A Beautiful Flower, a Garden Variety Drunk – AA Speaker – Roz B.
AA speaker Roz B. shares her journey from self-harm and teenage prostitution to 48 years sober, working the steps, and finding freedom in recovery.
Roz B. grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home marked by violence and loss, later becoming a runaway and teenage prostitute by her late teens. In this AA speaker tape, she walks through decades of drinking and street life, hitting bottom in 1975, and how the program—her sponsor, the steps, and the fellowship—transformed her into what her sponsor called “a beautiful flower, a garden variety drunk.”
Roz B., sober since 1975, shares her story of childhood trauma, self-harm before her first drink, and 13 years of progressive alcoholism including prostitution and homelessness. This AA speaker tape covers how she found recovery through daily meetings, step work, and sponsorship, and how acceptance—finally becoming a “garden variety drunk” rather than trying to be extraordinary—became central to her long-term sobriety. She discusses her spiritual awakening (spiritual experience of the educational variety), coming out as a lesbian in recovery, and learning to balance AA service with living a full life outside the rooms.
Episode Summary
Roz B. doesn’t fit the stereotype of an alcoholic, and that was exactly the problem. She came from an Orthodox Jewish family with no history of alcoholism, grew up in post-war England as the only Jewish kid in a Church of England school, and learned early that she wanted to be anyone but herself. Before she ever touched alcohol, she was hurting herself—physically, mentally, trying to escape the fact of her own existence.
By age 13, when her mother’s doctor prescribed diet pills for weight loss, Roz had already locked into the addict’s core belief: one is good, twelve is better. She took handfuls. Within a year, she was drinking, and within months, she was a runaway. Unlike the quiet, invisible child she’d been, she became loud, chaotic, impossible to ignore. The booze didn’t solve her problem—it became her solution. It let her run away and stay still at the same time.
For the next 14 years, she drank the same way every time: straight from the bottle, blackout to blackout, passing out in unknown places, waking up with who knows what or whom. By 17, she was turning tricks in New York City, living in hotels on 49th Street, working the beat on Lexington Avenue. She became what she called a “minus zero”—less than nothing—with a self-hatred so profound she couldn’t articulate it. The only thing that mattered was how to get the next drink, where to get it, and how much it would cost.
Her bottom came in stages, each one driving her lower until December 1975. She was 25, living in a gorgeous old mansion that caught fire the night she decided to stop drinking beer (which she didn’t think counted as alcohol). She woke up to flames ceiling to floor, someone pouring gin down her throat, her screaming that she’d killed elderly people upstairs. She lost everything material that night. More importantly, it propelled her into the next four years of truly hitting the streets—sleeping in parks at knifepoint, selling her body for $2, completely broken.
She came to AA not by choice but by necessity. She had nowhere else to go. She didn’t want it. She didn’t feel the love in the room. But she kept coming back, often drunk, screaming at speakers from the back row, then taking literature to the bars to pass out to anyone who’d take it. Her sponsor—a woman she asked purely to prevent another newcomer from getting close to her—became her lifeline. This woman gave her a t-shirt that said “My Sponsor Says No” because Roz couldn’t say no on her own behalf for years.
Roz got sober the way she drank: all in. She went to 25 to 30 meetings for the first six years, every single day mapped out, every meeting planned. She couldn’t sit still, couldn’t make decisions (spending hours at Woolworths choosing between dish drain colors), couldn’t ask for help. Service became her life—intergroup phones, sponsoring others, prison meetings, detox work, the Bill Wilson dinner. She was trying to earn her right to exist through ceaseless activity.
At her sixth year, a woman named Ethel from Intergroup told her something that stung: “AA is a bridge back to life, dear.” Roz didn’t understand. She wasn’t supposed to have a life. When Ethel suggested she keep her hand down for a year and volunteer less, it was agonizing. But it was the pivot point. She began to see the 12 steps not as punishment but as chiseling away—like Michelangelo removing everything that wasn’t David—everything that wasn’t truly Roz.
At her sixth anniversary, she walked away from mainstream AA meetings and found the lesbian meetings. For the next year, she lived as if making up for lost time, immersing herself completely in lesbian culture, reading everything, throwing out every man’s book and recording, becoming a radical separatist. It was healing. It was also limiting, and she eventually realized she needed both men and women in her life, not just one small group.
She met her partner Annie at year seven of sobriety. They’ve been together 15 years and are committed for 40 more (one day at a time). When she and Annie moved to Denver 8.5 years ago, Roz had to learn humility all over again. No one there knew she was “the president of AA.” She had to eat humble pie and become what her sponsor had always told her she was: “a very beautiful flower, but a garden variety drunk.”
That simple phrase—garden variety—became the freedom Roz had always been seeking. Not exceptional, not broken beyond repair, not extraordinary in her wreckage. Just a drunk, just a person, just someone in recovery doing the work one day at a time.
Notable Quotes
One is good, twelve is better. I had that attitude right from the get-go.
When I found alcohol it was like a dream come true because what it did for me was it took me away and I didn’t go anywhere. I felt like I had found a way to run away and stay still at the same time.
My sponsor would say read the book before you go to the meeting and then read the book when you come home and you will see that they have rewritten it.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a bridge back to life, dear.
The 12 steps are about coming out. The person who is Roz just emerges through the 12 steps because they chisel away at everything that is not Roz.
You’re a very beautiful flower but you’re a garden variety drunk.
Topics Covered in This Transcript
- Step 4 – Resentments & Inventory
- Sponsorship
- Hitting Bottom
- Early Sobriety
- Long-Term Sobriety
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Whether you join us in the morning or at night, there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. >> Tell me if you can hear me.
>> Okay. >> Is this better? Oh, blinding.
This reminds me of the old days. I don't have to say anything. I can just do show and tell.
>> Name is Rob and I'm an alcoholic. Hi everyone. Um, I'm going to do something I've never done before.
Please do me since I'm on tape. Iso, for once, I want to hear a few prayer on a tape. Um I want to really thank uh this committee for inviting me here and giving me this opportunity.
You've been absolutely wonderful. The conference um I've attended a number of workshops today have been just sensational. The sharing and the kindness and the com the fellowship has been just so special and I I really cannot thank you enough.
And Ellen um it's a pleasure. It's just a pleasure. That's I think one of the greatest gifts to me in Alcoholics Anonymous is the honor of, you know, meeting someone when they're new and watching them grow and change and maybe having just, you know, a tiny bit um having the privilege of maybe sponsoring with that person or one with that person at some point.
It's it's really the greatest gift I've received in AA. I'm going to talk about what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. And please know that um there was a time when I did a lot of speaking and um all over the country and certainly a lot in New York and for a variety of reasons I decided to stop doing that.
I thought I was the president of AA and and everybody else thought so too. And I used to say when I spoke um please know that whatever I share is my opinion only. I do not speak for Alcoholics Anonymous and I am not the president of AA.
Um, but I haven't spoken for seven and a half years and this is the first time I've spoken in a long time. So, it feels um I don't know what God has in store for us. Let's see.
Um the last few weeks when I was thinking about this I was thinking that because I've been sober a while sometimes um who I was so far away you know it feels like another person and it is another person and l some things have come up in the last few weeks that I just want to talk a little bit about because they've just brought they've been for whatever reason um I've either seen it on television or heard a story and it helped me remember some of what it was Like for example, um last week, a week ago exactly, I got a call from a friend and she was very upset and she and her husband had been to um a bach mitzvah, which I'll explain later. And um on Saturday and they were with another couple and some and their children. And when this other couple went home, their teenage son had committed suicide successfully.
And she's got two children, one of whom is a teenager. and she doesn't know much about my past. And I found myself sharing my experience, strength, and hope um as someone who had tried to commit suicide as a young teenager and who had tried several times.
And it was very um it was it was painful and it was also wonderful to remember that there was a time when I had wanted to end my life even before I picked up the first drink. and how appreciative I was that I was not successful and how much I could really empathize with the pain that the family was going through and also the pain that the young man had been going through. And so that helped me remember a little bit.
And then um later on about a week or two ago, I was watching television and um there was a program about self-mutilation and young people who mutilate themselves. And I've never talked about that and I'm not going to really talk about it now. helped me remember again um the years way before I picked up the first drink that I tried to hurt myself physically, destroy myself internally and externally with every um with broken glass and things, anything I could find to hurt myself.
And then um I arrived on Thursday night and Friday morning, I think that was yesterday. Yes. Yes.
Friday morning. Um I got uh locked in the elevator, I got uh you know, I couldn't get out and so I was a little freaked out and um when I when they finally got me out of the elevator, um I went back to my room cuz I was pretty upset. I had I had not been able I felt like I couldn't breathe and I had gotten really scared and you know, I had told myself to breathe and all the right things, but I also was very scared.
So I went back to my room and I switched on the television. so that I didn't have to think for a few minutes. And um there was a program on teenage prostitutes and it helped me remember again because that's who I was.
I was a teenage prostitute and I was a runaway. And that was after I picked up the first drink. I grew up in a home where there was no alcoholism.
There was no there's no compulsive eating in my family. There's no compulsive gambling. There's no compulsive drinking or drug taking.
here I am. Um, so that was hard. It was I think that's very important for some of us to hear because when I got here I thought I couldn't possibly be an alcoholic.
Um, I came from an Orthodox Jewish family. Jews don't drink. I was not Irish Catholic.
I was not an acco. You know, who was I? And certainly I couldn't.
This couldn't be legitimate. And yet I also was in a home where there was tremendous violence. My father was a very religious Orthodox Jew, but he was also um capable of great violence on towards everyone but me.
And um he died when I was young. He had a fatal progressive disease called called ALS. And I've come to believe in my own opinion that any fatal disease affects his family family in the same way.
And so there was lots of fear and lots of um never knowing how it was going to be from day to day. And he died when I was almost six. My brother was three.
And what we did in our house, which was a pattern I was to follow for the rest of my life, was we moved countries. And we moved back to England, which is where my mother was from. And we moved to England.
And in England, I was the only Jewish kid in a school run by the Church of England. and they let me know every single day that I was different and they called me names and they called me a kite. And um instead of um feeling strong and feeling good about who I was, it was about that time that I started to just wish I was anybody in the world but me, I just desperately wanted to not be me or any any part of me.
And I think that's when I started to really hurt myself physically in every other way that I could. I believe that my life was unmanageable before I picked up the first drink. To me, alcohol was what saved my life.
In many ways, when I look back, I think that was true for a while. I don't know. I definitely would not be here if it weren't well, I don't know.
I want to say this, but um I think that I would have been a successful teen suicide. And so what happened to me is I was one of these kids that was too perfect on the outside. I was very good.
Um they used to say Raz is so good you don't even know she's there and when I was 13 a few things happened I was bach mitzv which in the Jewish faith is when you reach uh you become a member of the community as an adult and I remember um I started smoking at that time cigarettes and I started taking amphetamines they were just called diet pills of course and my mother had taken me to the family doctor Dr. Calfman and he had given me diet pills and you're supposed to take one a day and this is my story. One is good, 12 is better.
Now, I had that attitude right from the get-go. Right from the get-go, I was off to the races. And I loved the effect.
I loved what it did for me. I stayed up for days on end. Um, I could do the same thing over and over, what seemed like 5 minutes, and you know, days had passed.
And next thing I know, I started drinking. I started drinking um when I was about 14 or 15 years old, and I was in the Cat School Mountains, and I had been sent away. I was a problem.
I now I had become a problem. Um, this kid who was too good to be true. Once I started using drugs, um, my I had a total personality change and I became a runaway.
I started running away from school constantly. Um, for all intents and purposes, I really never went back to school after I was 14. Did get a high school degree, but it was it was just because of uh the kindness of some people.
I was so unhappy. Um, I hated being different. I hated feeling like I didn't belong.
I sounded different. I had a very thick accent and I just didn't know how to that it was okay to be me and to walk to the to the beat of my own drum. I so desperately wanted to be like everybody else and I didn't feel like anybody else and so I be I started to run away and I started to get into lots and lots of trouble and so when I found alcohol it was like a dream come true because what it did for me was it took me away and I didn't go anywhere.
I felt like I had found a way to run away and stay still at the same time. And right from the beginning I I drank alcoholically. Um, my first drunk was the same as all the drunks I had for the next 13 or 14 years.
The first drunk I had was right out of a bottle. I have never drank out of a out of stemware and there was a bottle of rye and it was being passed around the room and it was kind of like a a joke. People wanted to see what was going to happen when Roz got drunk.
And I was young, but I was very very very serious. Very serious. And I I was one of these kids that was very old, way before my time.
Um I really did not have a childhood. And that's, you know, another story. And so the bottle came to me and it was rye.
I downed the bottle. They were not so happy then because I didn't pass it on. I was not a sharer.
I got very drunk. I took off my clothes. I blacked out.
I paused out. I threw up. I woke up the next day and I thought I had a great time.
The only thing I didn't like was um that I threw up. I really hated that. I could just never be a bimic.
And um so I thought that the problem was the rye and I never drank rye again. And I spend the next 13 or 14 years trying to, you know, really and truly trying to capture the best of of the moment and always always always the blackout drinker, always passing out, always waking up with who knows what anywhere. Um, right from the beginning, I was willing to go to any length to get drunk.
Right from the beginning, it became there's an I heard this expression that the man takes the drink, the drink takes the drink, and the drink takes the man. And right from the beginning, the booze took over my life. It very clearly became a power.
It was very clearly a power greater than myself. And I was more than willing to turn my will in my life over to the care of this power. And I absolutely believed that it could restore me to sanity.
I felt that I was insane and that booze was making me sane. And so what happened for the next whatever years is the people changed and the places changed and the outsides changed but I didn't change. The drinking just got worse.
I started turning tricks when I was about 17. And this is not what a nice Jewish girl was supposed to do. And right from the beginning I wasn't really very good at it because I was looking for a meaningful relationship.
And um I mean I won't tell you the details of my I can remember my my very first trick and you know he told he told the person who sent me never to send me back cuz I I wanted to have a discussion. This was in 19 maybe 63. I got $40.
I'll never forget it. I had to give 60% back over and I had 40 40%. And um I remember eating the first thing I did was go have a meal because I hadn't eaten.
I didn't eat in those days. The only thing that mattered was drinking. And I wasn't really very good at it for very long.
And and so I did something else. And um you know, I've had lots of I have a lot of drama in my story, but it was really more of the same. I moved to different places.
Um, for a long time I lived in an area of New York called Jackson Heights, Queens. And the reason I moved there is I thought that um, real Americans lived in Jackson Heights. They were from Nebraska and Iowa and Kansas.
And a lot of them had grown up in farms. And I really believed I so much wanted to be like a real American. And I thought if I could only live in Jackson Heights and learn how to watch football and eat peanuts and drink beer, I could be like them.
And I really wanted to be like them. But what happened is um I just got drunk and I got loud and I got nasty and I got beaten up. I got pregnant and um it didn't really matter.
And I moved into this city and I lived in a hotel called the Hooker Hangout. It's called the Shelton Towers. It was on 49th Street in Lexington Avenue and I used to walk up and down Lexington Avenue.
That was my beat. By the time I was 20 or 21, I was absolutely ready for Alcoholics Anonymous and I went to my first meeting, not by choice, by the way. Um, I was living in Brooklyn Heights.
I changed where I lived all the time and I moved to an area of New York called Brooklyn Heights. And at that time, I um I don't know if this is before or after. So, I think this is before.
Anyway, I because I hated being Jewish, I used to wear crucifix. I changed my name. I changed my hair, you know, I changed everything.
I wanted to be Italian at this point. I think my name was Tony. And so it's true.
And um so I went to Brooklyn Heights and because being the good Christian that I was, I decided to go to um midnight mass. So I always went to church and it was mid it was Christmas Eve and I thought it was mid you know and people were very very friendly and they were all in this room just like this and they were drinking what I was sure was alcohol lace punch because they were drinking punch and who would drink punch without alcohol in it not I was already pretty drunk but I was not in a blackout which is very rare and um you know I hung out and I thought that this was choir practice I loved to sing when I was drinking terri terrible voice. Didn't matter.
And so I thought we were all going to sing in the choir at night and I was pretty excited. And uh next thing I know, everybody moved. They took their chairs and they moved into the next room.
And somebody got at a podium that just looked just like this and said, "Hello, my name is Mary. I'm an alcoholic." And read the preamble. Well, I got up and I told them what I thought.
I um felt very sorry for them. I expressed my sympathy. I was sure that their life was over, that I was sorry that they were going to end their life this way because I was having so much fun.
And I went to the bar and we all had a good laugh over this experience. And we every time we talked about it, I say, "Come on, here's another drink." Um, I lived in Brooklyn Heights for a couple of years and at some point I got I became a mistress of someone I was working for, just like my mom. And um my drinking got worse.
Um I got pregnant a lot. I had a lot of miscarriages. Sometimes on the floor of department stores, sometimes on the floors of offices.
My name was No Big Thing. No big thing begun. No matter what happened to me, I just say no big thing.
First night off, get up from the gutter. Sometimes I'd wake up. I'd be at Knife Point in park in Prospect Park.
no big thing. And I just didn't really care. I had no interest in anybody else and and really very little interest in myself.
And I've always had a hard time talking about how I felt in these years because I really believe that I was a minus 0. And I frequently introduced myself that way particularly at the end. See, my name is Ros and that I'm a minus 0 minus 10.
I knew that whatever I was I was definitely less than. And I can't even describe the amount of self-hatred that I had. Um, I lived I I may as well just tell this one thing cuz it's kind of the beginning of the end.
I was 25 and I was working for this guy and um I decided that my problem was him and my problem was the United States. I always felt that my problems were outside of myself always and they were big. There was never anything small with me, you know.
was big. So I knew the problem was America and I knew that my solution was to move to Italy. And in Italy I had this fantas I was living a heterosexual lifestyle except that I did wake up with women out of blackouts but I never wanted to know what happened.
So when I was tricking occasionally I did a show with a woman but it was purely for a man. So you know I had to get pretty drunk to do all that stuff. And um anyway, I I came into my bar that night and I was a bar drinker.
I loved the bars. Loved the bars. And um I came into the bar that night and I announced to the bar that I was going to stop drinking and I was moving to Italy.
And we had a drink on that. And what I drank that night was beer because to me um I really was sincere about stopping drinking and beer was the way to do it because I didn't know that beer was alcohol. There's a sign in the detoxes now in New York and it says if you drink a lot of beer, you drink a lot.
But they didn't have that sign in the bars. And so with every with every beer, we toasted my stopping drinking and nobody said, "Hey, Roz, you're drinking 13 or 14 or 15 beers." And um I certainly didn't think I was drinking. And I went home to my then apartment and the next thing I know there were flames ceiling to floor and I was living in um one of these gorgeous old mansions, you know, that had been redone and the ceilings were like 24 26 whatever feet and uh the next thing I know I was in the bar and somebody was holding my head and somebody was pouring a bottle of gin down my throat.
I was screaming that I had killed somebody cuz I knew there were elderly people on the top of the building. And the other thing I knew was that this is what happens when you stop drinking because I really believed that this fire happened because I had stopped eating that night. And nobody dissuaded me from that notion.
I'm grateful today for that fire because that fire took every single thing that was in my life, every physical material thing. I had nothing except what I was wearing that night. And I want you to know that I would rather have lost my life than have lost those things.
My life meant nothing to me. But what that fire did for me was it propelled me into my next four years of help. And I needed to lose everything before I was able to get here.
It's just my story. I wasn't I couldn't have gotten here one day sooner. And so the next four years, you can, you know, I couldn't pay rent for very long.
Um, rent was so unimportant. Electricity, who dared to have electricity? There was only one thing that ever mattered to me in this life, and that was how was I going to get it?
What did I have to do? Where did I have to go? And how much was it going to cost?
And I was a bottle baby. Um, I lost my teeth when I was at when I was very young because of that. And I remember the dentist begging me not to drink, begging me.
He grew, he and his wife grew marijuana to give to me, to beg me to smoke marijuana and not drink so that I could save my teeth. And I remembered smoking the marijuana on my way to the bar, you know, because I could I I did lots of other stuff, but it didn't really matter. My I love to drink and I couldn't keep away from the bars.
And so I just, you know, started to get lower and lower and, you know, an apartment lasted 3 months and then next thing I knew I was in a room on 30th between Park and Madison with someone I'd never met. Um, another story, junkie. Um, I lived with this junkie.
She kept she got she was allowed to stay and I got thrown out cuz I couldn't make the rent. And ultimately in 1974, late74 I hit the streets and um I was no I basically what I did was I went between 23rd Street and 14th Street between 3rd Avenue. This I if you don't know Manhattan it's just you know an area and I went from door to door at night and if a man answered I would ask him if he would put me up.
And what happened for me, and this is my kind of my bottom, was that in the end, nobody wanted me around cuz I was obnoxious. I was loud. I was nasty.
I was mean. I wasn't I couldn't perform. I can remember the last time I t I tried to make money off my body.
I came to and the mattress had been stripped and it was like ice. Somebody had thrown thrown ice on me and I had left $2. And um that was the best I could do.
and couldn't do much with $2 in 197475. And so what happened for me is I started to come to AA. Um I didn't want to.
This was not my cup of tea. I didn't feel the love in the room. But um I absolutely felt that I had nowhere else to go.
And so I just started to come to meetings. Um I had been, you know, in hospitals and I had had seizures. But I want you to know none of that stopped me escorted out.
But invariably, I was always told that I could come back if I would behave myself, which was very hard for me to do because I would usually sit in the back of the room and scream at the speaker while they were speaking. What I would also do is I would take all the literature that was at the meetings and I would pass it out at all the bars that I went to. And sometimes if a guy was in a bar and he'd say, "Hey baby, you know, come with me." And I'd say, "Okay, can we make a stop first?" And I'd take him to a meeting with me.
And so what h I don't know, maybe maybe somebody got sober. I have no idea. So, I started to put some time together and I'd have two weeks and I'd have 3 weeks and you know, whatever.
I remember um in October of 75, I had maybe 3 weeks and uh this guy, my friend's brother who lived in Switzerland had come in and you know, he called me and you you know, he only wanted one thing and uh you know, I just couldn't do sex without drinking. So, I said, "Okay, but just bring a bottle of scotch." So, there went that time. Um, I didn't slip.
I just didn't stop drinking. And I finally got a one room apartment at 117 East 37th Street. And it was right across the street from a group called the Mustard Seed.
And I love the Mustard Seed cuz it wasn't a church. And they had lots of meetings every day. And in the beginning, I would go in the door, I would wait 3 minutes, and I go out the door because I was testing it.
Because they used to say the door swings both ways. And I wanted to see if that was really true. I used to call into group, you know, see what they sounded like, hang up.
And my last, what I hope is my last drunk drug the whole nine yards, um, was Christmas Eve, interestingly enough of 1975, and I haven't had a drug or a drink since. So, lots of things have changed in that time, as you can well imagine. in the beginning, you know, um I'm just going to share a little bit about my recovery and it doesn't mean that it's the way for everyone else.
It's just my experience and I always feel like I have to preface it cuz I didn't get sober by the big book. I got sober by my sponsor's book and she it was very different, but I definitely got what I needed. I didn't get a sponsor for a long time because it meant having to ask somebody for something and that was my biggest difficulty.
I absolutely could not ask for help. It was so hard for me. As a matter of fact, even when I started to go to meetings on a daily basis, I would buy very expensive cookies or steal them.
But no, actually, I was buying them because I was working and I would bring them to the meeting because I never ever wanted anyone to say that Roz got something for nothing. I wanted to show you that you weren't doing me any favors. I was buying cookies.
So, I started to come to meetings and I was pretty I was pretty sick. And someone suggested that I do AA and I get sober the way I drank and I drank every day and I drank all the time and I got to the bars early and I stayed late. So, I did the same thing in AA.
There was a woman at the meeting and this is at Mustard Seed. And at every meeting she would say just like this, "My name is Sue and I'm a happy, grateful alcoholic." And I thought, "How sick can you get?" And I was very mesmerized by her cuz I've always been very drawn to illness. And uh and the thing is is that she looked like she was happy and I knew that she was really but she looked like she might be happy.
And she was married to this guy and uh Eddie who was a unity minister who was also sober a long time. And so what I started to do is I started to call Eddie every day and I would say, "Hi, how is Sue?" And he'd say, "Great. Would you like to speak with her?" And I'd say, "No." And I'd hang up the phone.
And that was my beginning. And I always share this because you know um I did not have clean motives for a long time about anything I did. The reason I asked Sue to be my sponsor is another newcomer came in, Kelly.
And I thought and and I saw Sue starting to sit next to Kelly at the beginner's meeting and I thought, "Oh my god, she's going to get her first. I didn't know you could sponsor more than one person." So, I immediately asked her to be my sponsor, so she couldn't be Kelly's. Um, so much for good motives.
She became my sponsor. What a gift. Um, I heard somebody share this earlier, there were no suggestions.
Um, the first thing she told me that was that I couldn't get involved first year. Little did she know that I already had and I had gotten gorrhea and I had it was mother story, you know, seven days ba but in a way the gorrhea kept me away from men for the rest of the year. Um and she bought me a t-shirt and it said my sponsor says no.
And the thing is for me, I was sober many, many years before I could say no on my own behalf. And so she gave me permission to say my sponsor said. And that's what I did for a long time.
I didn't um I went, this is where it gets a little embarrassing. I went to 25 to 30 meetings for the first six years. I can tell you every day where I went.
I'll give you a Sunday. Sunday I would wake up. I'd be so excited because I had like five or six meetings to do that day.
And I would go to the 11:45 at the Mustard Seat and they would read from the big book the first step. And that's how I got to identify as an alcoholic because they would say all these things that people did to try to control their drinking and I knew that they had written it after they had met me and because it was my story. And from there I would go to came to believe on 90th Street between 1st and 2nd and I'd go to a 1:00 and I'd go to a 2:30 and then the worst part for me was to have free time.
So I don't know what I did for the next couple of hours but I didn't go home and then I went to to um what was that meeting central Upper East Side central I went to 6:15 7:30 and 8:30 and then invariably and then we'd all go out for coffee. Coffee was just as important as the meeting because that's how you learned how to talk to people. And then I would go to the midnight meeting and the midnight meeting was at midnight and at 1:00 in the morning and then we'd go out for breakfast and then start the next day.
And I did that for almost six years. I don't when I sponsor people today, I don't suggest that that's the way they get sober. It's the way I got sober.
I had I couldn't be still. I couldn't make a decision. I remember after I was sober a couple of months, I had to decide on um I was getting a I had this one room apartment and I had to get a dish rain, you know, the uh dish drain that you put, you know, next to your no dishwashers then.
And um I went to Woolworths. I had a choice of avocado green, mustard yellow, white or brown. I cannot tell you.
I must have spent two to three hours walking back and forth. I asked everybody in the store what they thought. And I want you to know that I walked out without a dish drain.
I couldn't make a decision. I couldn't read. It took it was months actually before I even shared in a meeting.
And the first time I ever shared, it was because I um I didn't know what to do. You know, I was having money and I wasn't spending it on booze. So, I started buying plants and the first time I ever shared at a meeting, I shared that I had 174 plants and I thought they were coming to get me.
You know what they said, right? Keep coming back. So, um it was a very slow slow recovery for me.
My spiritual awakening is of the educational variety. It's been very slow. At the end of the year, my first year, my sponsor said to me, "Here's where we go to work.
You go from the beginners's meeting on Tuesday nights. It was a beginner's meeting at Mustard Seed. And we go into the other room.
It's the step meeting." And that's where the work started for me. And from that time to this, well, I I can't speak for Denver, so I won't even talk about Denver. But from that time on I started to make step meetings became my first love because I felt for me that the healing occurred in the discussion meetings but for me the change occurred in the step meetings and that's the only way to this day that I know how to change is through the 12 steps.
There's just no other way for me. And my sp my sponsor would say read the book before you go to the meeting and then read the book when you come home and you would you will see that they have rewritten it. It was absolutely true.
And I started to get active. I want to talk for a moment about that cuz I had this really pain in the ass sponsor. And from the very moment that I she became my sponsor, she would physically throw me into the lap of a newcomer.
And she would say to me, "Talk to them. They're new." And you know, I'd be like in their lap. I didn't know that service was a choice.
But I did know that I needed to get as active in my sobriety and in my recovery as I had been in my drinking. And I got very very very active and service became my life. I started answering phones at intergroup and I became a sponsor and when I was a year silver um I started sponsoring someone who was 16 and she wanted to go to young people's and not be around these old people and so I took her to young people's I stayed she left and for the next four years I was very active in young people's aa went to young people's conferences all over North America um chaired a young people's conference in New York and just had started to learn how to play and have fun and be alive in sobriety and always always always very involved.
Um I just look at my okay just a few seconds on well we'll see um between my fifth and sixth year was a very tough time for me I can't really I was going to 25 to 30 meetings um if somebody had a feeling I would say make a gratitude list what step are you on you know I my answer to everything was what are you doing I just didn't know it was okay to just have a feeling and I tried at all costs to avoid avoid them. I was sponsoring everyone. Um, I was doing a women's prison meeting on Saturday mornings.
I had a a non-medical detox on Sunday nights on West 60th Street. I was the secretary of the Bill Wilson dinner. I was involved in everything.
And somebody said to me from Intergroup, Ethel, who used to work at Intergroup, she said to me, "Aa is a bridge back to life, dear." And I thought, "How dare you? How dare you?" That's, you know, I honestly did not know what she was talking about. And she suggested that I keep my hand down for one year and not volunteer.
And that was the very difficult time for me. And that was between my fifth and sixth year of rec of sobriety. I didn't I still sponsored people and I still did non-medical detox but I didn't volunteer every time I needed someone to do something and that was a tough time and I knew what was going on was I was beginning to I I think for me the 12 steps are about coming out.
I've always felt this, but that's really what they they do for me. That the person who is Raz just emerges through the 12 steps because I heard that, you know, they asked Michelangelo how he created the statue of David and he said that he took a piece of marble and a chisel and he chiseled away at everything that was not David. And that's how I see the 12 steps me.
They chiseled away and they're still chiseling at everything that is not Roz. And so, um, at my sixth anniversary, I was chairing a meeting on Wednesday nights at an Upper East Side meeting called Templeton. And I, uh, chaired the meeting for the last time, and I said, "I want to say to you all, thank you for the opportunity of chairing this meeting for the last 6 months, but I won't be seeing any of you again.
Goodbye." I took a cab over to the firehouse, which was a lesbian meeting. I got there and I said, "Here I am." Um, at this point, I had not slept with a woman. It only took like two or three days, though.
And um what can I say? I began to know a new freedom and a new happiness. It was the most glorious time.
They called me the miracle dyke. Um what I wanted to do was make up for all the years that I had not been a lesbian. and I had not been out as a lesbian.
So I went to this woman's bookstore on the Upper West Side and I told them I said I would go to buy a quart of milk and I said I'm a lesbian. I'm a lesbian. So everybody everybody knew.
And I went to this bookstore and I said I'm a lesbian and I want to read everything and I threw out every book that was written by a man in my house. I threw out every piece of music. I got hiking boots.
I stopped shaving and I became a radical feminist separatist lesbian. It was great. I It was a wonderful time for me.
Um there was a lot of healing that took place. I went to every concert, every lecture, every workshop, everything possible that I could go to and I only went to lesbian meetings. Um do I recommend that?
I don't know. It's it's what it's my experience. At the end of that year, I thought something was missing in my life and I got involved in the New York Roundup and began very slowly to incorporate men in my life.
And what a joy. Um, I hope that in my future that I never again limit myself to one small group of people because life is so rich and I'm I needed that year, but I also very very it was it was wonderful to begin to have both sexes in my life again. And I got very active in the roundup.
I just also have to say because I know Annie's gonna listen to this that after I was out for a year, I met um my lover Annie. I don't want to get emotional. We had 15 years this past Monday.
This past Wednesday was our anniversary. Um it's been incredible. Annie is sober as well.
She was sober much less time than me and so we it was difficult in the beginning. I had to remember that she was my lover, not my spons. And um she had to get her own sponsor and go to her own meetings.
I had to get my own sponsor and go to my own meetings. And um we've had some wonderful times and some tough times and we have another we have a commitment for 40 years. So we have another 25 and then we're going to talk about it one day at a time.
Um right now is a very good time and I'm very happy and things are pretty good for us right now. I want to share how wonderful it can be. We moved to Denver 8 and a half years ago.
Don't ask me why. No. Okay, I'll take it back.
I take it back. Um, we moved to Denver 8 and a half years ago. And, uh, wanted to see if there's life outside of New York City.
My brother lives there. I'm not um, he's got two children who I adore. Uh, we're their legal guardians, and I thought that I would want to be in their life as they were growing up.
So we chose to move to new to Denver and um you know our lives changed again and uh meetings were different and things were different and we had a lot of the first couple of years were pretty tough. Um they didn't know that I was the president of AA when I got there and that was hard for me and I had to eat a lot of humble pie. In retrospect, it was a great experience because what's happened as a result of being in Denver is for the first time I began to be um a worker among workers um a member among members a per you know just a garden variety drunk like my sponsor always said to me.
My sponsor would say to me every day every single day Roslin you're a very beautiful flower but you're a garden variety. >> Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give it a thumbs up as it will help share the message.
Until next time, have a great day.