Thank you!💖🌻🙏🏼
I, like other alcoholics, started drinking, and continued, to make myself feel different than I was feeling.
I quickly found that I could use it for courage, to reduce social anxiety, to relax, to numb, and hopefully change, painful feelings.
It worked beautifully, until it didn’t.
Thirty-one days before my sixtieth birthday, having lost everything, family, friends,(real friends), money and property, I finally gathered the unaided courage to give up.
I gave up trying to do it my way. I stopped fighting everyone and everything.
I had been to hundreds of AA meetings throughout my life, particularly in the several rehabs I had gone to.
This time, with the honest and strong desire to get sober, I put my stubborn streak in play, deciding that no one would keep me out, despite being a trans-woman in Eastern North Carolina.
There was resistance. I couldn’t get a woman to sponsor me, until I did. I was serious about getting sober, no matter what.
I went through six women who didn’t work out, and one who handed me over to a man, get this, with no prior discussion or warning!
She had told me the one good thing that I had learned from a sponsor, "Don’t let anyone keep you out of there, for any reason."
I found Buddhism on YouTube,(not the god of Abraham). I found FB friends who had been sober for years. One of them became my sponsor, of a sort.
I chair women’s meetings these days.
I have keys to the AA Hut.
There’s only one or two intractable, frightened, people who still refuse to accept me.
They are outnumbered, 100 to 3,(or two, or one maybe. Who knows?).
Admittedly, I transitioned in 1993, in San Diego, and no one knew that I was trans until I told them.
I understood the program required uncompromising honesty, and was committed to diving in without even holding my nose.

I made that commitment on 21sep,2018.
I live in a sec 8 one bedroom apartment. As a Buddhist I don’t need anything more than a reasonable amount of comfort, and not many *things* at all.
I’ve learned that happiness is always available, in each and every moment....as long as I don’t engage in my previous habit of talking myself out of it 😉
Thanks for the statistics.
I’m proud of you!
--weezi--💜🌈🙏🏼🦄🌻