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AS I SAT IN MY CHAIR and looked around the room, I thought to myself that there was no way I belonged with these people. So what if I drank a little more than my friends? An alcoholic I was not. I was too young.

I started drinking at the age of eleven. When I drank, I became funny and beautiful, and it seemed to me I had friends. But somewhere along the way I crossed an invisible line. And drinking was no longer something I could choose. My friends had begun to say, “Haven’t you had enough?” But as drunk as I was, I had just started.

My self-esteem vanished. I was no one. Only when a guy said I was beautiful, did I even think, “Maybe I’m alright.”

I hated the sight of what I’d become. I started to isolate. I became suicidal. My parents, not knowing that I was drinking, didn’t know what to do with a depressed teenager.

Then I found tequila, and during my last year of drinking, I never drew a sober breath. I drank to the point of no friends and no self-worth. No one could trust me, not even my parents. The next day, I was in a thirty-day treatment program. That day, sobriety began. It was March 21, 1988. I was thirteen years old.

Today, I know who I am. Very proudly in my meetings I announce that I am an alcoholic. I pray daily, even just to ask my Higher Power (whom I choose to call God) to walk with me that day. He has never left me, even when I have left him. I’m active in AA — shaking hands, chairing meetings, making coffee, reading, and sharing my experience, strength, and hope. I try to live the Twelve Steps of AA. I’ve found that they apply to my every situation in life since I still have to learn to live life on life’s terms.

Every one of us in AA is a miracle. The gratitude I have is just to be breathing today … I was so close to dying. And although I have a lot of “yets” out there, I have true friends who love me. All I need to do is call them and go to meetings, work my program, and for today the “yets” won’t come.

So I write this to thank all of you for keeping the AA program strong and giving me a chance to continue my sobriety today.

A. C.

Raleigh, North Carolina

August 1999