Carissa

Carissa 1:04:15
Okay, so our next speaker is going to be Annette.

 

Annette

Annette 1:04:20
It is when I am in that and I'm an alcoholic. Thank you so much, Jenny and thank you so much, Steve. And welcome Nick and Dwayne just got up, but welcome. I appreciate you asking me to do this. Thank you. My sobriety date is January, 27 2014 it wasn't my first one. My first one was in November of 1988 when I was still. Well, at heart, high school, I was in a peer counseling class, and one of the people in the peer counseling class was sober, and the teacher thought it would be a good idea for people that wanted to be pure counseling to know more about people that drank and used so I walked up the steps to the rafters, and people were smoking. So that was great, you know, and I felt absolutely home the second I was there. I knew they were my people. I knew that I had been drinking alcoholically since I was probably 11. I'm one of those. I've been this height since I was 11, and I have that personality where I have no problem being 11 years old and putting on a bunch of makeup and walking into a liquor store Hey and getting what I need. And it was hard and fast. My relationship with alcohol from the beginning, all's I ever wanted to do was be a grown up. I started smoking very early, drinking, very early, having sex, too early, just I could and I had a family that encouraged that kind of behavior. I could drive. We had we had a My dad likes to hunt, so I grew up with access to land, so I'm probably nine or 10 with a loaded gun, driving around in a jeep, stealing beer. So I had a that was my childhood, and I was, I was the girl with all the gifts.

Annette 1:06:41
I have a big personality. I'm naturally athletic. I was the prom queen. I mean, that's all I have to tell you. I that, you know, but I'm also this tortured soul. I hang out with very I'm great at picking very nice people to hang out with. They're going to put up with my debauchery. I need people to hold my hair back. I need people to drive me home. I need people to take care of me, because that's the kind of drunk that I am, and I'm young, and I'm really grateful for the for the friends that I had because they weren't doing the drugs it would have got me in serious trouble. And they and they got me home, and they kept me away from people that take advantage of very young girls that drink like I was drinking. So I feel very fortunate. And like Jenny, I had a very high bottom. I, you know, I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous, because I got sober right then and there, right when I was in high school. I graduated high school when I was sober, and I stayed and I moved to London to go to school after high school, and I was going to meetings. And there were amazing celebrities. You guys, if you got sober in 88 I mean, you're walking into meetings, and you're like, Oh, there's the lead singer of my favorite band. There's this famous actress. There is one of the most famous singers from England you ever heard of, and he's sitting next to me. I mean, it was a it was a golden era, and there was some guy you know, at the rafters, high school dropout at table two, perfect for me. So about a year in, I met him, and he didn't make it. He drank. And My Ism started coming back. You know, my ego, I was young and my life got good fast because I had quit drinking. I was able to figure out how to go to college. I was able to figure out to get I'm still I still do the job that I got when I was in high school. I've been a fitness professional for 37 years. I was keeping it together, but there was no break on my ego, and I wasn't doing the steps. The steps were over here on the wall. They weren't in the book. They were just floating around, which is something I heard at that convention that women's retreat this weekend, that I loved, and it just took one person to make one comment to me.

Annette 1:09:28
And you know, it's Fu, I don't need you guys. I'm out. So I'm the kind of person that once I decide that something's not right for me, and I'm a know it all. So I went out for 22 years, and I worked and I got married and I had two boys, and it all looked amazing on paper and in pictures and but I'm a tortured soul. Nothing's ever good enough. I. I'm never good enough. If the people around me don't get it together, I can't be happy, and that is absolute reality for me. And if I can't be happy with what you're doing, I'm going to try to control you. I'm going to try to manipulate you. I'm going to try to get what I want to because I'm not happy. I'm restless, I'm irritable, and I'm just content. But I learned enough from you guys back in the in the high school days to know that I better not do drugs, and I better lay off the hard stuff. And so I love when we read. We have tried every imaginable means we can think of, and that was me. I'm just going to drink natural wines, I'm going to read every self help book. I'm going to I'm going to become a yoga instructor as well, and I'm going to travel to Asia and wear beads and flowing gowns, and I'm going to learn how to chant in Sanskrit, and I'm going to, you know, hike in Peru like I want it to be huge, larger than life. And so I just went on this, this external Safari of of spirituality, and then I couldn't stop my oldest son. I have two sons, and my oldest son was born with a severe dent in his sternum, and he went in for surgery, and they punctured his heart during surgery, and the doctor who did it had to put his finger like the guy in the dike, in the wall, in my son's heart, until the or the heart surgery could come in, and they put a 14 inch scar across his chest. And he was in ICU for 20 days. And that was the moment that my alcoholism really got good. Now I don't know what kind of family y'all have, but my parents, when they would drive down, they knew they would walk in with a couple shopping bags and they would be bottles of wine. That incident fixed my relationship with my dad, just to kind of give you a little more context about the kind of life I wasn't just driving around in a jeep with the shotgun. I have the type of father, and I love this man. He's still with us at 80 years old. He's probably at work right now. He said, Have you left here? And I go, No, Dad. I said, John is an ICU. He's got five different tubes down him. I don't have anywhere more important to be. And he looked at me and he said, You're a good man, because that's the only language My father has. There's no adjectives for women.

Annette: 1:13:00
I'm a good man, so we're good man, and I sat in that hospital, but they knew to bring me wine. They knew it, and that that's when it got a little gnarly. Because now, even though I am, you know, I haven't lost my job, and I'm still to go into work, and I only start drinking at five and La, la, la. And I'm in a I'm in a bad marriage, but I'm going to make it work, because he lets me drink the way I want to drink. And if it gets violent, if I get verbally abusive, if it gets ugly, I can just say I was drinking, you know, sorry, yeah, but I'm still cute. So, I mean, it's just unbelievable to look back on it. So I start trying to quit, and that's around the time I started getting really into yoga, not just on top of the normal stuff that I do. I'm a avid outdoor mountain biker. Love to I mean, I'm outside all the time. And when I got into yoga teacher training and we started reading about the philosophy, which is 1000s of years old, there's another person that read about the philosophies that were studied in yoga. His name was Emmett Fox and Bill W and when I started studying, I heard some things that I couldn't deny. It said alcohol will stunt your emotional growth, and alcohol will dull your intuition. Now we all have our little moment, but I always really thought of myself as an intuitive person. That was my spirituality. I didn't grow up with church. Okay, my dad had gone that same dad, he had been forced to go to Catholic school, and he got kicked out of Catholic school because he tried to blow up the monsignor's car. Yeah, and so we transferred to Burbank High, got set up on a blind date with my mother, and they're still married. So that was, you know, we're not going to church. So when I read that and it says this is going to stunt your intuition and your emotional growth, I cannot deny my alcoholism anymore, and I walk up the stairs to the rafters after 22 years and two people that I had gotten sober with. Are there one of them? You might know him. His name is Sal he took a six month chip in the meeting that I was the secretary of, and then I saw Glenn. Hadn't seen Glenn in decades, and there he was. I got sober when Cathy H had two years. I used to go to lunch with Phil stone. I there was great people, but I failed to enlarge my spiritual life. The steps were on the wall. I did some of them guys, I like I but I jumped around. So I had stole some stuff from my aunt, and I gave it back and but I don't have a sponsor, you guys, because I'm busy. I took a searching and fearless moral inventory of anyone that had ever hurt my feelings, of anyone that had ever done anything wrong to me, of my parents, and I'm talking paragraphs, you know, my you know, read it at my funeral because feel sorry for me. But there was no six, there was no seven. There was an eight of all the people that harmed me. There was no 10, and the only 11 I had was a serenity prayer. And I did. I stayed that serenity prayer every single day since November of 1988, it can make me cry to think of it. It was that little thread that kept me connected to these rooms. And so I came back, and I walked up those stairs, and there they were. And I'm like, Oh God, I hate this place, but that I didn't know about stepping stones, and I found a woman's group, like you were talking about. I needed a strong woman's group, and I found it, but I'm not as sick as you guys, so I go to one meeting a week, and it's Thursday night, and Jenny was there. And I just want to tell you, you know, it was really hard. I remember you talking about your mom, and part of my story is I would kill for those problems. Great. We used to sit there and I talk about my alcoholic son, and you talk about your mom, and look where we are. Now, I would kill for those problems. And I was obsessed with them because they were horrible, and I couldn't take it, because what happened is my youngest son, at 14 years old, got high at high in junior high, and he's one of those people, and that's it. So the older son that had the heart surgery, he got better. He's normal. It's a rock climber. He's a great human being. My younger son is my heart. He's the one that looks like me, acts like me.

Annette 1:18:27
Always had a book. I love to read. Always was looking up math. He was because I grew up camping. He was that kid you want to sit around the campfire with because you never know what's going to come out of his mouth. It's going to be so interesting. He has so many questions. He wants to talk about aliens, he wants to talk about physics, and he just fascinating child, and he smoked weed, and that was it.

Annette 1:18:57
And my son becomes a full blown alcoholic and drug addict, but he's doing it in a way that is so destructive that I can't understand it. He doesn't pick one thing. One week he's, he's on acid, the next week, he's on meth, then he has alcohol, then he finds cocaine, and he's, he's getting himself so so fucked up that he's going into psychosis, and we're getting calls that he's like in a wash, that he's in a gutter. I mean, he's a little boy. I'm sorry, but you know, I was 15, and thought I told you I was going into stores I'd already been drinking for four years. I know what it's like to feel like an adult at 15. And you look at it a 15 year old now, and you're horrified, like, put a diaper on him. Are you kidding me? That's a baby. And so my son starts using and drinking in a way that is so disturbing that I absolutely cannot deny it, and so I am going to save him, period.

Annette 1:19:58
Do. I spent $150,000 on my son's big book. I begged, borrowed and I didn't steal. I begged and borrowed from family members. I took huge loans out on the equity of the home that I'd owned since 2000 I sent him off to the wilderness. I sent him to a boarding school. I did every one of the parent workshops. I flew back and forth to Tucson to do all the adaptive therapy, to be blindfolded and pet horses and all the things that you do. I sat across from that ex husband of mine and realized that my 16 year old and 18 year old sons were emotionally more mature than he was, and I had to do it all by myself. He was cute, but he had never grown up at all. So I had three teenage boys that I lived with, and I was going to save my son. I was going to save him, and I was absolutely obsessed, the way that only one of us can be obsessed. You ask me how I am. I tell you about my son. I don't know who I am anymore, and it was the worst thing that had ever, that could ever happen. I thought my son getting his chest cut open like that was going to be the worst thing that ever happened to me as a parent. He almost died, and then this, and I can't take it my nervous system, you can still feel it for me right now. My nervous system got completely disregulated. My adrenal glands burnt out. I'm going to save my kid, period. And when he came home after a 14 months in treatment, I had, like probably the best four months of my life. And then alcoholics and addicts do what alcoholics and addicts do. You cannot force us to get sober. You cannot. You on now I'm in Al Anon by this point too, and I'm so furious. Oh, God, have you ever gone to Al Anon? Oh, my God, you should go to this meeting in Pasadena. They're like, if you're new, sit outside this tree. So I sit outside the tree. And some know it all, woman comes over and I go, I'm here to, you know, get my son sober. And she's like, Oh, sweetie, we don't do that here. You're gonna work on you. And I'm like, you tell me what to do to get this kid because I am gonna die. I don't have the coping mechanisms to watch the love of my life kill himself. I don't, I can't do this. So you want to talk about things that can challenge your sobriety. This is my I mean, there it is. I don't know what to do. Then in covid hits. It scared them a little bit straight for a little bit, because it scared a lot of us. I mean, we're so busy washing our mail, we don't have time to buy map.

Annette 1:23:11
And then the addiction starts again, and he is going into psychosis, and I think he's on drugs. He's starting to talk to himself. We take a walk one day, and he goes, Mom, something's wrong with my brain, and I said, it's going to be okay. We're going to get you off these drugs, honey, and it's going to be okay. And I didn't know that was the last time I was ever going to talk to him. I didn't know I wish. I just wish I would have told him I loved him. I wish I would have, by the way, he's not dead.

Annette 1:23:49
The next day, he had a psychotic break, and he said that the CIA was in the backyard, and he took all this tin foil and wrapped around his head. And I thought he was on drugs. I thought he was being funny, but at 19 years old, he whatever he did, broke his brain, and he went into the hospital and told them that I was that me and his father were raping him. It was just unbelievable. I mean, I can't even explain to you the world of chaos I got thrown into, and when they finally decided to call me, because it turns out, when someone's 19, they don't have to tell you anything, and people can tell you our mental health care system is broken, but you don't know how broken it is until your 19 year old, who thinks he's a pharaoh, is trapped in a hospital in Northridge, And they won't call you to tell you what's wrong because of his rights, even though he's now a sun god from Egypt. And so they sent home somebody I'd never met. They sent home a person who didn't talk, who didn't bathe. If he did talk, he was. Screaming because there's spirit demons in his room.

Annette 1:25:04
I've seen things that I No parent should ever have to see, and he just gets dumped at my house, and all of a sudden, I'm a mental health care facility and I have no idea what to do, and I just watched my ex husband go like this because his mother had schizophrenia, and I can't imagine what his childhood was like, and it's on a spectrum. Just like autism, you can have autistic people to function and people that don't speak. My son is schizophrenic, low functioning. Oh, I'm sorry. He's Schizo, effective, because you should throw a little bipolar in there. Why just have a thought disorder when you can also combine it with a mood disorder, and there's no place for him to go except for the wash jail or my house. So what happened? It was like someone took a pen out of a grenade and threw it into my house, and there was my marriage. Cannot survive this period. My older son. I mean, you guys, it got to a place where I'm like, I'm going to lose all three of them. My ex lost his mind. He's unable to seek help. I'm a person of action. I immediately went into meetings for mental health. I immediately start going into a thing called Nami. I dove into Al-Anon.

Annette 1:26:38
I did not take care of my sobriety. I couldn't, I couldn't, I don't even know who I am anymore. So everything blows up. I can't go to work. I can't be married anymore, if anyone ever in here has been divorced. And you know what's funny is I said to myself, well, nothing can be as bad as this kid losing his mind. Divorce is a pretty close second, really, and my poor older son and I'm just surrounded you guys. And I remember calling my Al Anon sponsor, who also had 30 years of sobriety, and she said to me, Annette, you are in so much trouble. You are going to drink.

Annette 1:27:31
And so I walked in this door, right here, to this room in Jan, in June of 2022 on fire. If you sat next to me, I was on fire. I took my stuff. My book is here. I mean, I still sit like that, but I mean, they do not sit next to me, Do not talk to me. And I would just sit in meetings and sob, and I would try to go back to my parent groups, you guys. I would try, and I couldn't, because some newcomer would come in and be like, you know, my son smoked marijuana, and I can't take it, and I'm like, last night, my son took a knife and cut every mole off his body because aliens had invaded him. So no, you want to talk about not feeling like you can relate to anybody. Nobody has my problem. I'm alone, and I'm filled with hatred. How dare that man abandon his kid? How dare he? How dare God do this to me? Do How can I deal with these feelings?

Annette 1:28:48
And that's when I remembered these rooms. The only time I felt okay was coming into a meeting, and thank God for the five o'clock meetings here, because that's when I like to drink. I like to start drinking around three, but five always till five, if I have to. And they're all book studies. And I got back into those books, you know. So when it comes to, you know, number four, the AA, tools that help keep me sober, meetings, my sponsor, the one that I had when I first got sober in 2014 about a year into my sobriety, she got cancer, so she was dealing with her own things. And then two years into my sobriety is when my son got sick, and I just was completely obsessed with that. So I had to get a new sponsor, and I found this woman in that room next door. You guys, how can you love someone that much? I don't even know this woman. I. But everything about me is screaming help, and she just looks over and sees me. You wouldn't believe the stuff we have in common. You just won't even believe it. She's a Pisces. I love her, and she took me through the steps, and she made me follow the rules. She made me write my part. She made me see the insanity.

Annette 1:30:31
Now I live with an insane person, right? I have conservatorship over my son. He gets SSI. I'm his. I get, I get 10 hours a week. I get paid for to be his caregiver. I had to do all that. I had to advocate for every single piece of him. Nobody gave us the medicine he needed. 910, 11 medicines. So many hospitalizations, you guys. I've been popped in the face. I've been knocked down my stairs. He is doing great today, okay, and I advocated my ass off for that kid. I can't do any of that unless I got a sponsor, unless I surrounded myself with women. The things that were missing off this list are number four for me. Number one was gratitude, my gratitude list. Every day I'm just grateful for my coffee. I'm just grateful like it. You know, I like blueberries. I mean, I had to start off to start off really small. You know, present moment awareness belongs on my list. That's what I'm doing when I'm praying and meditating. I am so scared of the future. The future is too scary. When you're a caregiver of a very sick person, the future is terrifying. I'm not allowed to go there. It's a dubious luxury of normal men. Even though I'm a good man, I'm not allowed to go there.

Annette 1:31:59
Okay? I'm not allowed to time travel back either. I was a drunk mom. I didn't get sober till my kids were for 12 and 14. Okay, I still drove, you know? They, yes, they went camping. They had a Jeep with a gun to you know, they, they? What else belongs in my list nature, I have to walk. It is an integral part of my sobriety. If I do not get outside and walk, I am not okay. I need to get on my bike. I have to. It's not an aside. I have to that's where my church is. Period. I need projects that give me creative joy. I have 50 House plants. I do all this stuff with rocks, like I just, I, you know, I make bracelets. I got to stay busy, right? I need positive content. When my son first got sick, I was watching all every horror movie that I've never seen, every single one. Oh, and if you want to really watch some screwed up shit, hoarders, oh, I was watching hoarders, and saw one, two and three. And it was amazing, because nothing could scare me anymore. But you know what that had to go and you need positive content as a part of my sobriety. I have completely edited my social media. You start talking about politics on my page. I don't follow you anymore. You start posting all your victim bullshit. I don't follow you anymore. I curate my feed. I can't have it, you guys, my nervous system gets disrupted. It is an integral part of my sobriety to control my content. And I have to write. I have to write. You saw me writing. I sit up here, I write. I write down what you say. I have some hilarious you guys are hilarious. I write down what you say. And if I want to cheer myself up. Oh my god. I have stuff written in these books of things people have said in meetings that are so amazing I'm going to make a coffee table book all about y'all I have to write. I need projects. I need nature. I need movement. And yeah, yeah, I sponsor four women. Yeah, yeah. I read my literature. I have a very strong morning routine. I'm tight. I'm tight with my morning How much time do I have? All right? I have a very tight morning routine, and if I don't do it in the morning, I have a thing that I call midday mindfulness. If I don't get everything done, I eat at lunch. So I'll finish up one of my daily readers. If I haven't done my gratitude list that day, I do it. I have to my son takes medication four times a day, four times a day. Takes five different things. Guess who's in charge of the medication? What do I not need? Medication? Me, what am I doing to treat myself? Being a caregiver is detrimental on people's health. It is not an opinion. It's been proven. I am not a victim. I have I am not a victim. My son got diagnosed with an incurable mental illness. He will never have a girlfriend. He will never I had to mourn the death of a dream. That's what happens when you lose somebody. This disease follows us to the gates of insanity or death. I got the insanity. And if I ever wanted to be a victim, I'll tell you one little part. This is the non casserole illness. Nobody was there for me. I couldn't make dinner, I couldn't get out of bed, and nobody, nobody came. And you know why? Because I didn't have a strong fellowship here. I He got diagnosed in February. I didn't come back here till June. You guys, if I would have been here with you guys, you would have fed me.

Annette 1:36:09
Yeah, you want to come. You want to help me. I cheated myself out of that. I'll never do that again. You will get what you need in these rooms. It won't look the way that I wrote it out, but you will get what you need in these rooms. I can't believe the woman I've met. I can't believe the man I met. I can't believe it. I've been overpaid. And you know what? I didn't cause my son's mental illness. I cannot control it. I cannot cure it.

Annette 1:36:55
My son came in with it. He came in with it. It was in him. Do? Him, I am responsible for what's in front of me. I am not a victim of it. Would I trade everything I've learned to get my son's brain back? Probably? But you guys to pretend that I didn't grow and learn from that is a lie. To pretend that I didn't get things that I never even knew I wanted is a would not be inaccurate. He helped me become the person that God wants me to be. It's just like what Jenny read.

Annette 1:37:41
I am supposed to take care of my son, and today I'm not. I've been a teacher of my fitness for 37 years. I've now I'm a student. I have a life that I'm a student, and I just need to show up. I need to take the right action in the day I'm in. He takes his pills. I take my vitamins. I clean his room, I clean my room. I take him to a doctor's appointment, I go to a meeting. I take him to therapy, I go to therapy. I show up for people. I am you can count on me. I'm responsible. And if I have to go and be by myself or go to a woman's retreat, and someone's like, what are you doing? I'm like, Well, I was riding my bike. Where are those flowers? You took a great picture of the flowers. Where is that? I'm like, you can't go. It's 16 miles in. Cannot get there by car. You can, if you have a motorcycle, you can and and I'm allowed, I'm allowed to ride my bike in the middle of nowhere and say, I'm so grateful today that I have legs at work that ride me. I My older son goes to therapy. He doesn't drink to solve the problems he has with his dad, and in his life, he goes to therapy too, and I am able to be an example, not just for and you want to, and I'll close with this. I never have to feel guilty about being that drunk mom, because I literally make living amends. And I didn't know I was going to get so much out of it. I didn't know. And so when it talks about the AA tools that helped me change over helping others. And

Annette 1:39:39
I just really appreciate you guys. It was hard for me to talk about that, but we can stay sober and be recovered. So thanks for listening.

 

Carissa 

Carissa 1:39:58
Okay, bye. Thank you, please. Our next speaker is going to be, hey, Norm.

 

Norm

Norm 1:40:11
My name is Norm, and I am an alcoholic, so a drug addict, much like, I guess most Well, I didn't have when I grew up. Was growing up, my dad didn't have a Jeep with a shotgun in it, but I grew up with Ozzie and Harriet as my mother and father, and it was a good I had a great childhood. I lived in a nice suburb north of Chicago, and had everything that I wanted.

Norm 1:40:54
My I would get my quarter a week allowance went a long way back then. My sobriety date, by the way, is one, 199 I haven't had a drink or a drug this particular century, but growing up,

Norm 1:41:23
I always had fear. What did I fear? I didn't fear riding on a saucer, being pulled by a car in the snow. No fear of that. I didn't have a fear of waiting on a corner, and when the bus went by, grabbing the back of it, we called it skitching, and skitching to school. I didn't have a fear of skiing from a big mountain, but what I had a fear of was girls. I had a girlfriend. It took me about eight to 10 months before I even admitted that she she was my girlfriend, because girls always scared me, because I always wanted the prettiest girl, and the prettiest girl always had a boyfriend, so I couldn't get that pretty girl as my girlfriend. So at any rate, I grew up in this lovely suburb, my parents didn't drink, except socially the later on, after I became sober, looking back on my on my childhood, I believe my mother was an alcoholic, mainly because she couldn't wait for a friend of my dad's, who we called Uncle Bob, to come to the house, because he liked to have cocktails before dinner, and my mom just would be excited when he was going to come. And so I think I don't know what she did later on in my story,

Norm 1:43:30
I went to college. I started off at University of Colorado, where I was introduced to substances. I was introduced to VO, which I had a real taste for. I was introduced to pot, and I was introduced to being away from home at 17. And so what I had a and my college was paid by my parents, and I had a one year vacation in Colorado. I skied at least four days a week. I get loaded on weekends, and at the end of my freshman year, university Colorado said, Don't come back.

Norm 1:44:29
And so I didn't come back. And instead, there I was in Wynette Gillan, oh, I But luckily, my best friend, who had gone to Northern Illinois University, was told the same thing by that university. So he and I were in Winnetka. We were the studs of the suburbs. Because we were older, and so girls would come, and we were also introduced at that time to our first dope dealer. We also, I don't know if anybody here likes what was the name of that wine?

Norm 1:45:25
It was this wine that my best friend always said it had helium in it, because you drink it and your head would explode. And we used to drink that wine. We we'd buy six bottles of it, and there'd be about eight of us, and we'd go through those six bottles. I didn't particularly like alcohol, though, but what I liked was where it put me, my grand sponsor. May he rest in peace. Ted s used to say it got me there, and we all know where there is. The only problem I had with alcohol was that by the time I got there, I had already had four more drinks, and so I would pass out. I remember one time I wound up in Memphis, Tennessee, because I had passed out in my best friend's backseat, and he decided that that's where we were going to go.

Norm 1:46:33
And I woke up there, and it was the fourth of July, and was about 109. I don't know why we were there. Our friends, our friends had all gone to Michigan, which made sense, but there we were in Memphis. So any rate, I grabbed I went back to school, little, little school in Iowa, and I'm kind of glad I did, because we had small classes, great professors. It's a very good school, and I graduated from there in 1968 and if any of you are aware of what was going on in our country in 1968 Well, I was part of it. I was very anti war. I started two SDS chapters that's was Students for a Democratic Society that later became, there was a faction of it that became the weatherman, and that's when I dropped out of there.

Norm 1:47:42
I went down and I was accepted in law school. And I went down to the draft board, and I showed him my law school acceptance, and they said, that's nice, you can start, but you ain't gonna finish. And sure enough, I didn't start. I went to work for Sears, and four months later, I was drafted. After going through basic training AIT, which was advanced infantry training and armored personnel carrier training. I went over to Vietnam, and I actually didn't mind Vietnam, because in Vietnam, they had cheap you could buy a case of beer for $1 you could buy any drug and that you wanted, and you could buy any little girl that you wanted. When I say little girls, because they only stood about that tall. We they were called the boom-boom girls. There was and I stayed absolutely fucked up for the 13 months I was in Vietnam.

Norm 1:49:09
I didn't like getting shot at. I picked up two Purple Hearts and a bronze star while I was there, all the only reason I got that stuff, by the way, was because I was loaded. Because if I hadn't been I would have been hiding. I mean, I mean, you know, it's like, it's it. I always had this thing. And pardon me, if any of you are offended by this, but they always gave the Congressional Medal of Honor to somebody who jumped on a grenade and saved their fellows. Well, you got to be nuts to jump on a grenade, but then once you're been. It there. And in it, you realize that that guy who won the Congressional Medal of Honor was the smallest man in the unit, and he was thrown on that grenade. It's, I mean, I, you know, I hate to burst everybody's bubble. But at any rate, I came home from Vietnam, and I had kind of changed my direction while I was there. My brother in law was professor at University of Nebraska, and he he arranged for me to get an assistantship and a fellowship University of Nebraska Business School, where I was going to go and get my MBA and go out and be a millionaire. And unfortunately, when I got home, three days after I got home, I had to take the business grad school admission test. And I walked out of that test, my best friend was waiting for me because we were going to go east. I walked out of that test, I threw my suitcase in the car, and I said, they've changed the entire economic system since I was in college. And I scored the lowest on that test of any one of those kind of tests I ever took. And of course, there went my assistantship and my fellowship. So we went to the east, took a trip, saw friends in Boston, friends in New York. When I was in New York, I had the great experience of shooting up dope with James Taylor. I met I met Jim there, and then we went to Boston, and our friends who were there went through all of our drugs, so we had to go home. We went up to Canada on the way home to get a sitar that our friend had left there came back down and coming through customs, they found marijuana seeds on the floor of the car. They took our names, they took our pictures, and they said, Never come back to Canada again. So then I was banned from Canada, which wouldn't allow me to go to the world of meeting. So I couldn't go there because it was in Canada. So at any rate, we then went down to Florida, got a place down there. We were done in Key West, where in the morning we would get up and look at the sunrise, and in the afternoon, we'd go to the other side of it and watch the sunset, which is a wonderful thing to do on acid. In the meanwhile, we were drinking, my friend like to drink beer, and he would go through beer. I mean, he would go through a case and a half in a night. I, on the other hand, like scotch, and so I would be drinking scotch. And, you know, and we and back then, there were these. You don't see them anymore because I think they banned them. Were barbiturates, second all Nembutal two, and all rainbows, reds, yellows, and so drinking what we did and popping a couple of those really got you there. In fact, it got you above there and and that's what we were doing. And my best friend went back to Chicago for Thanksgiving. He came back down. We decided it was time to move back up. So we went back up to Chicago. And mind you, I had never been in cold weather since I had left to go in the army. I did my my training down in Louisiana, then I went to Kentucky, then I went to Washington in the summer, and I went over to Vietnam, and it was in June when I came home. It was in July. Well, at any rate, I came home in July, and then went to Boston. It was summertime. We went down to Florida. I came up to Chicago, and I could not stand the cold.

Norm 1:54:45
It was 22 below, and so I said, Nope. I loaded up my Volkswagen station wagon with all my belongings, which tells you how much I had, and my dog. And I drove to California, and I came out here, and I thought, now that I'm out here, I'm going to go to law school. I'd been accepted at Hastings. I went up there and they said they'll take you, but you have to wait until next September. My sister was in law school down Los Angeles here. And so she said, why don't you come here? So I went there, and I got in, and I thought, Now I won't die from eating downers and drinking I'm in a new place. I can just stop doing that.

Norm 1:55:41
But you know what, I didn't want to I liked being loaded. I liked being high. For one thing, now I could go up to that prettiest girl and say, Do you want to dance? Why don't we go home? And I'd even sometimes get to go to their house, but I quickly found the same thing here that I had found there, and that was druggies and drunks, and that's who I started hanging out with. I did make it through law school. I got my law degree. I was admitted to the bar, though they held me up for 22 months because of my nefarious past, the fact that I had been convicted of possession of cocaine for sale, that kind of made them wonder. But I got in and I became a criminal lawyer, not me being the criminal the people I represented, in fact, I've run into some past clients in AA, but I became a criminal lawyer, and I became a good one. I was I was taught by one of the best, and I used to get these phone calls middle of the night. Norm, I just got busted for driving under the influence. They've got me here at the jail and say, Well, why don't you sleep it off. They'll let you out tomorrow and go to an AA meeting and start going to AA meetings and get a card signed or a piece of paper. I had never been to an AA meeting. I had no idea what an AA meeting was like. I only knew that I could show that piece of paper to the prosecutor and say my client knew he had a problem. What kind of deal can we make? And I was very successful at that. And I, you know, and that ran to all kinds of different things, like when somebody would get busted for drugs, possession, not sales, but possession, I'd say, go to NA, start getting those signatures. I'd never been to an NA meeting or a CA meeting for that matter. And then came the time when all of a sudden it wasn't feeling good anymore.

Norm 1:58:50
I was now 52 years old, and it wasn't feeling good and I was at a friend's house on New Year's Eve, 1998 and I was loaded, and we ran out of stuff. And this girl that I had been seeing on the side, though I was married, she said, I'll go get some more. I turned to my friend after she left, it was quarter of 11. We'll never forget that. And I said, I can't do this anymore.

Norm 1:59:34
He said, It's no fun anymore. And I went home, and that was the last night I got loaded. Now we talk about staying sober during life's changes. Okay? I got sober like I say, on the first of January, 1999. I Walked in. I had been going to meetings starting in April of 98 why? Because in April of 98 I got lucid for two days, and I said, I'm in trouble. I had taken $92,000 that didn't belong to me, and this girl I was seeing, she and I went through it in about two weeks.

Norm 2:00:33
And I said, I can't do this. And so I called my friend Frank. Frank H if anybody remembers him, if you remember the no smoking lawsuit that was brought at rafters, he did it. And I said, I need help. And Frank said, Well, come on over. He gave me a big book. He gave me a 12 and 12, and started taking me to meetings. And we went through the book. We got about halfway through, but I wasn't ready yet.

Norm 2:01:15
I he was he was disabled, couldn't drive, so I had to be the one who drove and I drop him off, I'd open this little drawer. I had a Honda and had this little drawer on the side, and in there would be five or six rocks, and I'd smoke them on the way home.

Norm 2:01:41
And this is what I did from April of 1998 until January 1 of 99 so I didn't go out because I never came in. I mean, that's the way I've always looked at it. I never strung three days straight during that period of time.

Norm 2:02:13
But on January, the first 1999 I finally found the fellowship because these people that I knew that I was going to the men's stag, and these men who had who knew me, because now I'd been going for four or five, however many months, That is, and Jimmy C when I stood up, I when I was driving to that meeting, I said, Am I going to have the honesty to admit to all of these men that I'm a newcomer? And when the leader said, Is there anybody here in their first 30 days? I stood up and I said, I'm Norm and I'm an alcoholic. And Jimmy C turned around. I was sitting right in back of him, and he turned around and he said, I'll talk to you at the break. And he became my sponsor. And Jimmy took me through the steps. I remember doing third step prayer in his cupula that he had behind his house. And many, many, many men I know have done the same thing because Jimmy loved to sponsor newcomers. By the time you get to be two or three, Jimmy's not so interested, but because that's when he stops returning your cause. So I was three. When I had three years, I got a new sponsor, and I'm looking at his stone up there, Lee P we used to call him Reverend Lee, because he was a minister, sort of. He was a mail order minister. But he did have he was here in Santa Clarita, and he did preach, and he had a church, and I went through the steps again with Lee, and Lee and I became Not so much sponsor and sponsore as we became friends, and when he had problems, he would call me, and when I had problems, I would call him, which now leads me to staying sober during life changes and. Bad things happen when you're sober. Bad things happen when you're not sober, but when you're sober, bad things happen. What was the first thing? The first thing for me was losing my law license.

Norm 2:05:17
State Bar took it away in 2000 I had 18 months of sobriety, and when they I was wrong, by the way, when I told him before, when they took it away from me, I got a call from Tommy summers Ted.

Norm 2:05:39
Had two a testified for Me. Lee testified for Me. Bunch of people testified for Me. When I when I was going through the hearing with my license, but I lost it, and Tommy called me, and he said, I'm glad. I said, What do you mean? You're glad I thought we were friends. And he says, No, I'm glad you could accept it. And that's the first time that I learned what it meant, the word acceptance.

Norm 2:06:23
I have no power over what is going on out there. I have no power over any of you. The only thing I have power over is me. I'm the only one who can change me, and I can't change any of you. My best friend was a poly drug user, just like I was, whatever was around that will get us high we would take. He got married on my eighth anniversary, my wife and I went to his wedding back in Chicago, and he married this woman who had two daughters, and he wanted to adopt them.

Norm 2:07:19
And they said, No, we don't want to be adopted by a drunk so he went to Sierra Tucson. I don't know if that where you were referring to in in Tucson, but he went to Sierra Tucson, and he went through their program, and he got clean and sober, went on to school to get his masters in counseling.

Norm 2:07:48
But I didn't. I didn't get clean and sober. Then that was before 1999 but in 1999 or 1998 rather, my wife called him. He was living up in Washington, and she said, Will you come down and help Norman? He's having he's in a lot of trouble. She did. She knew that I was doing crack cocaine, but she was also worried, because when I would come home after three or four days of being away, I would drink like a fish.

Norm 2:08:33
Why? Because I wanted to come down. But I also liked the feeling it gave me versus the feeling that I had. And she called him, and he came down here to LA and we went out on a drive, and he said, What's the problem?

Norm 2:09:06
And I said, Well, the problem is this girl I've been seeing. I'm just going to stop seeing her, and I'll be fine. And being my best friend, he said, Okay. And he went back up to Seattle. I think my wife was expecting him to do an intervention on me, but he didn't. So anyway, they took away my license in 2000 I'll go back to there, and I learned acceptance a few, few years later, in 1995 my wife and I were going to move to Oregon. I had taken the bar there. I passed the bar there we were in a contract to buy a house up there and. Day before we were supposed to close, I wound up in the hospital needing emergency back surgery.

Norm 2:10:11
Well, my income went from here to here, because now all I've had was disability and so moving to Oregon was out of the question, except we were now homeless, because we had sold the house, we had nowhere to live, so we moved into a house in Westlake, or whatever it is, the eastern end of the valley. And we were there for a couple of years. I was still getting loaded. This was in 1995 in 2004 in I had more back surgery, and I got laid off my job, all in the same time, and my best friend died all in 1994 excuse me, 2004 How did I handle that? I accepted.

Norm 2:11:35
I also had a lot of men that came around and help me. They came to my house and put on meetings for me, and when I was able to get back to meetings, they would help me up the stairs at rafters. So I really found the fellowship. And then my sister died, leaving me as the only remaining good friend. My wife and I did not have kids, my wife and I, my wife stayed with me by the way through all of this, and in August, we'll be celebrating our 50th anniversary, much about the same time You'll be celebrating your 50th birthday. And so I rely what keeps me sober through all these life's changes, staying very close to the fellowship, going to meetings, praying, because I know that my God loves me, and I know that my God only wants good for me, and when he puts these tests in front of me, he knows that I can pass them. Why? Because I have a very spiritual life. I believe very strongly in my higher power, I turn to my higher power for more things. Just recently, I lost my best friend in AA, and I accepted it, and I've tried to help his wife through this, and I hope his wife becomes able to accept that God has His plan, and God needed Jim next to him, because that's the way it is. We have no power. I have cancer, but right now is in remission. It's liver cancer. I don't know if it will stay in remission, you know, and four years ago, if I'd had it, I'd be dead. But they've developed this. Scientists have developed these treatments, and it's amazing. But you know what, my friend Spencer Schramm, we were walking out of a meeting, and I said to him, it was where the topic had been fear. And we walked out, and Spencer said, I have no fear. And I said, What are you talking about, Spencer, how can you have no fear? He had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He had lung cancer. He had no fear. I. Been I have liver cancer. I have no fear. There is now nothing that I fear.

Norm 2:15:09
Yeah, I don't like snakes, but I don't fear them. I don't fear what's going to happen, because I live right now. All I have is right now in this room at this moment. And I hope all of you have this now in this moment, especially our two newcomers, Welcome to both of you, and I hope you guys stay, because that's the only way that you will live the miracle that the rest of us are. Thank you.