February
13, 2001
My
name is Glen and I'm an alcoholic.
I was born
restless, irritable, and discontented in 1954 into about as normal a family as
you can have. As far as I know, I was weaned properly and don’t have any other
collateral issues besides alcoholism. I learned how do this stuff by myself.
I was a child of the sixties, and as such, took whatever everybody else around
me was taking. My drug of choice in those days was yours. But I settled down,
got married, went back to college and had two kids, all the time drinking in
ever increasing quantities. In those days, at least in Texas anyway, DWI would
earn you deferred adjudication. I became very familiar with how that worked,
being arrested numerous times but never chalking one up that stayed on my
record. In 1986, my wife (thank God) did the only smart thing left to do and
filed for divorce. By 1992, the facility where I worked closed – fortunately,
as far as my career went, because I was on the verge of being fired. Fed up with
all of the people who just didn’t understand, I left Texas on a train to prove
that I could be a success on the streets of Seattle. I did the things you have
to do to survive there, and it wasn’t pretty. I came back a little over a year
later and pulled it together long enough to get the job I have now in Denton,
Texas.
In
the spring of 1996 I was in real trouble with my job, and my employer insisted
that I see a counselor. One day during the session, she announced that she had
decided that I needed to check out AA. I, of course, was quick with an excuse: I
had no transportation. She called a local AA group, and Dennis ‘happened’ to
answer the phone. He took me to a meeting the next day, and talked at length
about his struggle with alcoholism. Textbook 12th step work, looking
back on it. Dennis would come by after that to take me to meetings but most
times I’d be too drunk to go, and his rule was that if I were drinking, he’d
stay away. Call me when you’re sober, he’d say. Finally he took me to a
conference in Oklahoma, figuring if he could keep me sober for a day or two I
might hear something that would click. We didn’t have much money, opted
for cigarettes rather than registration fees, and camped out that weekend.
I
was amazed to see 500 alcoholics having so much fun, and that evening we heard
Earl H speak. After the meeting, that night in the tent, I asked Dennis why he
had kept coming around when I had been so unwilling at first. Dennis told me
that he’d had a real hard time accumulating any time sober, and that finally,
in desperation, he had asked his sponsor what he could do differently. His
sponsor replied that he needed to help others by giving rides to meetings, and
so Dennis accumulated a decent sized carpool. One by one, though, they all
decided to go out and do some more research. Down to one rider, in his morning
prayers Dennis had asked his HP for someone to help, and that afternoon was in
the club and answered the telephone when my counselor called asking if anyone
could give me a ride to a meeting. I
was the answer to his prayer.
That
night in that tent, I came to believe that there was indeed a plan for the
Universe, and my role was to participate in it. September 7, 1996, and I
haven’t had to drink any whiskey since then.
I got into an intensive outpatient program when we got back, and then into a men’s step study where we worked the steps; we took too long, but we really worked them. We started with seventeen members, and finished the study with three. The other fourteen didn’t all go out and drink; they just didn’t finish, for different reasons.
The
following year, I drove to that same conference in MY truck. With insurance.
The address on my driver’s license was where I lived. I even paid for a
room and registration.
I
was married this past July to ElizaBeth, and now have three stepdaughters, two
dogs and a wife. But it’s not about the stuff.
I’ve got friends all over the world, and a life I could never have
imagined. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t at least talk to an alcoholic or
do some service work. I’ve been fortunate in that I was able to help four
AA’s obtain positions where I work, three working directly for me. We have
little mini-meetings sometimes. Two worked out, two didn’t. I didn’t set out
to give AA’s jobs, it just worked out that they were qualified for positions
that we had.
If you’re reading this online, you’ll already know that the Internet has been a big part of my recovery. I consider myself something of a student regarding how it’s affecting our lives, and I met my wife on the ‘net. One of the things that the WWW has done is to make more information available to a larger number of people than was ever before possible. I’ve learned more about AA history on the Internet than I ever would have otherwise, and I’ve been exposed to many different philosophies about things that do or don’t work for others in AA. I think that knowing what’s going on in the world with AA is a good thing.
One time I was in a group conscience meeting, and we were debating about continuing to close the meetings with the Lord’s Prayer. This guy – I think everybody has one of these guys – speaks up and says, well, he’s been to meetings “all over the United States”, and he wants to tell us what most other groups do. When he finished, I told them to give me a week, and I’d let them know what groups all over the world did (if you’re interested, the group still closes with the Lord’s Prayer for “all who wish to”).
One of the things I wished we talked about more in AA are the highs. For nearly thirty years if I thought it would feel good, I'd give it a try. While it takes what it takes, if somebody would've said a long time ago that sobriety was a big high, I'd have asked how to score some. Excitement about sobriety was what that conference did for me, what the internet does for me today, and one of the many things that I think we should convey to the new person. If you want that light in your eyes that you see in ours, come with us. We're having a ball.
Thanks for reading.
Glen H
Glen
H lives in Denton, Texas and considers the Internet group Staying
Cyber to be his home group.
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Glen
H
Revised: 30 Oct 2005 03:40:40 -0800