My father and another man had drowned seven months before I was born. My mother was diabetic and frequently hospitalized in a diabetic coma. She took shots daily in order to function. I was a premature baby and somewhat sickly. As a child, I suffered from chickenpox, whooping cough, ear infections, and hives. I have two older sisters and a brother by a different father. No one hugged me as a child. I was to be neither seen nor heard. When mother came home with gifts, I got more books than toys. Being the youngest, I was protected from the world by my siblings, although my brother was a little rough with me at times, calling me names and hitting me. I withdrew into my secret world of books. Raised by a single mother and siblings, I managed. I wish I could say I thrived. But early on, I felt... Continue Reading
After a conference, I had a 5:55 a.m. flight to get to my niece’s Sweet 16 celebration. I had my meals prepared the night before and all my bags packed. I figured if I left at 4 a.m. I would be on my flight in ample time. So I set my clock to 3 a.m. I woke up, prayed for an abstinent day, read my Twenty-Four Hours A Day book and took 30 minutes of quiet time. At 3:45 a.m. I made my breakfast and began to load up the car. I ended up leaving at 4:15 a.m. On my way to the airport, I noticed I forgot to fill the tank on my rental car before drop-off. When I left the gas station, the time was 4:30 a.m. Now I’m getting nervous because I realized that I am cutting it close for my flight. So, time for the Serenity... Continue Reading
I was the heaviest I had ever been—370 pounds. I almost lost my life and I was using that as an excuse to eat myself to death. I was in Mexico for a fishing vacation none of us will ever forget. Imagine five days in a tropical paradise, blue cloudless sky, and crystal clear water filled with whales, dolphins and hundreds of tropical birds. Our ship was called the Erik and there were 44 people aboard. The first day at sea was calm and beautiful as we sailed towards our fishing destination. We went to bed excited as kids on Christmas Eve, dreaming of the fish we were going to catch in the morning. At two in the morning, a sudden and powerful storm flooded the ship and knocked out power. In my cabin below decks, if you were a fly on the wall you would have seen me wearing... Continue Reading
When I came into FA, I had been in 12-step recovery programs for 19 years. Lots of them. Programs for money problems, programs for relationship problems, programs for alcohol programs – but never a program for problems with food. Those problems I could handle myself, thank you very much. Yet, here I was again in an AA meeting, using my sharing time to talk about powerlessness over sugar and how unmanageable my life was around food. I’d make a point of saying how grateful I was that I had stopped drinking alcohol, of course. But, I’d add, there was no getting around the fact that everything I read in the Big Book about the incessant thinking about the drink, craving the drink, the temporary relief derived from giving in to it, and the resulting remorse and disgust that followed, described my experiences of eating junk food and drinking sugary drinks. ... Continue Reading
Sometimes it seems as if I have slipped into life as into a theatre, when half the movie was already over. In this movie, there has been a complicated plot and I have to determine the first, unseen half of it, from developments in the second. I am never quite sure what’s going on. Anger is the aspect my character I have the most difficulty in integrating. Difficult, because it developed in the first, unseen part of the movie, my early life as an addict. I know I released anger as rage in an immature, inadequate cover-up for fear, abandonment, and inadequacy. I also know I had to change, to develop, or be written out of the plot. If only it were really a movie, the protagonist of which “struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Of course, I might complete the quotation... Continue Reading
