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We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. >> My name is Josh. I'm an alcoholic.

>> Dear God, I just barely clear this podium. Um before I start, I want to say uh welcome to those who are new or relatively new, especially I believe it was Jordan, Christine, and Rick. Um this is probably one of the uh you know, the greatest times in history to ever get sober in AA.

Um actually, I don't really mean that. I'm not sure if that's true. I'm just trying to give you a glimmer of hope and what's probably been a lot of bad news lately.

Um I would also uh like to thank the committee for asking me to be here. This has been a wonderful conference up to about now. And uh I'd like to especially thank uh Jeff and his lovely wife Carolyn for hosting me when I came in.

And uh and Fran, my new friend, for flying with me from Toronto. I guess they didn't actually think I'd get her on my own. Um and uh and all the other uh speakers that spoke before me and John, who's going to speak tomorrow.

Um I I didn't know anybody before I came to this conference. I'd only spoken to Jeff over the phone and Fran over the phone. And uh the wonderful thing is I now know that all these people that I've met uh here uh you know I can now account as friends.

Uh Marcel and I were speaking and and we know some of the same people and uh some of the people that she knows have been quite important in my own sobriety and uh I just I've been quite humbled just listening to the other stories from the other speakers. I I like speaking after other people because their stories often act as a back beacon uh that lets me know how far it is that we've traveled to come from where we were at to where we are today. And um I mean it's it's really an incredible thing.

Um I uh I would like to uh I I was talking to uh Fran before the meeting and she asked me if I was nervous and I don't normally get that nervous before speaking. Um although two weeks ago I did have a dream that um I came to the conference without pants. So uh that that may have been an indicator of it.

However, usually when I'm I'm feeling a bit nervous, I just try to remember that pretty much every single one of you at one point in time in your lives have been colossal failures. And uh other otherwise you you wouldn't be an AA. Um, and and for some reason, this always seems to reassure me.

And I'm reminded exactly what my duty is here today. It's not to impress you. I mean, if it was up to me, I would give such a great talk that I would win.

At the end of my talk, someone would come up and say, "We don't normally do this, but we'd like to have uh you to have the seventh tradition." And uh, you know, that's the kind of talk my ego would like me to give. And uh really what I'm just supposed to do is tell the truth and hopefully carry the message of how it is that um I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and how it is that I stayed sober. Um one of the uh the cool things about AA for me is just the phenomenon of identification.

We uh yesterday we went to not yesterday. Oh yeah, it was yesterday. Yesterday we went to Lake Louise and we had uh lunch there and uh we were uh talking and kind of sharing our own experiences and I realized that a lot of the speakers previous to me had started drinking at the age of 19.

And um that was the age that I actually got sober at. And logistically speaking that would suggest that there should be some wild differences between our experiences as alcoholics. But after hearing their stories I identified on a level that is impossible otherwise.

And um that I believe is a phenomenon of identification that um I can completely identify with their stories even though at the time when they first started drinking um I was getting sober in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Um and here just a little housekeeping. Uh I uh my hometown is Toronto.

My home group is the primary purpose group. It meets on uh Mondays and Wednesdays. If you're ever out in Toronto, please look me up.

My sobriety date is October 22nd, 1995, which as Sean said, puts me a little over 11 years sober. And um which is impressive if for some reason you're impressed by numbers greater than 10 and less than 12. Um but that does also mean that I've spent literally over 30% of my life sober in AA.

And uh my sponsor is a man by the name of Dan um F. His home group is the Hill. If there's anything that I say tonight that does not sit well with you, I encourage you to go to Toronto, attend the Hill meeting on Thursday night, find my sponsor, and slap him and say, "This is for your obviously poor sponsorship skills." If for some reason you can't wait that long, uh, Garfield has a very eerie resemblance to my sponsor, both in mannerisms and, uh, looks, so you could just have a strongly worded conversation with him as well.

Uh, if you haven't noticed, I tend to talk kind of fast. Um, this isn't because I'm nervous. This is simply because my mind goes very quickly.

Um, I assure you this is not because I'm intelligent. Uh, my mind is filled with stupid, insidious, uh, incipid thoughts. Most of the time they just happen to be going very quickly.

When I was telling my sponsors some of the stuff that I used to do when I was out there, um during the heyday of my drinking, I had stolen a blank doctor's prescription script, copied them, and I was going around the city of Seattle filling out these uh bogus prescription scripts and getting medication, which by the way does not work anymore, so don't try that. And uh what I I most commonly did was I mix demorall, Jack Daniels, and anthemines, which basically makes you say a lot of stupid things very quickly. And uh when I told my sponsor that he said, "Unfortunately, that appears to have been permanent with you." So, um please don't have any high expectations as to what you're going to hear tonight.

Um I uh I uh I um I've always had problems with with my feelings. I mean, I'm an alcoholic. I can think I love you.

I hate you. Come home with me. Get out of here.

in the manner of about 0.5 seconds. And um by the way, also I I sometimes say things that if you have uh delicate sensitivities, you might be offended. So I apologize ahead of time, but that's just how my mind works.

I apologize. But the only the best analogy I've come to in regards to explaining my feelings is if if you can picture a priest in a speedo with an erection in as much that my feelings were always grossly inappropriate for any given social fabric in any given context. I was constantly overreacting and the only thing that seemed to level that playing field was alcohol.

And uh I reached a point in my life where I looked back and tried to figure out the things that had made me the way I was. And I decided it was the schools that I had gone to. And uh one particular school that I went to when I was in elementary school, oh by the way, I forgot to mention that I spent uh the beginning six years of my sobriety getting sober in Southern California.

And um for that I'm extremely grateful because there's another place like Southern California if you're young getting sober. I mean, we have 15-year-olds there who have 20 years of sobriety, which I've been told is biologically impossible, but you get my point. And uh, you know, I'm always grateful also that not only did I get sober there, but I got sober at a time where it was much more accepted.

If you can think back to the earlier days of uh, of recovery back when Bill W and Dr. Bob were still pushing this thing called AA, and they would get new drunks and they would send them to Dr. Bob's office.

And these wet drunks would show up to his doctor's office and they would be standing outside his door. And if you don't know, Dr. Bob was a proctologist.

He was a butt doctor. And that wet drunk would be standing outside his door. And um there was very little known at this time at the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And at that point, they would suddenly think, "Dear God, Alcoholics Anonymous is invasive anal surgery." And in a moment of desperation, they would say, "Okay." And um you know, that was what was happening in the earlier days of AA. And here it is that I get to get sober with. Um my experiences have been that I have about 25 close friends and all of us got sober before we were 20 years old and all of us have 10 plus years of sobriety as well.

And uh that was what I got sober with. So I'm always grateful for that. Um going back to uh finding out why I'm so screwed up.

I believe it was the schools I went to. Uh one particular school I went to when I was growing up in Denver, Colorado, um it was apparently very uncool to ever be caught using the bathroom. Uh it was commonly referred to as taking a load off your feet.

Uh if you were ever caught doing this, you were endlessly ridiculed until you moved out of the city or you killed yourself. Um I'm very conscious of the social toll pole. I'm always conscious of who's on top of that and who's on the bottom.

And my greatest fear was that I would get stuck somewhere in the middle of it. So I paid close attention to social etiquette. And I knew about this whole taking a load off your feet.

So for many years I stayed constipated and I never used the public washroom. And finally, I reached that point of coolness where I was invited to that party. And I was 10 years old and I was invited to Dan and Dustin's party.

And the first drink I ever took was appropriately vodka and Kool-Aid. And I we drank that and uh we ran around the town shooting fireworks at cars, which is apparently illegal. And uh the cops started chasing us and they cornered us in this field and uh they were going around asking us our names and my friends were visibly shaken.

And when they got to me, suddenly I began to feel the effects of alcohol. And at that moment, I felt a feeling that I had never felt before. And when he asked me my name, the cop, quite calmly, I told him my name was Richard Head.

And he looked at me and cocked his eye and he said, "Son, are you trying to tell me that your name is dickhead?" And I said, "Sir, I've always preferred Richard." And he laughed and he let us go. And as we were walking away, my friends were patting me on the back and saying that was the most incredible thing they'd ever seen. And I knew that was true.

And at that moment, I knew that I had acted in that way directly as a result of alcohol. And um I would pursue that feeling up until the point that I was 19 and getting sober. And I remember first coming into these rooms and being told that I was immature with moments of grandiosity and being incredibly offended by that.

Uh just because I've been trying to relive an hour that I'd had when I was 10 years old did not make me immature. It just made me highly nostalgic. And uh and I I would be a not to chase the feeling that I had.

I mean I was 10 years old and I I crossed that line of social drinking in about 20 minutes. And from that point on I was nearly a daily drinker and um I suffered from the physical allergy in a way that is extremely uh allergic I guess I should say. I'll kind of go back to my childhood.

I was also born in the Philippines. Uh my mother was 16 years old and an intervenous drug user. uh she was related at that time to the ruling family of the Philippines and I was something of a political scandal.

So I was uh quickly expedited to the United States and adopted for lack of better words to white people and um and uh also to go back to my family history. Uh my parents are incredible people. Uh they're also kind of crazy.

They adopted six other children and all of us are from Asia so they also have something of an Asian fetish. But um For the first couple years after coming to the United States, I spent in the hospital going through drug and alcohol withdrawal. And I was constantly told that I had a prediliction toward alcoholism and drug addiction.

And um I waited until I was 10 to take my first drink. And when I took my first drink, I knew there was something bodily and mentally different from for me. I mean, the fear went away whenever I took that first drink.

Something happened inside me. My mental state changed. And it's important for me to remember that I suffer from a disease of perception.

And the alcohol seems to alter my perception in a way that it does not do to normal people. And um I remember even my first day sober coming into a meeting. And as I walked in, someone looked at me and he said, "You're no longer alone." And I took that as a threat.

I thought he was saying that I was indeed no longer alone. Now that I'm an Alcoholics Anonymous, someone will be following me, monitoring all my activities, and make sure that I stay sober. Um, I was a little bit paranoid and I remember when I stood up as a newcomer, the guy standing next to me handed me a card and I still remember it said Ron C and it had his phone number on it and he said, "Call me anytime next time you want to drink." And I was like, "Dear God, this guy wants to go drinking with me.

What is this place?" And these were my early perceptions of Alcoholics Anonymous. And um, perhaps because of my genetic prediliction or whatever, I went downhill very quickly. Um, within the month of taking my first drink, I would also do every single drug that I would do.

Uh, I mentioned a little bit about drugs, and all I can say about the drugs is there's things that I've smoked, there's powders I've inhaled, uh, there's chemicals I have put in my body that seem to trigger the same phenomenon of craving for alcohol that alcohol did. And um that's the way that the drugs related to my alcoholism is whenever I took these substances, they seem to trigger that same phenomenon for cra of of craving for alcohol. And um by the time I was uh 14, I had a very serious uh methamphetamine habit.

Uh if you've ever done methamphetamines, you know that it's difficult to sleep at night. So you come up with nighttime hobbies. Um and by the way, just a little word about crystal meth.

I've come to believe that any drug that would make a 14-year-old clean the room for a recreational activity is inherently evil. Um but um I was busy drinking and busy cleaning people's rooms. And uh when I wasn't sleeping, I would chat on the internet.

And my other favorite hobby was to lie. So it'd be 3:00 a.m. in the morning and I'd be furiously uh typing away at the uh internet.

If you're not familiar with the worldwide web, it's a cyber connection of crazy people simultaneously communicating with each other. And um I would be telling them these horrific lies such as that my dad would beat me, which is totally untrue. And uh you know, being the compassionate people that are on the worldwide web, they would say that's horrible.

Come run away and live with us. So I did cuz I'm easily influenced. And uh I uh I was 14 going on 15.

I stole a couple thousand dollars from my parents and I flew to this small city in Texas called Amarillo. And I hope there's no one from Amarillo, but I don't mean to offend you. Uh but basically there's nothing to do in this city except go bowling, drink vodka, and go um smoke pot.

And uh so I was 14 years old and I was living the high life of bowling, drinking vodka, and smoking pot. And I was living with this couple that I'd met on the internet. And at that point in time, I'd more or less resigned myself to the fact that eventually I would kill myself when things got bad.

And uh this was not because I hated myself. This was simply because the idea that I could kill myself when things got really bad allowed me to act in ways uh without any sort of guilty conscience. And that was my MO.

Anything that allowed me to act in a way that I didn't have to feel guilty, that's what I grabbed on to. And uh the other thing that's uh important for me to mention, especially to newcomers, is that I've always been a blackout drinker. Um being roughly the size of a large owl, I've always drunk past my weight.

And uh I was constantly going into blackouts. And uh you know, I blackouts were kind of like my poor man's time machine. I would get drunk on Wednesday uh Monday and then I would suddenly become coherent on Thursday and I would come to and I'd be like, "Oh my god, I've lost several days." And then that uh alcoholic optimism would kick in and it would be like or I've traveled through time.

And uh that's kind of how I handled my drinking. And near the end of my drinking, I was blacking out all the time. And unfortunately, I was also attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and uh going to meetings in LA.

There's this one specific meeting called the Pacific Group. The average attendance is over 2,000 people. I apparently got drunk and went to this meeting.

I came out of the blackout, looked around. It's in a gigantic auditorium and thought that I was in an opera. And then suddenly I realized, dear God, I'm in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If you are currently coming out of a blackout, I'd like to welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous. This is a wonderful place. And uh you know that that was my experience.

And uh so going back to Texas, I was later apprehended. And uh my father came and got me. And the thing that's important for me to remember is during this time I was telling a whole network of people over the internet that my father beat me.

And my father kind of traced back through this network to find me. And he ran into a bunch of people that assumed he was beating me. And he continued to look for me.

And he finally caught me and um I went with him. And as we were flying back to California, we had this layover in I believe Denver. And we were standing at the ticket agent counter and my father was talking to the ticket agent and I realized I had to go to the bathroom.

So I wandered off to use the washroom and as I came back out into the terminal I saw my father and he was running around and he had this absolutely desperate frantic look in his eyes and for the first time in my life I realized that my father cared about me immediately after realizing that I forgot it because for a moment to believe that my father killed cared about me aggressively interfered with my ability to act without conscience and anything that got in my way of me acting without conscience I simply forgot about and that was the beauty of alcohol for me. was it allowed me to forget about those kind of things. Near the end of my drinking that stopped working and that was one of the reasons I got sober is because the alcohol stopped making me forget and I'll talk a little bit more about that later.

Um I got back to California and my parents put me in a rehab and I was in this rehab and they were trying to tell my parents that I had a very serious problem with drug addiction and alcoholism. And uh being like most parents in denial, they thought that my main problem was that I wasn't in a good Catholic high school. So uh they took me out, put me in a good Catholic high school.

At this t point in time I was 15 going on 16 and I'd reached that point where I suddenly realized that there was no way out of my lifestyle. I absolutely hated myself. I had finally acroved enough evidence to make me believe that I hated myself.

I felt worthless. I was drunk all the time. I was incapable of stopping using the drugs that I was on.

And uh in my mind, my life was completely deteriorating. And at 16, I made the decision that the only way out of my lifestyle was suicide. And I attempted suicide.

And uh during the time that I was doing my inventory with my first sponsor, I told him the details of the suicide attempt. And he told me anytime I'm speaking if, God forbid that opportunity happens, that I should uh relate those details back to you verbatim because he felt it was a wonderful example of God working in my life at a time that I did not believe in him and nor would I have wanted him to. And uh what happened is I'd stole my friend's van, which was something of a habit.

And I'd taken it to his father's business complex. And uh at this time I was in Orange County. And the beautiful thing about Orange County is there's not a lot of tall buildings.

So I wasn't going to kill myself by jumping off a high building. I was going to kill myself through carbon monoxide poisoning. I took a hose, put it in the back of the exhaust pipe, put it back in through the van, turned on the van, and waited to die.

And I remember sitting in that van as the fume started creeping in. For the first time in my life before I lost consciousness, I had this feeling of complete peace and serenity. A feeling of everything being right in the world.

And I've come to realize that living that kind of life, you can only feel like that if you've completely lost the ability to hope and dream. I would never feel like that again up until the time that I came into these rooms. And ironically, it was for the exact opposite reasons.

And um fortunately for me, at some point, I didn't do a good job hooking up the hose cuz I wasn't dead yet. And I came to and realized I wasn't dead. And uh one of the lines that jumped out of me at me in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous is pitiful incomprehensible demoralization.

And I remember when I first read that, I vividly remembered coming to in that van, realizing I wasn't dead, taking the hose off the floor of the van and sticking it into my mouth with the hopes it would kill me faster. And there I was at 16 without the ability to hope and dream with a hose sticking out of my mouth hoping only to die. I had completely lost the ability to dream.

And um what happened later was told to me. this group of people decided to come into work for their first working lives or first uh yeah working lives on a Sunday. They all went in through the front.

This one guy went in through the back and uh he said as he was opening the door he saw the van and had a strange feeling come over him. He went over to the van, investigated, found me and realized what was going on. They dragged me out of the van.

I was in and out of consciousness and they sat me down in the office and started talking to me. I don't recall that well, but the one thing that I do recall is that the guy that found me told me that sometimes he believes God gives us an opportunity to write what was once wrong and that years before his brother had committed suicide. And um and then he said he was Filipino and I happened to be Filipino.

And of course at that time it completely went over my head because I was a little pissed off that they'd screwed up my suicide attempt. And um and these people saved my life. And uh I'm I I was struck when when Ron was speaking.

And uh the the thought that jumped out of my head was redemption. And uh one of the things that I love about this program is the almost miraculous occurrence of redemption that often happens to us if we do this thing. And uh it's it's those moments in our lives where we get the chance to write what was once wrong.

Um when I would be sober, I would be asked to make amends to those people that had saved my life. Uh 6 years later, I would actually make those amends. And I'll talk about that when I talk about my ninestep.

Um they contacted my parents and I remember as my father walked in with the paramedics, he was just crying and that was the first time I'd ever seen my father cry. And I remember absolutely despising myself and knowing that I needed to drink. And they took me to the hospital and the doctors tried to explain what I'd done to myself.

They said that the average human at middle age would have a carbon monoxide level of a two or three. A smoker might have double that. When I came in, my level was a 35.

And they said I was literally moments away from dying. And um my personal belief is that I'm somewhat on borrowed time. There's no logical reason why I should still be alive.

And the reason I like this particular story in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is by mo no means is this an uncommon story. I can assume that pretty much each and every one of you can think back in a moment as to know why there's no reason that you're here. And um Marcel mentioned this, but um one of my favorite speakers is Norm Albby and the line that I always love was seconds and inches.

And what he meant by seconds and inches is it was by mere seconds and inches that alcoholics of our variety got to come into this program sober. It was by mere seconds and inches that we escaped death, if not worse. For me, it was what if I had simply been in that van a little bit longer?

And um it was by seconds and inches that I came into this program. At this point in time, my parents realized that if they didn't do something drastic, I would die. And so they relinquished temporary custod of me and I was sent to a long-term juvenile rehab.

And um I spent two years there. And it was a very poorly run lockdown center. And uh the most common form of punishment was demerits.

The merits were 25 minutes spent standing against the wall. If you moved or talk, you started over. And the other common form of punishment was getting your ass kicked.

And um for the two years I was there, I did quite a bit of standing against the wall and getting my ass kicked. Um at one point in time, I decided I didn't want to be there anymore. I was drunk on Pruno, high on LSD and over thecounter uh medication.

And uh me and my friend decided that we would escape. So we stole the van that was there. We crossed a couple state lines.

In a moment of drunkenness, I called him up and said, "We're in Mexico. We painted the van FU." And um at that point in time we were fugitives from the law for what is apparently called unlawful flight from a courtappointed institution. And uh they said that if we didn't come back uh our girlfriends were threatening to kill themselves, which is apparently untrue.

And um so we felt some sort of strange moral obligation that indeed if they did kill themselves, we'd feel bad. And we'd also been gone long enough that the only thing we were eating was granola that had stolen from Safeway. And we were hungry enough to eat our belts.

and they said, "If you turn yourselves in tonight, we'll buy you Chinese food." So, we said, "Okay." And uh we turned ourselves in. They came out and got us, repped us up a bit, brought us back to the institution, and gave us an excess of 1,000 to marriage, which is roughly 25,000 minutes spent standing against the wall. Out of the two years I was there, I spent over 3 months in solitary confinement.

And um there was this one particular counselor that we all hated. While I was in solitary confinement, I had refused to stand any my demerits. And he was in there beating me in and out of consciousness.

And I remember I had two black eyes and a broken knuckle. And I thought to myself, I would kill this person before I was ever afraid of him again. That I wouldn't let the bastards break me.

And the comical thing about the idea of letting anyone break me is far before I had ever arrived there, I had been broken. And I believe it's the disease of alcoholism that have defined that brokenness. I believe that all of us arrived here broken.

And uh there I was broken, hoping that I couldn't be broken anymore. And uh eventually I got out of there when I was 18 years old. And I'm extremely grateful that I was put into this place.

Had I not been there, I know for a fact that I probably would have killed myself. There's something about the alcoholic audacity that I'm either trying to kill myself or desperately trying to survive. And there's something about the daily conflict that happened in there that seemed to get my back against the wall and I tried to survive.

And uh the only thing that I'm happy that I was there is uh when I was a freshman in high school in my first semester, I was expelled and I would never again darken the doors of any high school. Uh when I was in that place, I was also asked not to touch computers until I was 18 because apparently some of the things I was doing on them were illegal. And uh when I was put in this institution, I hacked into their school mainframe.

And as a result, I graduated high school with a 3.56 GPA. Um which I'm still pretty damn proud of. When I told my sponsor that I basically had a fake diploma, he told me because at this time I was thinking about going to college, he said before I pursued any sort of academic pursuits, I had to make some form of formal amends.

And so I contacted someone that was affiliated with this organization that knew me and I told him what I had done. And after a moment's pause, he said, "Well, I figure if you're smart enough to do that, you probably could have graduated from high school. Good luck in university." And um as a result, I actually did go back to university.

Um, I got out of there when I was 18 and I was absolutely psychotic. Shortly after I left, the place was shut down by child protection agencies because of the rampant accusations of sexual and physical abuse. And um, it took me years of sobriety to get past the things that had happened to me in there.

And it was only as a result of doing these steps that I can say that I have not killed myself because of the things that happened to me in there. And I don't say that to tell you that I'm a victim. Had I not been an alcoholic, I probably never would have gone there.

And there's something about me that put me in the situations for those things to happen. But um I was haunted by the things that had happened to me in there. And it took me years of sobriety to finally get past those things.

And I was absolutely psychotic. I wanted to kill people. And I have no idea how I did not kill myself.

And at this point in time, my big dream was to move to Seattle and become a street junkie. And um me and my friend moved out to Seattle. And oddly enough, at this point in time, I became convinced that I was becoming an alcoholic, which for some reason scared me.

So, I tried to stop drinking. And I need to qualify what I mean by trying to stop drinking. At this point in time, I had barricaded myself in this shabby apartment in downtown Seattle.

And I was on a strict diet of methamphetamines and crack cocaine and heroin. And what I would do is I would sit in this apartment on that strict diet and I would listen to the song Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley on loop over and over and over. Convinced hidden within the lyrics was a special message to me.

Ironically enough, I wasn't that far off. If you're unfamiliar with this song, the opening line is, "We're caught in a trap." And there I was at the age of 18 barricaded in this apartment trying to stop drinking by smoking crack, doing anthetines and heroin. And that was my alternative to drinking alcohol.

After a month of doing this, I went absolutely batshit and I had to start drinking. And within a couple months, I was evicted from my apartment and I polarized and burned every single bridge for every relationship that I had there. And the thing about Seattle is the people I was living with were the people that I had been locked down with for over 2 years.

I mean, for lack of a better words, we were very tight. It took me 2 months to polarize every single relationship with those people. And that's what alcoholism does.

It polarizes every single relationship. Every single every single thing that is sacred to me will be gone in a short span of time. And that has been my experience.

I was eventually homeless on the streets of Seattle and I ended up living in dumpsters and doing things that I could not imagine myself doing today. And the odd thing about this is I was somewhat okay because at this point in time, the only thing the alcohol was doing for me was apathy. That was all it was doing was just simply giving me a moment's peace and that I would feel absolutely nothing.

When I was 10 years old, it made me feel like everything. By the time I was 18, the only thing I was chasing was just a moment to not feel anything. And that was the point.

That was when alcohol had ceased to stop. It had stopped working in my life in the way that it used to. And that I had to continue drinking.

And I spent several months homeless in Seattle doing things that I just could not dream of doing. And eventually I made it out of Seattle and made it back to California. And um I remember I uh after being a little bit homeless in California, I went back home and uh I went to my parents house and this is the first time I talked to them in probably a year and I told them everything that I had been doing.

Kind of a filtered version of everything I've been doing and said, "It's just been a phase. I want to stop doing it. Please let me come back home." And uh they let me do that.

And there's a passage in our book that says, "Self-nowledge will avail us nothing." And at that moment, the desire to stop drinking and the knowledge of what it had done to my life could not keep me sober. Within a day of allowing me to come back home, I was drunk again. And um at this point in time, I started making some money because my father got me a good job.

And frightenly enough, my job was inspecting bridges in California. So, uh be a little wary when you're in Laguna Beach in California. Apparently, I was inspecting some of those bridges.

I have no recollection of doing that, fortunately, but that's what I was doing. Um, at this point in time, I was drinking so much and doing so many drugs that my mind began to slowly deteriorate and I became absolutely convinced of the paranoia that was going in my head. At one point in time, I became convinced that my brother was working for the DEA and I wasn't living home and at that time I broke into my parents house at the middle of the night uh pulled my brother up, held a knife to his throat and said that I would kill him if he ratted me out.

My brother was 14 years old and he's handicapped. At that moment, I was absolutely convinced that's what he was. And um that was what was going on in my mind.

I had completely lost the ability to tell the true from the false. And uh this was a combination of both the alcohol in my system, the drugs in my uh system, and just my alcoholism. And um things just slowly degraded over a period of time.

Actually, they very quickly degraded. And I also became part of a scene. um if you're an alcoholic, it's important to become part of a scene.

I got very involved in the LA club scene and um I began having these small indicators that maybe things weren't going well. I remember I'd be in a club in the back room, this really nice place. I'd come out of a blackout and I' I'd stick my head up and go, "Oh my god, I love this song.

Why am I naked?" And then I'd have these other moments where I'd lift my head out of a pile of outside issues. I'd look to my friend who I just met 15 minutes ago and I would say things like, "Do you think that normal people live like this?" And he'd be like, "What are you talking about?" And why are you naked? And with frightening speed, these things began occurring over and over and over.

And and the strange thing is is on the external, my life was not as bad as it had been in Seattle. But internally, everything was crumbling to the ground. And by the time I was 19, I hit bottom.

And I'll tell you about my last day at my job. Um, I showed up to work and uh I was called into my boss's office for uh ironically to discuss my job performance. I had been up for 11 days and uh while I was in there I started passing out and I felt a strange pain in my neck.

So I cracked my neck, dropped to the floor and went into convulsions and uh they rushed me to the hospital and I was treated for a drug overdose. And um after I was treated for that because of the fact of who my father was, the people at my work gave me an option. They said either you can go to a treatment center or we have to fire you.

And I told them when I was 18 I was released from a treatment center. I'm never going back again. And so they fired me and um I went back home and I got thoroughly hammered.

And as you may remember, I said that I'm a blackout drinker. I went into a blackout, completely forgot about everything that had happened that day. And when I came to the next morning, the thought that entered my head is something's not right.

You better get to work on time. And so I showed up to work for the first time ever on time. And absolutely astounded my ex- employer.

And one guy took me aside very surprised. And after saying, "What the hell are you doing here?" He figured it out. And he gave me the same option again.

He said, "We will fire you again or you can go to treatment center." And I still wasn't entirely sure what he was talking about. So I said, "When I was 18, I was released from a treatment center and I promised myself I would never go back." And he's all, "I know you told me that yesterday." And so I got fired for a second time. That was my last job before I got sober.

And uh at 19 years old, I hit bottom. And I came into this program and I remember meeting people that had been sober longer than I had been alive and had drank longer than I had been alive and had stories that were like things that I had never I couldn't even imagine. I mean, they had lost things that I had never possessed like children, families, although I had actually lost my family and homes and all these things that I I just had never had.

And I I didn't immediately identify with them. But when they said that they drank and it made them less afraid, I identified with that. And it was that initial identification that allowed me to stay.

And what I came to find is uh that my bottom was simply the painful undeniable realization that I wasn't who I thought I was. And what I mean by that is the alcohol and the drugs had ceased working in my life in the way that they used to. No matter how drunk I got, I knew exactly who I was, exactly where I was going.

And for some ungodly reason, I was no longer okay with that. And at that point in time, the alcohol had ceased to work in my life in the way that it used to. And I believe that regardless of whatever external or internal bottom we reach to come here, all of our bottoms are marked simply by the fact that the alcohol has ceased to work in our lives in the way that it used to.

And if you have reached that point, I welcome you to this program. That was my bottom. And immediately after that, I had a moment of clarity.

That moment of clarity was simply the painful, undeniable realization that there might be another way to life. And I remembered Alcoholics Anonymous. And I came here.

And for me to be honest, one of the big reasons I came to Alcoholics Anonymous is because I knew I lacked the ability to kill myself when I was drunk. I woke up or came to every morning absolutely disgusted that I had not been able to kill myself. And that was my existence at that time.

Every single day I came to and was disgusted with myself that I could not seem to kill myself. And I thought that the sheer pain of being sober and alcoholics anonymous would finally give me the courage to kill myself. And that is why I came here as well.

And it's important for me to remember that. And um and I was one of the fortunate people that got to come here. And as big as this conference may seem, not that many people come to Alcoholics Anonymous and not that many people stay sober.

But those of us that do have lives that are absolutely incredible and they're directly as a result of this program. And uh I'm going to talk about all 12 steps as they're related to my life. And uh very quickly I'll also make a mention about the traditions.

Uh at one point in my sobriety I had to make amends to I guess old people. And uh in Los Angeles there's a lot of circuit speakers and a lot of speaker meetings. And what my sponsor made me do for this particular amends is I had to drive the circuit speakers to the meetings that they were speaking at cuz they were too old to drive themselves apparently.

And uh there's this one lady that took a shine in me. Her name was uh Marie and she had 55 plus years sober at that time. She was one of the first women to ever get sober in Southern California.

and she got sober at the time that Bill W was still alive. And whenever I was with her, I gleaned her for any information about Alcoholics Anonymous. And at the time she was first getting sober, the traditions had not fully been instated in the meetings, not in the way that we know them today.

And she told me about an Alcoholics Anonymous that was extremely segregated. There was meetings that were segregated by race, segregated by sexual orientation, segregated by business affiliation, segregated by religious affiliation. And there were people dying because they could not get into these meetings based on circumstances that they could not control.

And Bill W, and it really was just Bill W and his foresight realized that in order for alcoholics to get sober, there needed to be something that protected people that had a desire to stop drinking. There needed to be something in place that allowed people with simply the desire to stop drinking to come into Alcoholics Anonymous. And thus the tra traditions were born.

And moreover, he realized that in order for alcoholics to stay sober, new people had to come in. There had to be new people coming in that we could help. That was the only way that would we would remain sober.

And um that's just a small understanding that I have of the traditions. And if you have no understanding of traditions, I would encourage you to find out more. It's the reason that Alcoholics Anonymous still exists.

And it's the reason that at the age of 19, Filipino, um I was allowed to stay and come here. Um, so now I'll talk about the steps. Again, this is a small disclaimer.

This is simply my own experience with the steps. I encourage you to get your own. If you disagree with anything I'm saying, all I'm talking about is my own experience.

Um, step one, uh, when I was uh, newly sober, and I mean newly sober as in my first couple years sober, I would make uh very important financial decisions based on the idea that I would win the lottery. Um, this doesn't necessarily make me an alcoholic, it just makes me highly financially irresponsible. At one point in time during my sobriety, I was living in southern Turkey.

Every morning, I would wake up and I would jog alg. After that jog, I would stop in my corner store and get some water. I remember this one particular time I stopped in my corner store.

I looked in to get my water and I suddenly noticed that the beer was cheaper than the water. And out of the blue, the realization or the thought came to me. You know, you should be practicing getting financially responsible.

Why not start here? And for that moment, that seemed like one of the sest thoughts I had ever had. And I was a I was several years sober at that time.

The Big Book typifies these moments as a mental blank spot. And um there I was in southern Turkey not going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, convinced that in order for me to get my life in order, I should buy beer because it's cheaper than water. And uh the book also suggests that the only thing that will protect us from these mental blank spots is our willingness to be of service to other alcoholics and our previous work with our previous intensive force with other alcoholics.

I believe at that moment I stayed sober simply because I had done other work with alcoholics and because I was willing to continue doing work with other alcoholics. I went back, got a hold of my sponsor, told him what happened and said that I couldn't go to meetings because there were none. He said I needed to start some.

So I began starting meetings in southern Turkey. And um the first initial people that came I believe were only there because they wanted to learn English. And um I have absolutely no idea if those meetings still go on or if anyone was affected by them, but I got to stay sober.

And um the other thing that happened while I was in Europe is I was dating this girl. We were working at these resorts and at this resort you could drink. In fact, you were encouraged to drink and it was free.

And I remember asking her why she didn't drink. And she said she did drink. I just had never seen her drunk dancing naked on a tabletop.

So I assume she didn't drink. And I said, "Yeah, but why don't you drink all day?" cuz I mean it's free. You're allowed to and you don't get in trouble.

And she looked absolutely puzzled and she said, "Yeah, but who would want to be drunk all day long?" And and the first thought that came to my mind is what the hell is she talking about? And again, I was sober for a while. And I mean, I continue to be affected by my powerlessness over alcohol.

And when I first came into this program, oh, the other thing that I've come to find is after being sober for a while, I have certain experience that can help people that are on the fence. Um, I like to be on the fence and just kind of grind. But, um, if you're on the fence as to whether you're an alcoholic, I've I've found certain indicators.

Uh, my favorite is if you've ever used a personal hygiene product as a recreational beverage, that may be an indicator. My personal favorite was brute after shave. I always kind of thought that was a manly drink.

Um, and and when I came in here, the question that was posed to me is when you drink, do you find that you have little to no control over the amount that you drink? And do you find when you want to honestly get sober that you cannot do so on your own? And perhaps the most important question that was asked of me was, do you like the way that you're living?

and I had to say no to all of them. I didn't like the way that I was living and I knew that when I took that first drink, I could not stop. And moreover, I had come to find that on the unaded will, I I couldn't stay sober.

And um it wasn't necessarily a drinking problem that I suffered from because I was not drunk when he asked me that question. And I hated myself. So, obviously, it was not just the alcohol that was affecting me.

There was something quite deeper to that. And I went to my second step. And um I uh when when I had my sponsor, he often used simple analogies to help me understand the uh steps based on my past.

And um I I was fortunately quite stupid. Um he often called me ass hat because I didn't know my head for my ass. And uh for step two, when I arrived to that and I saw the word God and I saw the word faith, I said, I can't work this step.

I know nothing about faith. I know nothing about a higher power. I I don't even have the tiniest idea of what it would look like to live on faith or believe in anything.

And um the story he used was something that I had told him I had done when I was in lockdown. And the general rule of thumb in lockdown was that if you were ever at the doctor's office and you saw anything that vaguely looked like prescription medication, you stole it. And so I was in the doctor's office and I saw this box of medication and on the medication it had two old people walking down the beach hand in hand.

And it it said for the ease of pain and discomfort. So I stole it and I brought it back to uh this lockdown, shared it with my friends under the assumption that it was muscle relaxants. Uh an hour later I realized that two old people walking down the beach hand in hand.

In other words, for the ease of pain and discomfort, me and my friends had just uh overdosed on prescription strength laxatives. And uh for the next couple hours, we turned our will in our lives over to a power greater than we understood. And the reason my sponsor used this particular story is he had said it was not the quantity of faith that I lacked in, it was rather the quality of faith.

He said that the only evidence I had needed to turn my will and my life over to something was a picture of two old people walking down the beach hand in hand and the words for the ease of pain and discomfort. And immediately I turned my will and my life over to it with the belief that it would take me where I wanted to go. And yet I came into this program and bulked at the very idea of faith.

And yet I had lived my entire life based on faith. It was not the quantity of faith that I lacked. It was the quality.

I needed to find something that was worth having faith in. And the beautiful thing about this particular step is that the only requirements it places on your higher power is that one, it have the ability to restore you to sanity and that it be something you can understand and that's it. The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous numbers and literally the millions.

Our religious affiliations are all across the board. The only requirements we place or we even suggest to replace on your higher power is that it have the ability to restore you to sanity and it be something that you can do business with. That's it.

And um and really all we're asking you to do is believe that there that such a thing exists. And um I was willing to take that leap of faith. And then I arrived to my third step.

And um what I came to find is for me to do my third step, all I needed to do was start my fourth step. And the funny thing is is I've lived my entire life based on a simple singular principle. That principle is if it makes me feel good, do more.

Do more regardless of the consequences that happen to me. and especially regardless of the consequences that happen to you. And I live my entire life based on this principle.

And the ironic thing is the only area of my life that I have trouble applying this extreme to is my recovery. Uh I don't many I don't know how many times I've told my sponsor that things were going well. So I've decided to stop going to meetings.

That makes absolutely no sense based on how I've lived my life. And yet I've done that before and so many of my sponses have done that before. And I arrived to my uh third step that says I need to make a decision.

And really after having made that decision, all I have to do is my fourth step. And we have these somewhat esoteric slogans sometimes that for me misled me into believing that the third step suggests some form of inaction. We have let go and let God.

Easy does it. Think, think, think. And sometimes I misinterpret those into believing that it said don't do anything.

And granted, as an alcoholic, sometimes the best course of action is not doing anything. But certainly, it's not something I should be living my life by. And I remember at this one point in my sobriety, I was going through a traumatic breakup, as all breakups are in sobriety.

If you're going through a breakup, I tell you to just get over it. But I was going through this traumatic breakup, and I was telling my sponsor about it, and he said, "You need to let go and you need to let God." And I remember with great incredul, is there some sort of law that requires you not to give me a straight answer? Like, what what does that mean?

what do you mean by let go and let God? And he said, "Well, off the top of my head, maybe you should stop stalking her." And um I had made a decision that I needed to stop a behavior. And immediately thereafter, he gave me a course of action that I could follow.

After having made my decision to turn my will in my life over to the power greater that I understood, I was launched into a vigorous course of action. That vigorous course of action was my fourth step. And I began doing my inventory.

And the inventory was awesome for me. I thought it was a list of people that I was pissed off at. Finally, I would be vindicated for all the people that had treated me wrongly, and then I was pointed to that fourth column.

Um, that's my part in it. Up until that time, I'd had no idea that I actually had a part in anything. And, um, I was like the jaywalker in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If you're unfamiliar with the story, the jaywalker is a person that constantly runs out into the middle of the street, compelled to do so, even after he has been injured and has affected other people. I was like the jaywalker in as much that I felt that in order for me to stop getting hit by cars, you all needed to stop driving. And that's how I approached my life.

And I finally did this inventory. And for the first time in my life, I reached a semblance of honesty that I was otherwise incapable of doing. And I had to do this with a sponsor.

And um I did a great deal of my fourstep with my um grand sponsor. And I actually remember and I was talking to Marcel about this. I had hit kind of a writer's block with my fourstep.

And I was up in San Francisco and I ran into one of the craziest people I have ever met in sobriety. It's a guy by the name of Lord Haw. That's not his real name.

He changed it in sobriety. um he tattooed a spiderweb all over his face and um I was hanging out with him and some of his friends at that time he had several years of sobriety and I was frank with him and I said I can't get past something on my forep. He spent the entire day walking around the city of San Francisco with his arm around my shoulder discussing his experiences about the fourth step.

After that talk, I finally finished my fourth step. And my fourth step basically took me eight months of sitting around blowing it out of proportion and one month of actually sitting down and putting pen to paper. And I made that list of all the secrets that have been keeping me sick.

And I went and did my fifth step. And I remember when I took my fifth step to my sponsor and I told him all these things. And I divulged these things to him.

And at the end of my fifth step, my sponsor said, "Now tell me all the things that you didn't write down." And I had not written down some things. I had walked into that fitstep with a firm belief that there are some things that I would never tell anybody. And a lot of those things were things that had happened to me when I was homeless in Seattle.

And a lot of the things that were happened to me when I was uh in lockdown when I was uh a teenager. And after telling him these things that I had not written on my forep, he was uncharacteristically quiet. And again, this was a sponsor.

They called me ass hat cuz he thought I didn't know my head for my ass. And he said, "For what it's worth, I'm sorry these things happen to you. Perhaps in a perfect world, these things wouldn't happen to anybody.

Fortunately or perhaps unfortunately, depending on how you think about this, that's no longer an excuse to live the way that you're living. And um that was perhaps one of the most powerful things that has ever been told to me. After divulging all these secrets that I had held on to, all these things that I had promised I would never tell anybody, I was absolutely humiliated by these things.

And um he said, "These things are no longer an excuse to live the way that you were living." And at that moment, I suddenly became accountable for everything that had happened in my life. And for the first time in my life, I was absolutely set free from my past. And um I believe as a result of doing a fourth and fifth step, I do not have to close the door on my past.

And although I don't necessarily go into great detail about some of the things that happened to me, when I sit down with people, I will tell them exactly some of the stuff that happened to me if I believe it will help them. And um and that's essentially how I've gotten over those things. And uh I was talking to Garfield and Fran and we were just talking about the intimacy of some of the things that we share in our lives.

And what we talked about is how difficult that can be at sometimes. I mean, how can we live our lives constantly bringing those things up and reliving those emotions? I mean, for me to talk about the fact that I was locked down in a place for 2 years that I was ritualistically, physically, and sexually abused is not the easy thing for me to talk about.

But I can assure you that the emotions that I feel, I only feel for the moment that I'm talking about them. I don't go about my entire life feeling these things. What I've come to find is that tragedy has turned to triumph because I have been allowed to use these experiences to help other people.

And that's one of the promises in our big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that has been my experience. And um then I moved on to my sixth and seventh step.

And um my sixth and seventh step were simply coming to that realization that I'm such a spiritual defect that nothing short of divine intervention will help me remove these shortcomings. And um for this particular story, I borrow heavily from a friend named Sandy B in the Eastern United States. And um I I sponsor a lot of jackasses.

Um in spite of my best efforts to kill them, some of them stay sober. Uh ever so often one of them will get up to take a medallion. Uh they get up and they talk and uh they say something somewhat intelligible and you know, people applaud because they have to.

And as they're applauding, I'm sitting there thinking to myself, you know, the reason the sponsor is sober is because they have a sponsor. And you know, I happen to be that sponsor. So really all the applause you're giving him should be coming to me.

Uh that's my definition of spiritual pride. What I'm looking for is gratitude. What I'm looking for is the gratitude that there's actually people in this world that want what I have.

What I'm looking for is the gratitude that for a moment I'm able to give back something to somebody else. What I'm looking for is the gratitude that I actually have something that's worth imparting to other people. That's what I'm looking for.

What I'm looking for is to have these defects be transformed into something that will be of use to another person. That has been my experience with the six and seven step that over a slow period of time if I am willing these defects of character will be transformed into something that can be of use to another human being. And um that is the only way that I have changed is by the willingness to help another person.

And um I moved on to my eighth step and I'd already done that because I made my inventory and it was a list of the people that I had harmed and I moved on to my ninth step and I went about and started making those amends and I remember early in sobriety like any good alcoholic I decided to make an amends and it was to I guess the in institution that I had been locked down in. So, I made this crazy crow uh crazy road trip out to this place and uh I ended up running into this person that was affiliated with this institution and I tried to make amends to him. At the end of this amends, I was waving a knife at him and I said, "F you, watch your back." That was my amends.

Uh shortly after that amends, I would meet up with people that I was in lockdown with and we would quite literally begin planning how to kill that person later that night. And in the midst of that planning, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe this wasn't what we were talking about when we were talking about amending our wrongs. And the other thing that perhaps saved me from murdering somebody is I had brought along another friend in a recovery.

And during the time that we were literally planning to kill this person, he was standing there like a deer in headlights and he suddenly said, "What the hell are we doing?" And it was like an audible snap where I snapped out of it and realized I needed to get the hell out of there. And um at that time I did not understand the importance of the ninth step. I thought that it was all about making me feel better.

And of course, that is a side effect of the ninth step. But it is not why we do it. It is not why I had to do it anyway.

And um I went about and started making those amends. And uh the amends I'll talk about is the amends I had to make to those people that had saved my life when I tried to kill myself. This was one of those give me amends.

All I had to do was find the people that had saved my life, thank them, and tell them what my life was like as a result of AA. That's all I had to do. I could foresee absolutely no negative side effect from doing this amends.

It took me six years to make this amends. At around 6 years of sobriety, I was going through a spiritual crisis and it suddenly occurred to me that I had neglected to do these amends and I realized there might be an association with this. So I went about and tried to make this amends and I went to the business complex where I tried to kill myself and I went looking for these people.

They had since moved out of that office and I couldn't find them and I was searching around and I could not find them. And I remember going back to my uh car crest fallen and I said a prayer of desperation and uh the prayer was quite simple. It said, "God, if it be your will, I think it's very important that I make this amend today.

If that be your will, please give me a sign and please make it very obvious because I'm very stupid." Immediately after saying that prayer of desperation, the thought occurred to me, "Check one more office." And I walked into that office and sitting behind the reception desk was one of the ladies that had been there when I had tried to kill myself. and not quite willing to let it go, I said to her, "The reason I'm here today is because years ago, my brother tried to kill himself." And she looked at me and started crying. And she said, "No, it was you." And she came around the reception desk and hugged me.

And she took me back into the office and I met all those people that had saved my life several years ago. And I told them about what my life was like as a result of AA. And my life was really good.

And I thanked them. And immediately after doing that, the spiritual crisis that I was going through ended. I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I had a higher power in my life that I could do business with.

And um I don't know why that works. I simply know that that's how it works. And I made that amends.

And the other significant amends that I made was to my parents. Um it took me two years of sobriety before my parents even believed that I was sober. And the way that I had to do my amends is because I wasn't living with them is I had to show up once a week and do something with my parents that they wanted to do.

And I absolutely hated it. And I would show up once a week and I would do this thing and I just absolutely hated it. And over a period of time, I slowly began liking to go there.

And even more amazing, over a period of time, my parents enjoyed having me over. And over a course of time, I began making that amends to my parents. And I was welcomed back into my family.

And I made amends, a formal amends to each and every one of my siblings. And today, I can proudly say that I'm a member of my family. And I have a very large family.

So that's important. I remember at one point in time on a Christmas uh after I'd been welcomed back into my family, my sister wrote me a note with a Christmas gift and she said, "When you were drinking, I used to pray every night that you wouldn't come back home. not because I hated you, but because I thought that if you finally died, you would be let go of your pain.

And um and she said, "This has been one of the greatest Christmases to simply have you here as a member of my family." Um, oddly enough, my sister and I are like a best of friends. And I remember I had assumed that I didn't really need to make direct amends to this sister because I had never in my mind directly harmed her. And what I came to find is she had been greatly harmed simply because of my actions and simply because of the fact that she cared for me.

I was absolutely foreign. It was an absolutely foreign idea to me that you could be injured simply because you love someone because I had never had an authentic relationship with anyone in my entire life prior to coming to Alcoholics Anonymous. It wasn't until I was sober that I came to find that simply on the basis of loving someone, you could be harmed.

And that was what I came to find out after making that amends with that sister. And um when we were at Lake Louise, uh one of the joys about being here in BA is that this is where my parents went for their honeymoon. And uh I walked out onto uh Lake Louise and I called up my mother because they went to Lake Louise for their honeymoon.

And I said, "Uh, guess where where I am, mom? I'm on uh Lake Louise." And she said, "Uh that's where we went for our honeymoon." And I'm like, "That's kind of why I called you." Um and for that moment, uh me and my mom talked and we shared that moment. And uh I I'll kind of talk about this a little bit later when I talk about what my life is like.

But at some point in time uh an author that I know decided to write a book. And uh in her book, one of the stories was my story. And uh what she had to do was also interview my family.

Uh we were in Toronto and this author was interviewing myself and my family and particularly my mother, my father, and my sister because at that point in time my sister lived in Chicago. So she came up for that trip and uh the author asked my my mother how she felt about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. and my mother just broke into tears.

And um my mother is a a public speaker and she goes all over the world speaking about things. And one of the things she's famous for talking about is paralleling the the Fellowship of Christianity and the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and making the association of how some of these religious fellowships could learn quite a bit from the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. And what she said was she has a debt to Alcoholics Anonymous that she could never fully repay.

that it brought her son back into her life and it made him into a person that she never thought could be alive and um that's what she said about this program and uh I have an incredible relationship with my entire family today and that's directly as a result of doing these amends and I moved on to my 10th step and the 10th step is simply that buffer zone that allows me to screw up which inevitably I'm going to and still stay sober as a result of being willing to make prompt amends whenever I'm wrong I can stay sober and still be human because inevitably I'm going to mess up. My own experience suggests that I'm going to mess up quite a bit. And if I'm willing to make prompt amends, I can still stay sober.

What I've come to find in terms of my 6 7 8 9 and 10, that there's been moments in my life where I had to be willing to give up everything that I thought I was at that moment to become what I could be. And uh that's been my experience in this program. And I moved on to my 11th step.

And I'll share a quick story about kind of prayer in regards to this. Um, this is not a story that's talking about whether or not you should say the Lord's Prayer or hold hands or anything like that. This is simply a story of my own experience.

At one point in my sobriety around the time that I was going through that spiritual crisis, at the end of the meeting, I refused to say the Lord's Prayer and I also refused to hold hands. In Southern California, it's traditional at the end of the meeting that you would say the Lord's Prayer and you would hold hands and I wouldn't do it. And uh, I went to my sponsor and I told him that I wasn't going to do it and I was pissed off and I said why I wouldn't do it.

And normally my sponsor is uh somewhat glided and um oh actually I got to backtrack to the ninth step. There's one important story that I would like to share about the ninestep. Um at one point in my sobriety I was going through a gratitude problem.

Sorry about this, but uh so my sponsor made me attend meetings in Compton, Los Angeles, which is a place that I used to get drink. And I went to the Compton Alano Club and there's this guy there that I knew named Bear and uh he had about 16 years sober. And ironically also when he was 16 years old, he did a driveby in the Alano Club and later he would find he had a drinking problem and would be welcome with open arms.

And I was in the Salano Club and I was trying to do my amends and I made the mistake of asking him how it is that we make amends to oursel and he said, "Listen, jackass." And um of course I listen because here in this program we uh preface any sort of spiritual revelation with a personal insult. And uh he said, "Listen, Jackass, I'm going to show you how it is that we make amends. What is it that you think we're doing with this entire program but making amends to ourselves?" And he referred me to the part of the big book that we traditionally called the promises.

And the promises are the thing in the uh the big book that suggests it'll happen in our lives as a result of being halfway through our amends. And one of the things that it says is we will do a new freedom and a new happiness. I I can think of no better way to make amends to myself than having a new freedom and a new happiness.

And uh now back to the 11th step and um again I was refusing to hold hands and say the prayer and I told my sponsor that and uh he said yeah you know what I used to do that too and uh what I came to find is that at the end of the meeting when I would hold your hand and I would say that prayer with you for that moment I felt connected. I've spent my entire life trying to feel disconnected. Far be it for me to uh a avoid any sort of moment that I can feel connected to a human being after I've been spending my entire life trying to be disconnected.

And um I didn't put much thought into that. But the next meeting I went to at the end of the meeting when we stood up to say that prayer, I heard my sponsor's voice saying, "Far be it for me to avoid any situation where I can feel connected to a human being." And um I took your hand in my hand and I said that prayer with you. And he was right.

For that moment, I felt connected. From that point on, I've always held your hand when I can and said that prayer with you because I felt connected. What I've come to find is in my pursuit to find a better conscious contact with my higher power, I have inevitably become more connected with you.

And in the 12 and 12, and if you're going through a slump in your sobriety and you have some time sober, I encourage you to read the 12 and 12. Um, the history behind the 12 and 12 is Bill W came out of a dark depression and wrote the 12 and 12. Originally, he wrote the 12 and 12 simply to write a book about the traditions.

Also originally apparently he did it to make money but nonetheless he also wrote about all 12 steps because he knew that no one would read a book simply about all 12 traditions and if you read this book you come to find that essentially it is Bill W's inventory at the time that he was sober at that time. Majority of those chapter reads in the way that Bill W hoped his own sobriety could come to and um the thing that he often talks about in the 10th and 11th step is his own connection to the fellowship and the other people in his lives and he brings up the prayer the prayer of St. Francis and that's one of my favorite prayers.

If there is ever a mission statement for my job as a member of AA, it's the prayer of St. Francis. It is better to understand rather than be understood.

Where there is hatred, I should bring love. Where there is darkness, I should bring light. These are the things that I should be doing.

It's no wonder that it's brought up in the 11th step. Through my own u uh pursuit to improve my conscious contact with God, I have become closer with you. And then I moved on to my 12th step.

And um at a point in my sobriety, a friend of mine that I used to drink with decided he wanted to get sober too. And he asked me to help him get sober. And so I started taking him to meetings.

And uh he he stayed sober. And him and I got very involved in H&I, which is hospitals and institutions. And once a week we would go to the juvenile halls and uh we would share our experiences and I would talk about my experiences.

And they were very much like the places that I had been locked down in. At the end of our sharing, the children would often the kids would often ask us questions. And uh when my friend spoke, he often credited me with his sobriety.

And one of the questions that was common was asking me how I felt knowing that I had gotten my friend sober. And in retrospect, the thing is is at the time my friend asked me to help him get sober. I hated Alcoholics Anonymous.

I hated hearing about your miracles. I hated singing happy birthday. I didn't want to see you.

I hated the steps. My sponsor was mean. And I was slowly sneaking out the back door of AA.

And then my friend approached me and he asked me to help him. And I was too stupid to know that you didn't actually have to say yes. So I said yes.

And uh I brought him the meetings and I started listening so that I could translate what you were saying to him. And um I started doing all these things. I started working my steps because I thought it would be really embarrassing if he surpassed me in the steps.

And I just started doing all these things that I needed to do in order to stay sober. And um the thing is is at the time that he thought that I was saving his life, he was quite directly saving mine because the fact of the matter is he could have asked anyone in the program to do exactly what I had done and they could have done it just as good if not better. But the miracle is is I did it and I got to stay sober.

And what happened is my actions superseded my intentions. And I believe that's the 12th step in its best form is that my actions to help another alcoholic kept me sober for one more day. And um I have continued to try to carry the message to other suffering alcoholics.

And then there's the kicker. Practice these principles and all our affairs. And uh basically what that word means or that line means is these 12 steps are simply an introduction to a way of living that will connect us with a higher power that will keep us sober.

That's it. There's no graduating. All we're doing is working these steps to be introduced to a way of living.

From that point on, we have to continue living that life if we decide to stay sober. And that's been my experience. And um just in terms of what my life is like today, um I uh I moved to Toronto about 5 years ago uh on a wild hair.

I uh was going to do a short internship for human services uh for an application of med school because at that time I thought I wanted to become a doctor and I moved out to Toronto and I ran this art studio for for people with developmental disabilities and I had meant to do it for only 4 months and I went there and absolutely fell in love with the work and I I I stayed there and I continued doing that work. It was there that I met that lady who uh was an author that wrote that book and um and I did that and I moved out to Toronto and uh and I remember I saw this this woman there and I thought she was way out of my league so I didn't talk to her. Uh 2 weeks later she asked me out on a date.

Uh last September we celebrated 3 years of marriage and uh the thing that's interesting for me is you know I I'd always wanted to have a relationship. you know, being an alcoholic, I always wanted to date the most popular girl in treatment center. Um, but uh, for periods of my sobriety, I had a hard time having a relationship.

I remember this one, I mean, God bless all the women that dated me in my early sobriety, but I remember I had this one girlfriend and she accused me of being self-centered, which I was really offended about. I said, "I'm not self-centered. I'm constantly thinking about other people." And she said, "Thinking about what other people are thinking about you does not count." And uh and I met this woman and fell in love with her and we got married and uh we had this wedding and uh we had we got married in this big barn that was totally renovated and at the height of our wedding there was like 250 people.

All of my whole family was there and um about 50 of my friends came out from California and they were all in AA and uh kind of during moments of uh emotional overwhelming times I think to myself what would this look like if it were a movie? I I assume I do this because I'm self-centered and neurotic, but um during the first dance of the wedding, I thought to myself, what would this look like if it were a movie? And in the movie, the uh the bride and the groom would be having their first dance.

And they would be surrounded by their family and friends and all these people they love and care about. And uh the groom would be looking in the eyes of his bride and he'd be thinking, "This is perhaps one of the greatest days of his life." And uh the music would slowly build to a crescendo and there'd be a slow white out and then the credits would roll. And at that moment, everyone would assume that they lived happily ever after.

And um I've been sober long enough and also married long enough that I know that nobody lives happily ever after. But today, if my happily ever after is simply the fact that I live with very few regrets, then I'm okay with that. And um recently, I I went out to California to surprise my mother for her book launch party because she also just recently published a book.

And um I remember this one time I surprised my mom. I uh was uh coming from Seattle. I showed up at the storefront drunk on JD and high on crack.

And I was like, "Surprise, can I borrow 40 bucks until I get off my feet and uh can I live here?" And you know, those are the kind of surprises I did before I got sober. And uh me and my wife showed up to the book launch party and she was not expecting us. And it was the first time in many years that my entire family was there, all of the children, all of the spouses, and all of the kids.

And uh for the first time, I had met my brother's uh son. And it was an incredible event. And um you know these are just small things that that my life is like today.

And um I'll share this last thing in terms of kind of what my life is like. Uh I do a bit of speaking at conferences. The last conference that I spoke at was in Seattle.

And if you may remember Seattle was a city that I kind of hit bottom in. And uh the night that I spoke I stood up in front of uh a couple thousand people. And I noticed that the first three rows were all my friends.

There are people that over a decade of sobriety I have known these people and most of them have continued to stay sober. And um the reason I tell you this is because at the point that I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was suffering from a disease of loneliness. I had polarized every single relationship that I knew of and I was absolutely alone.

And uh that night I stood in the city that I would kind of hit bottom in surrounded by hundreds of people that I had known for over a decade in sobriety as a result of AA. And um after that conference, me and a couple of my friends would go into the city of Seattle. And um I stood in front of the dumpster that years ago I called home.

And um that moment that I was standing in front of that dumpster, for that moment, I felt that things were closer to right than they had ever been. And um if there's any message I can give to people that are new, it's simply choose. Again, by the time I came in here, the only choices I was capable of making were things that hurt me and hurt other people.

And um as a result of AA, I'm capable of choosing other things. I'm capable of choosing life. I'm capable of choosing love.

I'm capable of choosing things like compassion. And you know, it's today that oh jeez, I'm going to say it, but it's today that quite literally I choose to celebrate living. And um that has been both the theme of this conference and the theme of my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous.

and um you know I've just I've been absolutely privileged to be here tonight with you and um I'm excited for the rest of the conference. Thank you. >> Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise.

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