Alcoholics Anonymous by Bill W

Author:Bill W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

A FEMININE VICTORY

To my lot falls the rather doubtful distinction of being the only “lady” alcoholic in our particular section. Perhaps it is because of a desire for a “supporting cast” of my own sex that I am praying for inspiration to tell my story in a manner that may give other women who have this problem the courage to see it in its true light and seek the help that has given me a new lease on life.

When the idea was first presented to me that I was an alcoholic, my mind simply refused to accept it. Horrors! How disgraceful! What humiliation! How preposterous! Why, I loathed the taste of liquor—drinking was simply a means of escape when my sorrows became too great for me to endure. Even after it had been explained to me that alcoholism is a disease, I could not realize that I had it. I was still ashamed, still wanted to hide behind the screen of reasons made up of “unjust treatment,” “unhappiness,” “tired and dejected,” and the dozens of other things that I thought lay at the root of my search for oblivion by means of whiskey or gin.

In any case, I felt quite sure that I was not an alcoholic. However, since I have faced the fact, and it surely is a fact, I have been able to use the help that is so freely given when we learn how to be really truthful with ourselves.

The path by which I have come to this blessed help was long and devious. It led through the mazes and perplexities of an unhappy marriage and divorce, and a dark time of separation from my grown children, and a readjustment of life at an age when most women feel pretty sure of a home and security.

But I have reached the source of help. I have learned to recognize and acknowledge the underlying cause of my disease; selfishness, self-pity and resentment. A few short months ago those three words applied to me would have aroused as much indignation in my heart as the word alcoholic. The ability to accept them as my own has been derived from trying, with the un-ending help of God, to live with certain goals in mind.

Coming to the grim fact of alcoholism, I wish I could present the awful reality of its insidiousness in such a way that no one could ever again fail to recognize the comfortable, easy steps that lead down to the edge of the precipice, and show how those steps suddenly disappeared when the great gulf yawned before me. I couldn’t possibly turn and get back to solid earth again that way.

The first step is called—“The first drink in the morning to pull you out of a hangover.”

I remember so well when I got onto that step—I had been drinking just like most of the young married crowd I knew. For a couple of years it went on, at parties and at “speakeasies,” as they were then called, and with cocktails after matinees.

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