My name is Jerry Banfield and I am an alcoholic. This is my AA style speaker meeting for 2017. I'm very grateful to be here to share this with you today because alcohol nearly killed me. My sobriety date is April 22nd 2014. That means that's the last day I had a hangover and that's the day I asked God, I said, "Please, God, I'll do anything to stay sober." Shortly after that, I had a thought laying in bed with my hangover that maybe going to one of those Alcoholics Anonymous meetings would be part of anything that you just offered to do.
Then I committed to going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Now, I go to Alcoholics Anonymous on a daily basis. I try and make a meeting everyday. I get up. I do five things everyday as a part of staying sober. First, I get up in the morning and I ask God, I say, "I'll do anything to stay sober today." Then I make a decision to turn my will over to God and pray for knowledge of God's will for me and the power to carry that out.
I then get out of bed, I read these two books as soon as possible. You can see my daughter has thrown these around on the floor quite a bit and opened up them herself at 16 months old. I read those two books everyday. I have a sponsor that I call everyday who's like an AA mentor. He's been sober for 38 years. I call him everyday and I have two people I'm sponsoring right now. I talk to them each day as well.
I go to one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting everyday. Then at night, I review what I've done with my program that day. I review my life, review how I did and look for opportunities to make improvement. I try and make my life a living example because the 12-step in AA says we practice these principles in all of our affairs and carry this message to other alcoholics. This is part of my 12-step work practicing these principles in all my affairs and carrying this message to other alcoholics and their families, their friends, the people that love them, the people they work with and anyone else who needs to hear this message today. I'm grateful to Alcoholics Anonymous for being there to help me, for all the men and women who are sitting in the room of AA right when I needed help.
Let me explain to you why I needed help, why did I end up going to AA in this video or in the post on Steem.
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Warning: I chose to skip tagging this NSFW because there is just a picture of me talking in mostly family friendly language. That said, I share the truth of my alcoholism because I have found listening to these stories by others has been fantastically helpful for me to stop feeling shame and start feeling like a member of the human race. Some of what I share here might be better enjoyed in private. While I would prefer to listen to your story than share my own, I realize the best chance I have to hear your story is to lead by example. While I originally published this for an audio book, a video course, and a paperback book, it has taken me months along with thousands of dollars to get this onto Audible and Amazon only to then struggle to make sales. Meanwhile, everyone I have talked to that has listened to, read, or watched Speaker Meeting 2017 has loved it. I am EXTREMELY GRATEFUL for DTube allowing me to not only make this available free which I dared not do on Facebook or YouTube but also to earn from upvotes! Thank you to 
Well, a little bit of family history. My father was an alcoholic. He quit drinking at 40 years old. He said the last time he drank he had more than 40 rum and Coke and did not get drunk. My father once was at a police station to pick his friend up and my father blew a .36 or something like that and the officer asked, "How are you getting home?" He said, "I'm driving." They all left and drove away. My father was quite the epic alcoholic, one that I would not live to live up to, to go through all the things he did.
My father's father nearly died when he was over in Korea. As a soldier, he nearly died from drinking and had to be hospitalized. They thought he was going to die. He barely made it. His wife, my grandmother, told him there would be no drinking in her household if he wanted to get married. His father died drunk driving on the way home from a poker game. You're starting to see a common theme here. His dad died on the way home from a poker game. He wrecked his car drunk and he had all this money in his pocket. He went to the emergency room. Back then, they hung these concrete blocks on you when they did X-rays. They didn't know very well at the hospital about dealing with a broken neck. My great grandfather had broke his neck. When he made it all the way to the hospital, they hung the concrete blocks on him for the X-ray. That killed him in the hospital.
My great grandfather grew up with a stepfather who seems to have been very abusive to him and nearly beat him to death and kicked him out of the house. It's a miracle that I'm even here after the generations of suffering of alcoholism in my family. My grandmother on the other side of the family also may have some issues with that.
Alcohol runs rampant in my family and I knew that. I remember my father drinking when I was three to six years old, getting drunk, yelling and screaming at my mother. I remember the terror of laying in my bed as dad would do things like punch the clock and talk to his father for hours on the phone while he was drunk for $4 a minute. That is what I grew up in as a child. Thank God, my father realized that my mom was going to leave him if he didn't stop drinking. My father realized he would not survive losing another family. My mother was already his second marriage. He had already lost his first family and first marriage. I would say alcohol and drugs were a big part of that.
Thank God, my father sobered up when he was 40, when I was about six years old. My father didn't go to any meetings though, he just did it on his own. It was pretty rough for him. He had a lot of anger and emotional issues for 10 or 15 years after he sobered up that he just dealt with all on his own and mellowed out as he got older.
I knew all of this. Going off to college, I didn't drink. I went to parties, I got through most of freshman year without drinking. People offered me drink after drink after drink and I said, "No. I don't need alcohol to have a good time." What I did decide I needed alcohol for, I did decide I needed alcohol to have sex. I had a bunch of failings already and as you may have heard in the previous section of this, sex was the very most frustrating part of my life. I believed the lie that the alcohol companies, that kids in college, I believe all the lies that alcohol would make having sex easier.
Guess what? The first time I drank, I got alcohol to help me have sex. It turns out it didn't help. After two and a half Miller High Lifes, I didn't care about sex anymore. I felt so damn good. I didn't care about sex. There was a beautiful girl with me who wanted to hang out, and I felt so good I had this amazing buzz, I just laid there on the bed and just I was, "Ah! Oh, this is so good." Because when you go through your life with a lot of background of pain and frustration, when there's a bunch of anxiety, fear, resentment, depression, all these things boil up in the background, you're just barely struggling to hold that together and you throw a few drinks down and all of that goes away. All of a sudden, you feel like the weight of the world's just been lifted off your shoulders. That's how I felt like everything was restored to its proper place.
From there, I believed alcohol will make me feel better. That was my fundamental belief that no matter what was happening, alcohol will make me feel better. When you go around selfishly asking the question all the time, "What will make me feel better?" or "Why do I feel so bad?" The answer you're going to keep getting is, "How do I feel better? Okay. What will make me feel better? Alcohol will make me feel better." That's the answer I kept getting for 10 more years after that. About 11 years after that, I kept getting that answer. "Why do I feel bad? How do I feel better?" "Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol."
Well, if two and a half beers is good, then eight drinks must be great, right? The second time I drank, it was obvious I was an alcoholic because if you look at what happened, look how I wrecked it. I'll compare this with my experience on marijuana here after I have a quick sip of my tea. I appreciate you going through this with me in this live filming because I believe these live filmings are natural like this. What I'll say comes out straight from the heart. Then I won't edit everything to make myself look pretty. I think the flaws are what make things great lots of times.
The second time I drank, I was at nearly the end of freshman year. Again, I found some girls in the laundry room downstairs that were going to a party at one of my friend's places. I thought, "For the first time, I'll go to a party and drink," because I used to go to lots of parties freshman year of college but I didn't drink in any of them. I was really excited to go to a party and drink. I hoped that drinking would help me get with a good-looking of the two girls. Well, you'll find out how it happened.
I got there and there were lots of drinking games. I did maybe four or five shots and I drink three or four beers there. I was good and wasted. I did not have any luck with any girls because I don't know why. Probably there were twice as many guys there to girls. Usually in life, it's about positioning. If you want to have good luck with girls, there probably need to be less guys than girls there.
I went to get a sandwich with my friends afterwards. I came back to the dorm room and that's when the throwing up started. The room started spinning. That was the first time I went through the, "Ooh! Aah!" I threw up for, let's see, about 14 to 16 hours. I was sick because then I didn't know anything to make a hangover better. I just threw up, I didn't eat anything. I could hardly drink any water and I was miserably sick. The first day I drank and got drunk was the Saturday before Easter in 2003. My first hangover was Easter on 2003. I just desperately wanted to be back home with my family, with my Easter bunny, Easter basket and not have a hangover. It was miserable.
There was this movie called Pay It Forward online with Jodie Foster where she's an alcoholic. It was almost like this message from the universe, "Here's your future. You have a choice or maybe you don't," but I had this horrible feeling that that movie was showing me some kind of truth I didn't want to look at. Even then the day after, Monday, I still wasn't feeling right. That was one of the worst hangovers I ever had. It was absolutely brutal and miserable. My father must have been overjoyed to hear that I'd had my first hangover in college from drinking.
From there, a normal person, a healthy person would back off. See, I'll compare an experience I had with marijuana a couple of three years later in college as a senior. Junior year, I started experimenting with marijuana when I drink. I'm fast forwarding a little bit and I'll fast forward and move around all over the place. Junior year, I suddenly got the idea one day walking home from the bar that I thought it might be nice to smoke marijuana at some point.
The first time I ever smoked marijuana, I was walking home from a bar. Now, from the bar to my house was probably two plus miles. I was an antisocial, so I didn't get a ride or I was so cheap, I wouldn't get a cab, so I walked it. There was a bum in a public park near on the way home. I stopped over and asked the bum if he had any weed because I was smoking a cigar and I was drunk and I wanted a little something to spice it up.
He had a bag of weed in his pocket. He sold it to me for $5 and helped me stuff up my cigar with the $5 of weed, which I then smoked and did not get any additional high or buzz from. I figured that was pretty pointless and stupid. Then I didn't bother with it for a while until senior year. I was a resident adviser. That means I was the guy in-charge. There were 20 guys on my floor and I was the senior who was in-charge of 20 freshmen. I went out and smoked weed with my freshmen residents down behind the bleachers in the football practice area.
That time, I got high. I went down there. I've been drinking a little bit. We passed around a joint. I got high that time. I'm like, "Oh, this is great." Then I went down with another of my freshmen residents one night, the third time I smoked weed and I got high again. I actually drove to Sonic drunk and high that night. I remember the lines on the road being, I felt like I was floating while I was driving. Now thankfully, Sonic was only a mile away and we got back and forth alive. I remember playing poker online, you see how all these addictions work together, and just having a blast, laughing it up. Everything was great.
Now the fourth time I smoked weed, I got a different experience. The fourth time I smoked weed, I just got my LSAT score, my Law School Standardized Admission Test. I just got my LSAT score back and I was really, really upset because I got 62nd percentile or something. It was better than most people did on the test, but it wasn't going to be good enough to get in some great law school or to get a great scholarship or anything. I was really mad about my LSAT score.
At the same time, I hadn't studied that much for the LSAT. I hadn't taken it that seriously and I still did pretty good on it. I was really, really upset. Like with anything else, my strategy was to get drunk. I got wasted. Then I went down to smoke weed. I didn't mean to, but I just ran into some guys, different guys that I had smoked weed before. They were smoking weed, so I went out back right behind the dorm room like in view of all everyone. Now, it was three in the morning. I smoked weed with them. This stuff, I don't know what happened, but I inhaled, I inhaled deep and I always inhaled whenever I smoked anything. It didn't usually have much of an effect on me, but this time, I don't know if it was laced with something or what. When I breathe out, I felt like I still had whatever it was inside.
I was like, "Oh, my God! Oh! All right. Let me do that again." I took another hit and I just got the feeling immediately like you've got about 30 seconds to a minute until your body just purges. I ran upstairs. Thank God, the elevator was right there. I sprinted straight up. I was on the ninth floor. All the way up to ninth floor, I got to my room, grabbed the trash can, got in the bed and oh, my God! I was sick.
See, the beautiful thing about marijuana is that I got sick within maybe five minutes or less of doing those last two hits of it. I woke up the next day and I said, "I'm never doing that again. I'm never smoking weed again. That made me sick." Now, why didn't I do that with alcohol? That's a normal reaction. A healthy reaction if you got wasted and had a horrible hangover and got miserably sick, a normal person would say, "I'm never doing that again." A normal health person who's tried smoking weed and got really sick would say, "I'm never doing that again." That's what I did. The last time I smoked weed was that last time in 2005 that I just told you about.
No matter how drunk I got or what situation, I always said no to marijuana after that because I associated, "Marijuana makes me sick." That's what it does. Marijuana doesn't make me feel better. It makes me sick. I had a very painful experience the last time I smoked weed and I used that to reprogram my idea about weed. Weed is not fun. Weed doesn't make me feel better. It makes me sick.
Well, alcohol, it took a really long time to do that. The sick thing is my mind still thinks today, it still gets the idea that, "Well, now that you haven't drank in almost three years, you're pretty normal again, right? You can have a drink or two." Let me tell you about my alcohol. After the second time I drank, a normal healthy reaction would have been to never drink again or to never have say more than one or two drinks. I have to say either of those reactions are normal. The reaction I had was, "I love that. I'm going to try to avoid the consequences." That is an alcoholic addict way to think about something.
I just had the stomach flu the other day. It was about a week ago. Oh, my God! The misery, the throwing up, the nausea. After almost three years of not drinking, I could see, I'm like, "No amount of pleasure from drinking or anything is worth this amount of sickness from a stomach flu." The stomach flu felt just like a hangover. I've had hundreds, if not thousands of hangovers in my life that I volunteered for.
There's definitely something and I go back to the sex thing. I remember the moment I decided to do anything to just satisfy my sexual urges. At some point, I decided I'd do anything to manage my alcoholism. I'm not sure where it was though. It might have been after that second time I drank. Instead of just saying, "I won't do it again," I decided, "You know what? Let me try and get the best out of this and minimize the consequences."
Let me tell you about the last time I drank. Then we'll go in to a lot of the stuff in the middle. You see, the second time I drank, it was pretty normal, right? I went to a college party, I got drunk, I threw up and had a hangover. There's nothing special there. Let me tell you about the last time I drank. The last time I drank, it was Monday. My wife went to work. It was 2014, April 21st 2014. My wife went off to work. Now, my wife used to ... We lived in Sarasota. She worked in St. Petersburg and she worked a normal job. She was gone 12 hours a day then. She leave at seven in the morning. She wouldn't come home at six or seven at night for her job.
What I like to do was I like to get up either with her or a little bit after her and get to work. I had my own company. I'm grateful I still do. I have my own company, so I work for myself. I had an office back then. I like to go into the office, do some work, feel like I was productive. Then after doing some work, I like to go to the gym, feel like, "Yeah! Now, I really did something useful." Then I like to get home anywhere from noon to two in the afternoon and start drinking and playing video games.
Now, of course, that's not how it started out or anything. That's what it got to though. I liked to do that as often as possible. Now, if I was doing something with my wife like going out to dinner or we had plans, I would try and not drink. If I had a hangover, I'd try and not drink. If those two things weren't going on, I really wanted to drink. Occasionally, even if say my wife and I planned to go to Universal on Saturday, I'd still get wasted on Friday. I'd be so sick, we couldn't go to Universal on Saturday.
By the last time I drank, this was just another typical Monday. My dad's memorial was that coming weekend, so I knew we're visiting my mom. I'd planned out that this Monday, I really got to tie one on good because I might only have one other time to drink before I go visit my mom for dad's memorial. It was a perfect day to drink. I thought I just probably spend some time with my wife and her family on Sunday. I woke up Monday feeling all right.
I went, I did some work Monday. I went to the gym. I came home and I used to make ... I had this cup from college from 2003 and 2005 that I used to drink with. Talk about nostalgia. It would hold one 12 ounce can of soda and it would hold about two to three shots. The shot cup was two ounces. I used, I put two of those in. You'd have two or three shots worth of 70 proof strawberry Smirnoff in there to the 70 proof Admiral Nelson's vanilla rum is what I like to use at the end.
In my closet, when I started drinking, I would try and have ... That particular day, I think I had about two gallons of liquor in the closet in my man cave then. I knew I could just drink until I was satisfied. I was playing Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Zombies on the Origins Map by myself, doing the entire Easter egg. I sat down at around two in the afternoon having had a productive day, knowing that my drinking was going to cause problems.
I knew, I remember sitting there before I drank thinking about some of the problems, "Your wife's not going to be happy with this. Your body is going to feel like crap tomorrow. Can't you just play the video game without drinking?" Because I loved playing the game too. Then there's this little voice that come into my head. Now, I try and avoid cussing, but here I'm going to give you verbatim what the voice, the thought process, "You fucking plan this out. Fucking do this now. Don't be a bitch about it."
As soon as I had think that, that is the general male programming, "Don't be a pussy," male programming that a lot of men are programmed with. That programming kicked in right when I was trying to think things through. As soon as that thought came in, my response is, "Fuck you! I'll show you and I'll make this go away." As I started drinking, I felt very uncomfortable, angry, on edge. A couple of drinks later, I was in the middle of playing my video game, lost in the game. Just right in the middle of the same kind of buzz I got the first time I drank, "Everything's okay. The world is fine. I'm not going to worry about how my business is nearly bankrupt. I won't worry about what my wife's going to think about this. I'm just going to drink."
I just drank and drank. Meanwhile, I had a gaming date, so to speak, to play with my friend later that night, but I wasn't too worried about that. I was more interested in playing the exact game mode I wanted. I also was playing this Eminem song called Fack, "Oh, oh, oh, I'm going to facking come. Oh, shit! Oh, yeah!" It's a really song filled with sexual shame, including having sex, gerbils up the ass. I mean, it is a really nasty song, "See that gerbil? Grab that too. Shove it up my butt." The song is just, it's disgusting.
I was into that because I was into anything that helped me bring out the sexual shame that I had inside and to not feel so bad like you listening to Eminem singing about all that nasty stuff and hey, I don't feel so bad about my sexual stuff. I didn't think of it like that consciously. All i thought of was, "Yeah, this song's great. This song's funny. I love this."
I'm playing that song on loop, just over and over. I've got that kicked up super loud on the stereo, just banging, "Oh, shit! Oh, yeah!" If you've ever heard it, it is one of the most obnoxious songs you can listen to. It's disgusting if you're a normal, healthy person. I'm listening to this and I'm getting more and more liquored up. About every 40 minutes to an hour, I'm pausing the game and I'm also doing laundry meanwhile because I like to feel like I got something productive done.
I'm getting a Gatorade bottle full of water. Every 40 minutes to an hour, I'm downing the whole liquor drink with the two to three shots in it, plus the can of diet soda, diet Dr. Thunder, plus then the Gatorade full of water because I know by this point, I want to drink as much water as I can stand, so I minimize the hangover for tomorrow. By the time my wife's got home from work, there's five or six hours of this that's went on already. You're looking I'm anywhere from 10 to 15 shots deep in liquor by the time my wife gets home and I'm just getting started.
My wife finally has gotten to the point where she can't hardly stand it because she knows this will go on all night. My wife stops me in the kitchen at one point and she says, "I'm packing the stuff up and going to my parents' house tonight," which is an hour away after she already was up there working that day. I said, "Fine. So what? I don't care. Go ahead." I had no feeling. I was like a dead person like a zombie. Here's the love of my life. Here's sex, has been the biggest problem I've had in my life. Here's the love of my life frustrated, miserable, hurting and I have no feeling. I can't feel her at all. She is just an object in my world just like the refrigerator.
In fact, the video game consoles and the liquor bottles at this point in my room are much more important because when I drink alcohol, it cut off my feelings most of the time or sometimes it brings them out in some self-pity wallow and disgust. Sometimes it brings them out in the euphoria and everything is great, but most of the time, I was like a zombie, dead. I have no feeling. I don't care at all. I'm completely off in the mind world. That's what I told my wife, "Fine. I don't care if you go to your parents' house. So what? I've got everything I need. I've got my liquor. I've got my video games. I'm good." That's what I told her. I went right back in my room to go continue playing the video games.
Now, I actually broke my record on that level. I got the 71 on Origins. I did the entire Easter egg, which is fairly challenging. I played that game for six hours. My wife heard, must have listened to that Fack song played 10 or 20 in a row at one point at just ridiculous volume. She used to use earplugs and go to sleep. Thank God that she was able to call her mom and her mom encouraged her to stay. I would hate to have seen what happened that night if my wife actually did pack up and go. I would have hate to have seen what happened when I realized what I had done. Thankfully, that happened the next morning when I was hungover instead of when I was drunk.
As the night carried on, I started playing games with my friend. I've been gaming with him. I've been friends with him since sophomore year in college. He's known me really well. We're both married. I was asking him while we're playing the game, I said, "Do you ever have thoughts about being with another woman, about being unfaithful?" He was really uncomfortable hearing me talk about these things.
When I drank, I got a lot of awful thoughts and frequent thoughts about that. I often would then be watching porn, even when my wife would have been with me that day, I'd end up watching porn at night if I was drinking. I was getting horrible habits. I'd made these habits earlier in my life. The problem is just because my life got better, these bad habits didn't go away. I'd made most of these habits of drinking and playing video games and then looking for love in the wrong places, I'd made these habits when I was younger and single and lonely and frustrated, but just because I had a wonderful wife that loved me, they didn't magically go away. I had to deal with them and look at them and doing this is a part of that. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm doing this is to heal these things.
After my friend went to bed, all this time I'm continuing to drink. By about midnight or so, maybe one, my friend goes to bed. Now, my wife's bed. I'm all drinking all alone. The house is all quiet. Now, I've been drinking nearly 11 or 12 hours. I'm probably anywhere from 20 to 30 shots deep in liquor by this point. I'm drunk and I'm lonely. Out of nowhere, then I start getting my habits then. One of the worst things I was doing ... I was in looking at porn. One of the logical leaps you make from looking at porn online is looking at opportunities to potentially get an escort to come over. I ended up in the course of looking for porn. I ended up finding a website with escorts.
I was looking at these websites with escorts on them and thank God, I never did that while I was with my wife because I'm sure I would have killed myself if I did. I'm absolutely certain about that. That's what this was. This was a desire to die. This wasn't something like my wife wasn't being absolutely perfect because she was. This was a desire to die, to ruin my life. That's what this was. Here I am after I've had ... I had a great day before this I thought at the time. I had all the fun I liked to get out of drinking. At this point, then I'm looking at these things online. I'm feeling this horrible sense of shame and I'm feeling this little nagging voice keeps telling me, "You're going to really do this. At some point, you're going to stop looking. You already did this when you were single before. You're going to really do this while with your wife and that's it. You do that once and you're going to kill yourself."
Then to get distracted out of that, I had awful online gambling habit as well. I will tell you more about that in another section. Long story short, I hadn't gambled online for at this point eight year or maybe seven and a half years. The last time I'd gambled online was December 2006. The last night I drank, I managed to find a way to sign up. I think I signed up on some gambling website. I managed to get $500 off my credit card onto the gambling website.
Now, keep in mind that I was nearly broke and bankrupt at this time. All my credit cards were almost maxed out. I had hardly any cash left. My business was failing. What do I do? I throw $500 onto a gambling website. I start playing Texas Holdem. Now, when I used to play Texas Holdem in college, I'll get more into this, I used to have a 60% win percentage if I went one-on-one with people. I was a little better than average. Sometimes when I'd get drunk, I'd really tell. I'd either just go crazy and play perfect and take everyone's money, which would happen occasionally, but most of the time, I just get really loose and stupid and lose all my money. That's what happened. I got really loose and stupid. In about two or three hours, I lost, meanwhile making new drinks the whole time, I lost all of my $500 online.
What did I do? I sat there with customer support for two hours trying to get them to let me put more money on. I was trying to put even more, another $500 on. Thank God, I didn't think to just sign up for a new account and use a different credit card. By that point, it was about five or six in the morning. I had been drinking by then since two in the afternoon before. I would estimate somewhere I drank between 30 or 40 shots, probably about a quarter of a gallon, a liter or so of a hard liquor by then.
I finally just got to the point the only way could stop drinking usually is when I got to the point where I physically couldn't stand it anymore. At some point, there'd be this magical point at night where the desire to drink would just be satisfied and turned off. Some time while I was on the chat with customer support, the desire to drink just turned off. I went to bed and my wife got up for work shortly after that.
Pause for a little bit of matcha tea here. My wife gets up for bed. Now, I probably get up for work. My wife goes into work because it's Tuesday. My wife gets up and goes into work. Meanwhile, I wake up at about 11:00 having got a couple of hours of sleep with a miserable hangover. God, awful hangover. I threw up blood that day. That was the first time I ever remember throwing up blood. I got in the toilet, out on my knees throwing up blood. Then thank God for that blood because seeing that blood scared me.
Now, a lot of times I'd had hangovers I just figured I was paying my dues. The blood scared me and it scared me enough to start thinking about what had happened last night. Thinking about the fact of thinking about what I'd looked at online, realizing that you keep shopping, you're going to buy at some point and realizing that when my wife was vulnerable asking me, pleading with me to please stop hurting myself, that I just could ... "So what? Go away. I don't care." Realizing that I don't have another time to drink
I had a weird thought the night before when I was drinking, maybe in the early afternoon right when I was getting started around maybe four or five in the afternoon, I was walking. I was mid-step and this little thought crossed my mind which when you have obsessive-compulsive thoughts all the time, a new original thought is big news. I had a drink in hand. I was halfway across the room, halfway, mid-step and this thought just slammed to me very gentle but like the voice of God I would say, "This is the last time." That's all the thought. It's just that, "This is the last time."
I'm like, "Who said that? What the hell?" As I'm drinking I'm like, "No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not." I woke up the next day and I could see this is the last time. You're going to kill yourself doing this. Not only that, you can't stop. This is your life. You're going to go through with these stupid things you're looking at online. You're going to through and do something worse than you've already done with this gambling thing, with all the other stupid, you're going to do something and you're going to go pass the point of no return and you absolutely will kill yourself then.
There's no hope. There's no hope. You have to do that because by this point, I had tried to quit drinking at least 20, if not, 50 times I had tried to quit drinking. Now, some people think that an alcoholic is a weak-willed person. Understand that an alcoholic is often a very strong-willed person and alcohol is the weakness that makes up for it. By this point, I'd had my own business. I'd push through all kinds of business failures. I got new customers from hundreds of customers from 20 plus countries around the world. I'd finish my master's degree. I had an amazing wife who is sticking with me. I had been through all the things I told you in my life. I had an amazingly strong will to get my way.
In fact, I'd been really good at getting my way most of my life. Alcohol is the one area my willpower is a complete failure. I can't stay sober. Even today if I don't do the things that keep me sober, I'm very likely to die today from drinking myself to death. That's why I share this with you because this is part of how I stay sober.
I realized it didn't matter how much I wanted to quit drinking. There was no hope. That even seeing in the middle of this hangover as bad as I felt, as bad as things were, I would still drink again no matter what. I had soon enough forget how bad things were and all I would remember is the original belief I just told, "Alcohol makes me feel better," that fundamental foundational belief, "Alcohol makes me feel better." That got me desperate enough to pray to God because I wasn't into praying to God except, "God, get me out of this." Just before this, maybe eight months before this, I got some chlorine in my eyes and I washed them out with water so much that my vision was completely blurred. I couldn't hardly see after 30 minutes of washing my eyes out with water.
I was scared to death, just screaming. I had a panic attack, "God, please, I'll do anything if I don't go blind." I didn't go blind and guess what? I did drink the next day though to numb the pain of the whole thing. I could see that I was on my way to dying a disgusting death and there was nothing I could do about it. That got me desperate. I don't even know why I just said, "God, please, I'll do anything to stay sober." Because I realized at this point I didn't know what to do to stay sober. I couldn't stay sober. It didn't matter if I wanted to. I wasn't going to.
Then just a little while after that prayer, I was laying in bed listening to audiobooks, something like Brené Brown, Power of Vulnerability, just desperate for any distraction from a hangover. Then I got this little thought, "Well, going to one of those AA meetings might be part of anything that you just offered." "Yes. Okay. I'll do that. I will do that. I did just say I'll do anything. Okay, I'll do that."
Then I talked to my wife when she got home. I told her, I said, "I'm going to go to ..." I told her, "I'm willing to do anything to get sober. I'm going to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting." Because at this point, I'd already swear to God and to my wife that I'd never drink again and that didn't work. My wife and I had already been through that, but I'll get more into that in a minute.
As I started that, "Okay," then I looked for meetings online. I found a meeting that was just across the street from where I lived. It was a really good meeting. It was my home group for the first almost two years I got sober, before my wife and I moved. It was an absolute miracle, an absolute gift. I then scheduled because by then it was Tuesday, I was going to visit my mom on Thursday with my wife for dad's memorial. I had always been able to stay sober when I was around my parents. I figured I could make it one day, I could finish the day with a hangover. I knew I wasn't going to drink that day because I was way too sick.
I thought, "I can make it one day sober on my own before we go visit my mother." Then thank God, I had just enough self-awareness. Now, my wife realized this a long time ago. She said, "Every time we get back from a trip, you have to have a bender the next day." I realized I could see my choice. We got back from dad's memorial. We drove back on Monday. I realized on Tuesday I had two options: you go to that Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or you drink. There is absolutely no other option for me, no other option. You will do one of those two things.
After going to dad's memorial on Sunday, which was very difficult and on the edge and frustrated and holding on, thank God that I wasn't tempted with a drink or anything. Then we drove home on Monday. Then on Tuesday, which normally would have been my bender day, and by that point, my life a week without a drink was a really long time. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous for the second time on Tuesday. I had been when I was 21 years old. I'll tell you a little bit about that in a minute.
I went to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on Tuesday and I was scared. I went because I was more scared of seeing what would happen if I didn't go. I knew I had to drink again. After all the things I told you about and all the things I'm going to tell you about, I knew I am going to either drink again and die or I'm going to go this AA meeting. I went to the AA meeting. It was at a church. It was scary walking in there. I saw the sign. It said, "Serenity Room". Meanwhile, I don't have any serenity. I'm just on the edge of tense's hill. I'm trying to look good, "Hi. Hey. How are you doing?"
I walked in. I sit off in the corner and they asked, "Is anyone new or coming back?" I was so glad I didn't have to say I was new because I had been to AA once when I was 21 to get out of trouble. I went home and drank right away that night. I'm not an alcoholic. I stood up, which is funny because hardly anyone stands up to introduce themselves. I stood up and said, "I'm Jerry. I'm an alcoholic." I don't know if I believed it or if I just was faking it to fit it, but then I told them a bit about my drinking, which was more than I ever hardly did with anyone. I would actually tell them a little bit about how ugly my drinking was because I figured, "I'm not that bad. I drink at home. I play Xbox. Come on, I'm not that bad."
What I noticed is I didn't realize they were having the whole meeting about me because I couldn't hardly listen. The only thing I noticed when I got done with that meeting, I got back in my car, I cried. I felt grateful. I could feel the people who prayed for me. I felt like the universe said, "Thank you. Thank you." I could feel my dad who had died at this point, I could feel him saying, "Thank you, my son. Thank you. I've been waiting for you to get sober. Thank you for taking better care of yourself." That was the first time since my dad had died, I felt really connected with him and I just cried and cried and I felt so good after that meeting.
I said, "You know what? I'll go to one on Thursday." Here's my rationale. I figured, I figured that I drank twice a week, which I drank maybe two to four times a week on average at this point as I just mentioned, usually for 12 plus hour benders. I spent about 20 plus hours a week drinking and then often 10 to 20 hours a week having a hangover. Drinking was like a full-time job between. Then I plan the whole rest of my life out based on my drinking.
I figured, "Well, I'll go to two meetings a week. That will probably do me real nice. That will probably do me real nice." I set it up to go to two meetings a week. For the beginning, that worked really well and I stayed sober. Now, keep in mind that the first meeting they said to go to 90 meetings in 90 days. I didn't hear that. I didn't even consciously hear that. I decided to just do two meetings a week. They said to get phone numbers. I got no one's phone number. They said to become a member of the home group. Thank God that's the only thing I did because being a member of something means something to me. I got the book out and I hardly see anyone that came in to that meeting new do this. I went straight to that book after the meeting. I opened it up and I wrote my name in the membership book. That membership meant something to me. I didn't get a sponsor like they told me. The only thing I did I became a member of that group and thank God for that.
Before I tell you more about my recover, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how I got to that point. How did I get to the point where I saw that my drinking was utterly hopeless. If you just look at it from the outside, you might not think it was that bad. I could just easily minimize it. Well, what did your drinking look like most of the time? Most of the time, I drank when my wife was at work. I tried to keep it down and be respectful while she was home and I played Xbox. Most of the last year or two of my drinking, I drank at home while I was playing video games. You might think and it's easy to rationalize, that's harmless, right? Well, that's what my drinking looked like while I was trying to control it. I told you how ugly that was.
Let me explain to you some more about my drinking before that because you don't get to grow up passed these things. You just get in periods where it's a little nicer, but all those nastier things, all those things that happen to other people but haven't happened to you, you're eligible too.
I'll go back now to my college drinking here. After the second time I drank in college, I didn't get to drinking too much for a while. I had a few drinks with my friends here and there. I was actually a normal drinker for a while. I tried to avoid getting wasted because of what had happened before and I went to the same party I'd got drank at. I drank a little less. I had myself convinced, "I'm not an alcoholic. There's not problem with me. Look, I just made a little mistake. There's a lot of fun to be had in alcohol and I'm going to have it."
As I got into sophomore year, I met some friends that drank. Freshman year, I'd set my life up around being sober. Most of the people I hung out with didn't drink because when you don't drink most of the beginning of freshman year, you make friends who don't drink either. Sophomore year, I came into sophomore year being willing to drink. I became a resident adviser sophomore year. I was on a freshmen dorm. I was the guy in-charge of the freshmen hallway with 20 guys on it. Then I met up the other resident advisers that I hung out with. Some of them drank, some didn't. I started to drink with the ones who did.
There was a resident adviser girl down the hall. She was 24 or something. She bought me all my booze for almost the whole year. I'd give her a tip. I'd get a couple of handles and give her 40 bucks. The handles would cost her 30 bucks and then she'd get 10 bucks out of going to the liquor store for me. I made sure to always have a handle or two even sophomore year when I just started drinking. I made sure to always have a handle or two. To me, that's alcoholic behavior right from the beginning. I had to have it.
The very first day the freshmen moved in, she spiked my drink, her and the guy that lived across the hall who as the RA, they spiked my drink. I didn't even realize it. I ended up getting drunk on moving day, and I didn't even mean to. Now, I could have simply had the first taste of it and said, "No, I'm not doing that," but no, I knocked it out and then had more. I was even drinking right on the job, in the elevator, in front of parents and I thought no one could notice. I guess that's just what people expected at college.
From there, I hadn't done much drinking at that point, but by the end of sophomore year, I had started to build a resume of stupid things I had done while drinking. I had damaged thousands of dollars of property. I smashed all kinds of things. I'd get drunk and go around and take this chair leg I had, this chair that fell apart, a wooden chair and just smash things around the dorm room. Yes, while I work there. Isn't that crazy? I'd smash whatever was easy. I'd smash whatever would make the loudest noise.
One time, I nearly even got caught. The police came. Thankfully, I got out of that. It's just amazing, the stupid things. This was just within the first year or so of my drinking. We did one night, we threw a burning carpet off the eighth floor. We lit a whole carpet on fire and threw it off the eighth floor. I went down and I burned a whole bunch of stuff. I got really started on my alcoholism that year. I didn't do it alone. My friends would drink with me and we'd get into this stuff. My friends, we all got into this Nazi stuff. I don't even know how we got into it, but we were all into this Nazi stuff. I think we watched American History X and that's why we all got into it. We got in all this Nazi stuff. Then that became a part of my drinking. I took a history class the next year just about Nazism.
By the end of the year, then I started gambling online with my friends as well. One of my friends introduced me to that. I discovered I could really have a good time if I drank if I was lonely because mostly sophomore year, I still drank socially. I'd have parties with my friends. I rarely drank by myself in my room sophomore year. I ended up in my room after the party a lot of times sophomore year all alone as I described with looking at the porn and then I'd be watching these. I'd watch all these movies I downloaded illegally like Crash, American History X, Pulp Fiction. I watch all these movies and then at the end of the night, I started to realize, "Hey, if I'm feeling lonely at the end of the night, I can just pour some more drinks in my room and then I'll feel better."
I'd play video games also. I'd play lots of Madden that year. That was the year Michael Vick was just way overpowered Madden. By sophomore year, my drinking had started to become seriously dysfunctional and alcoholic. If you look at it, you would see this is not what a normal person does when they drink. This is what someone who's sick, who has a lot of things causing them problems in drinking is but a symptom of all these deeper problems.
Junior year, I started drinking antisocially a lot. Whereas sophomore year, I honestly was a social drinker most of the time. Junior year, I switched and most of the times I drank where antisocial. I moved out of the dorm room, so there weren't people to drink with all the time. My roommates, one of them was a guy drank with a lot of his RA, but he calmed down a bit. He wasn't looking to get drank and go to a party every night. My other roommate was a guy. He got married and he didn't drink that much. He'd drink with us occasionally.
I was on my own lots of times and I was too lazy to go schedule things. Junior year, I spent a bunch of nights in my room getting drunk by myself, gambling online. That became my new go-to thing. If I'm lonely, if no one wants to hang out with me, all I need is a bottle of liquor and then just 20-50 bucks, I can gamble online all night. That became what I did. Things really took off in that. I used to just play small stakes. I'd do a $5 heads-up game and I could win about 60% of those. I can usually just make about $3 an hour gambling online and drink.
I thought that was heaven. I'd sit there and make some money winning these heads-up game against suckers as I thought, taking their $5. I could usually, if I started the night with 20 bucks, lots of times I could end it with $40 or $50 or $100 sometimes. Then what I do is lots of times I just gamble until I had no money left. If I lost, then I'd be out and I might watch a movie and go to bed. If I won, then I'd buy into a tournament or I'd save some money, but I'd like to get into a tournament if I was having a good night because then I could win more.
One night, I bought into a $10 tournament with thousands of people in it and I got second place. I won $800 and some out of that $10 tournament. Then all of a sudden, I was big time. Now, I know how to gamble now. I'm good and I really know what I'm doing. I've won that tournament again another time. The problem is a $10 tournament at three in the morning, you get a lot of people who are drunk, high who aren't playing very good. I started buying into some more of the serious tournaments and then I started really getting some big loses.
As my drinking progressed, at the start of the year, I was having a few drinks and gambling a little bit and going to bed. By the end of the year, it was starting to look more like what I just described, eight, 10, 12-hour drinking benders, up all night, gambling up all night, continuing to get into worse and worse deviant activity. I don't know what I was. I'd get lonely and it was like the devil came over me and possessed me or something. I'd go out and do things that were just unimaginable. In addition to watching all the nasty movies I talked to you about, I'd go out and just vandalize things or just break things.
One night, I tried to blow a car up. I got the gas tank opened and put this string down it, and I lit it. The string kept falling off. I swear some higher power is looking out for me lots of times with all the stupid stuff I did. I lit the string and the string wouldn't go in it and blow the car up. I guess they'd already thought of that in the design.
I kept getting into more and more delinquent activities like this, smashing things, running around, just doing stupid stuff at night, trying to break a car window. Thankfully, car windows aren't that easy to break and I wasn't that strong, so I'm sitting there whacking away and I can't even chip it a little bit. Hurt my hand. I wake up the next night not having even remembered exactly what I did or how I did it. I'd go to the bar and get in stupid fights. It just continued to get worse.
Senior year, I moved back in to the freshmen dorm. I become a resident adviser again. This is when things just got even worse because now, when I'd been a social drinker sophomore year, I still had a lot of bad habits, but senior year, I was a serious drunk by senior year. I was an everyday drinker senior year. That's the only time in my life I consistently drank everyday. I'd drink anywhere from five to seven days a week.
While most days, I'd have maybe three or four liquor drinks. I'd get good and drunk at least twice a week. The things I kept doing got stupider and stupider. By the end of the year, I threw a keg party with my residents in one of my residents' room while I was on duty. This means while I was responsible of anything happen, that way I'd know if there was a complain or something, I'd hear about it first.
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