About

Hi, My name is Mindy and I am a grateful alcoholic and this is my story. I have gone back and forth about posting this and to be frank this is the abridged version, but I think it’s important for you, the reader to know who I am.

I am a selfish and self-centered woman who suffers from eternal uniqueness and as I sit here with nearly nine years of sobriety, I hope to share a little bit about what it was like, what happened, and how it is today. It would be easy for me to tell you about all the accomplishments that sobriety has afforded me, and I will tell you that without sobriety I wouldn’t have accomplished them; graduating college Magna Cum Laude, being employable, owning a home, having a family; suiting up and showing up, you get the point, but that isn’t what page 84 of our book talks about “No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will show how our experience can benefit others.” So, I’m going to tell you what it is like in my world before I rocketed into the fourth dimension our Big Book tells us we will reach before I tell you about those things.

My story, like many others, starts at birth, as I was born into this disease. Born to parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins all with the same generational affliction. I was born to mother who couldn’t mother and who traded her soul and my body to the drug man and because of that I spent the next 30 years of life not only trying to kill myself but believing that somehow, I was unique, that my story was unique, that I was the only one who had my story and that if you had my life, you would drink too. I had no conception or care that other people had been through what I had been through, only that I had gone through it, but others have faced what I have faced and survived. I also learned that while what my biological mother did was vile, she has the same affliction that I have and she was operating under those circumstances. I have learned that there is a strength in that you can’t imagine, even if at that time I didn’t believe that.

I had my first drink by the time I was nine years old and I was an alcoholic by high school, because of a keen ability to lie, and perhaps a father that trusted too much; I don’t know, I never got the chance to ask him, drinking and blacking out every single weekend, in fact I can’t remember ever having drank and not being blacked out, not once. By my senior year I had graduated to heavier substances and began trading pieces of my soul for them. Less than a year after I graduated, I had married my dealer, I apologize, but that is part of my story and was expecting a baby. I cleaned up and I was going to clean him up too, because duh I had that power! I know you will be shocked when I tell you that didn’t happen, but he found the church and for ten years I played the role of the perfect Stepford Wife in the perfect religious cult, unable to speak to anyone outside the church, unable to have thought of my own, playing the victim role perfectly. Many of you who know me well would not have believed or recognized the me of then. I still don’t know how I went from alcoholic druggy to being in a church cult. Don’t you know that if you escaped that hell in the middle of the night with your life, you would drink too? It’s important to note that during my first marriage I didn’t drink a drop, I had another addiction and that was cleaning to obsession and that of my disabled son, his care and his appointments and his welfare, I had become neurotic and lost at best, a shell of a person.

In the first year after I left my then husband and my now husband I lost myself, drinking every day, alone. I was never a bar person; I always drank at home, I am a loner at heart. I worked a lot trying to feed my kids on what little money I was making as a waitress and still having enough money to drink. I also fed my resentments, to my mother, to the men who had harmed me, to the church, and to the ex-husband and because don’t you know I had I right to be hurt, I had a right to drink my sorrows away, I had a right to drink my memories away. When I finally met my now husband, I had a mountain dew in one hand a cigarette in the other and weighed about 90lbs, all skin and bones and an attitude that said I’d just as soon see you dead as let you in. I wish I could tell you that is where my happy ending began, when I met him, but that’s not how it worked for me. You see the book talks about those who have mental malady and that is part of my story and without dealing with that part of the whole I would never get my happy ending.

I continued to drink myself into oblivion, but I was what most people would call a functional alcoholic at that time, I was employed, had a job and a home, I just couldn’t enjoy and control my liquor and didn’t want to control it anyway. We lived the biker lifestyle, so it worked for me to drink the way I drank because others drank the way I drank, I mean hadn’t they my whole life. It truly never occurred to me until I got sober that people actually stop drinking when they felt a buzz or that they stopped drinking at any point really, I didn’t know that people drank only when they went out, not in order to help when they went out. You see I have severe anxiety and am an introvert by nature, I don’t enjoy being out and I don’t enjoy being social but get liquor in me and I’m life of any party, it takes a lot to kicked out of a biker bar, but this girl can do it and if you know that story well good on you!

As my disease progressed, I was unable to go a day without drinking and drinking a lot. You see, I am a small woman, and I was drinking a 30 pack a day or a box or two of wine a day, really anything was my drink of choice. During this time, I also had bout with pills that didn’t stick but the booze did. I had found one and only true love in the drink. I was all consumed it, thought of nothing else but when I could have my next drink or what I could avoid in order to drink instead, I stopped showing up and suiting up and revolved my life around the drink. People started to talk and mention that maybe I drank even more than they did and maybe I drank too much, and I started receiving meeting lists to which I laughed at because I was not a quitter, no one in my family was a quitter and I wouldn’t be the first. Until one night I had simply had enough, nothing that I remember happened necessarily I just remember being tired, being tired with obsessing, being done with revolving my life around the drink, being done with not remembering my life and having to clean myself up night after night. So, I reached out to friend that I knew was in a program in another town who sent me a meeting list in my area, and I chose the raunchiest one (or so I thought) I could so that I wouldn’t know anyone there, I couldn’t have anyone see me! I went to my first meeting the next morning and sat in my car right up util the meeting started, not wanting to be there but not knowing where else I should be. I was mean and I was mad that I had come, I didn’t speak to anyone, not even when they asked my name except to tell them that it was none of their damn business. I heard my story in those readings and because I am selfish and self-centered woman, I was convinced that they wrote them about me and put them on the table, but I also heard about a God that I had no desire to have a relationship with and thought oh great so that’s the catch, another damn cult. I was assured that this God that they spoke about was my conception and could be a doorknob if I wanted it just couldn’t be me, which pissed me off if I’m honest because at that point I was pretty sure that I was God, at least in my world. All that aside, I stayed, and I kept coming back…every day and several times a day, like three times a day. You see I was petrified to be alone with myself because I knew I would drink. I got a sponsor, rest her soul, and started working the steps.

I want to tell you that the first time I worked the steps I got it and that my life changed but again, that’s not my story. You see I am one of those with the mental malady and it was one that I still hadn’t dealt with, but it was about to deal with me. I was always preaching about self-love and taking care of yourself and your mental health if you had to, but I wasn’t following my own advice. I had been diagnosed as a young teen with bipolar and never dealt with it except to self-medicate but in program I was learning that my behavior may have more to do than with just my drinking but my mental illness as well. My depression was so bad that I was suicidal, and my hypo mania was so bad that I was running away from my family on a regular basis, so I finally took myself to the doctor and was prescribed the right medication to even me out and virtually save my life. The entire program changed for me after that, everything I had been taught and heard finally began making since and I was able to get a new sponsor and work the steps in a meaningful way. And thank the universe because my life was about to get very complicated and sad. In my second year of sobriety, I was diagnosed with a condition called Chiari Malformation and told that I would not only go blind but that I would need brain surgery. I would be forced to put my middle child in a home for emotionally fragile children in order to save his life and for the first time in his 17 years I would only see him once a week. In my third year of sobriety, I watched my husband die of a heart attack and be brought back to life by modern medicine only to nearly lose him to a knee replacement that caused a pulmonary embolism and then cancer that same year. In my fourth year COVID hit, and meetings stopped for us, and I was in school full time and working from home full time with a sick husband and I was neurotic as one could be. I learned the importance of the book and what it says and how much you can get from meeting on tape and staying out of your own head, I learned how to use the tools the first years of sobriety had given me. Not once over those couple years did I want the drink and not because things weren’t hard because the goddess knows they were, but because I wasn’t in fear and I wasn’t in my way or will. I knew that no matter what, I would be ok and that everything was going to be whatever it was, no amount of my moving chess pieces would change that. In my seventh year of sobriety my daughter had to be institutionalized and in my eighth my husband was diagnosed with stage four metastatic carcinoma of the brain that is terminal with three to six months to live. I tell you these things because life happens when we are making other plans and they happen whether we are sober or not, but today I get to be present for those who need me. I get to suit up and show up for those who cannot do so for themselves. I have got to spend the last months of my husband’s life with him sober and helpful, driving him to doctor appointments and sitting by his side, things I would not have been able to do if I was still in the drink. I beg of you, if the miracle hasn’t happened for you yet, do the work until it does