Page 284 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 269
able desire was possible of attainment for me. I was
strong and healthy and quite athletic.
I experienced some of the pleasure of social drink­
ing when I was sixteen. I definitely liked everything
about alcohol—the taste, the effects; and I realize now
that a drink did something for me or to me that was
different from the way it affected others. It wasn’t long
before any party without drinks was a dud for me.
I was married at twenty, had two children, and was
divorced at twenty-three. My broken home and
broken heart fanned my smoldering self-pity into a
fair-sized bonfire, and this kept me well supplied with
reasons for having another drink, and then another.
At twenty-five I had developed an alcoholic prob­
lem. I began making the rounds of the doctors in the
hope that one of them might find some cure for my
accumulating ailments, preferably something that
could be removed surgically.
Of course the doctors found nothing. Just an un­
stable woman, undisciplined, poorly adjusted, and
filled with nameless fears. Most of them prescribed
sedatives and advised rest and moderation.
Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, I tried
everything. I moved a thousand miles away from
home to Chicago and a new environment. I studied
art; I desperately endeavored to create an interest in
many things, in a new place among new people.
Nothing worked. My drinking habits increased in spite
of my struggle for control. I tried the beer diet,
the wine diet, timing, measuring, and spacing of
drinks. I tried them mixed, unmixed, drinking only
when happy, only when depressed. And still, by the time
I was thirty years old, I was being pushed around by a