To me sobriety is a gift from God to me. If I drank, it would be giving the gift back.

But she said if you had to control something, it was out of control.

We feel that elimination of our drinking is but a beginning. A much more important demonstration of our principles lies before us in our respective homes, occupations and affairs.

I was self conscious and ill at ease most of the time, my health was at the breaking point, and I was thoroughly miserable.

For the first time in years I opened my box of paints and poured out an honest rage, an explosion of reds and blacks and yellows. As I looked at the drawing, tears of joy and relief flowed down my cheeks. In my disease, I had given up my art, a self-inflicted punishment far greater than any imposed from outside.

Second, I discovered that I was able to love someone else responsibly, with respectful and genuine concern for that person’s growth. Before that time, I had thought that my ability to care sincerely about another’s well-being had atrophied from lack of use.

In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned, our crippling handicap had been our lack of humility. We had lacked the perspective to see that character-building and spiritual values had to come first, and that material satisfactions were not the purpose of living.

Just an unstable woman, undisciplined, poorly adjusted, and filled with nameless fears.

To get over drinking will require a transformation of thought and attitude.

Life at home was falling apart around me. Every time I turned around I’d done something to make my mother cry.