March 27, 2002


Hi, I'm Annie Kelley, and I'm an alcoholic. 

Sometimes I go to meetings just to hear that come out of my own mouth. It took me a long time to be able to say those words and even longer to really accept them. I was one of those einstein's who are too smart for this program, but not smart enough to stop falling down drunk and blacking out on a daily basis. Oh, the dilemma!! LOL

I am the oldest of 6 children born to a couple of midwesterners, the pride and joy of my father and the nemesis of my mother. I was born in the middle of a blizzard in Centralia,Illinois and delivered by Dr. Jack Frost. (Swear to God--his name is on my birth certificate!) An auspicious start. I was inordinately healthy and quite brilliant even at an early age. I could read and write before I went to kindergarten, and was extraordinarily stubborn and willful. I was very independent, a character defect that has been with me (apparently) from the start. I wanted no help from ANYONE for ANYTHING, thank you. By the time I started kindergarten, my mother had had 3 more children. By the time I was in the 5th grade, there were 5 more. There is a picture hanging on my wall of the day my mother brought my first brother home from the hospital. She's standing there smiling in all her 1955 glory, holding the new baby...and there I am beside her, in cowboy boots and a dress, with my gun and holster on, scowling. In my innocence, I must have had a premonition that life as I knew it would never be the same again.

I started drinking at 13. It was a sledding party out in the pasture behind a friend's farm, and we had a bonfire and a bottle of blackberry brandy. I had several swigs as the bottle was passed around. It made me feel warm and lightheaded and I thought that it was the best thing since sliced bread. I had to get sick and puke and then try to sneak into my parents house without getting caught. I woke up the next morning with a bad hangover and thought..."I'll never touch that stuff again!" 2 weeks later, I was at a party and drank gin. Straight. Thought it was wonderful 'cause it tasted like Christmas trees smell. Woke up the next morning in the bathtub with vomit all over me and soaked to the bone where somebody had turned the shower on me. This was the beginning of a love/hate affair with booze that would span 2 and a half decades.

I did all the things that drunks do. I moved. I got married (again and again). I moved again. I had job after job. I wreaked havoc in the lives of those around me. I neglected my health. I did tons of drugs. I endangered my life on a regular basis by doing things like driving drunk, going off with men I didn't know, putting myself into situations that only God's grace could save me from. I abandoned my child. I alienated anyone who ever cared about me. I lied. I cheated. I stole. And I drank even more to turn off that shame and guilt I had going on inside me. I went for years at a time with no word to my family. My mother and I hadn't spoken in years. She was a nasty drunk and I swore I would never be "like that". And I became exactly "like that". Bitter and lonely and miserable. So I drank even more. It was an endless loop of self hatred-shame-intoxication-self hatred, etc, etc. In the meantime, when I was 27 years old, my mother died of cirrhosis of the liver while she was in the hospital for a cerebral hemorrhage. She had left my father some years before, and was living with some old alcoholic. She got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and passed out at the end of the bed. He thought she had just passed out again and he left her there. About noon the next day when he came to, she was still lying there, so he tried to wake her, couldn't and called an ambulance. She was in the hospital for 2 weeks before she died. They actually repaired the blood vessel that burst, but after 2 weeks with no booze, her liver started crumbling. They called me and I went to the hospital, and she died in my arms 10 minutes later. I left there in a blur of tears and went straight to the nearest bar. It was all I knew how to do. I was drunk for 2 weeks. My dad died about 5 years later, leaving me not only an orphan, but now the matriarch of the family. Holy shit. I spiraled into a hell that I can't describe. Drinking, drugs, and self loathing were my only companions.

In 1989, I was diagnosed with uterine cancer. I didn't really want to live anyway-what did I care? I kept drinking and taking the pain pills they kept giving me while I tried to make up my mind about what to do. I was scared of letting them cut me. Finally I decided I was more afraid of dying and I let them take me apart, clean me out, and proceed to radiate and chemically bomb me until they were sure they had gotten rid of all the traces of the cancer. I quit drinking at this time because I was vomiting so much. But soon I was drinking a gallon of red wine a day, and saying I wasn't drinking--well, not REAL booze, anyway. I thought that I must not be too bad anyway as I hadn't experienced any DT's...in retrospect *grin the percodans and red wine may have had something to do with that.

In Feb of 1990, I was finally arrested for drunk driving and sent to jail. The judge sentenced me to 10 AA meetings and I was shocked. AA?????? Not me, man. I don't have anything in common with those people!! PLease...can't I just pay a bigger fine or something?? Maybe a few days in jail??? ANYTHING but AA!!! But he was adamant. Said I had a problem and that there was a chance I might not die or kill somebody if I could quit drinking and that AA was the only thing that works with drunks like me. Bastard. So I was fined up the wazoo (first offense in California at the time was $1600. Plus I had to pay another $400. for substance abuse classes.) and forced to go to AA.
At the door, that first meeting, a little guy standing outside stuck out his hand and said, Hi, I'm Keith. You know, you don't ever have to drink again if you don't want to. "Get off me-"I thought as I brushed past him. Maybe he didn't have to drink anymore, but he didn't know how it was for me. I was WAY past any kind of choice. I drank immediately after every one of those 10 AA meetings. Then as the weeks went by in the substance abuse classes, I tried to not drink. I actually went almost a week. At the end of the classes, I went out to a bar to celebrate the fact that I wasn't drinking. I had 7 gin martinis...don't ask me. I had been a scotch drinker for years. I crossed that line and woke up at home with no earthly idea how I got there. It was the same old thing. Here we go again. I drank again that night and this time I stayed drunk for about 8 days. I knew I couldn't quit and I knew I couldn't keep drinking. It was getting worse and worse.

I crawled back to AA on June 12th, 1990. I have not found it necessary to take a drink since. The God of my misunderstanding led me to a group of long time sobriety and they took my hand and walked me through all the hard parts of getting sober. I have not had to do anything alone since I came here. They walked me through the steps, through a divorce, through finding my new love (we've been together for 10 years now), through losing and finding my son and his finding sobriety (thank you, GOD). They loved me back to life. The last chip I got at my home group was my 5 year chip, and I was getting ready to move to Portland, OR. I cried and cried. I didn't want to leave them. I needed them, and it struck me that this was the first time in my life that I actually needed someone. That made me cry even more. My sponsor put her arms around me and said "You're getting pretty soft in your old age!" and I cried some more.

I have since left the west coast and moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I will celebrate 12 years this June, God willing. I have found a home group that is comfortable and I have found online AA and a group of wonderful people who are becoming my friends. I count my blessings on a daily basis. I am still learning and moving forward and as long as I continue to do so, I don't have to worry about picking up a drink. I have a daily reprieve, that's all. And never has the concept of One Day At A Time been closer to my heart than these past 8 months. I was in an industrial accident that was so horrific I was hospitalized for 8 days and had 2 transfusions. I couldn't leave my house for over 2 months because I couldn't walk w/out a walker and then only a few steps. I haven't worked for 8 months. I have some physical problems that may never go away. I hurt all the time. But today, thanks to the Grace of God and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I am walking through one day at a time and trusting that God has a plan for me. I have the love of a bunch of drunks to thank for that, and for my life. I couldn't do it without you guys...I don't ever want to have to.

Thanks for letting me tell you a little about Annie Kelley. I am so grateful for sobriety and so glad to be sober today. I have a little sign on my fridge that says...You are a child of God...now ACT like it! Today I try to act like it, and see everyone in my path with God's eyes.

I'm getting pretty soft in my old age....

Annie K

Annie lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and would enjoy hearing from you.

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