Hello, my name is Greg and I am a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you St. Pete Dean for inviting me to this forum. The facts of our stories are often quite different. However the Truths of our stories are the same. The Truth of my story is that my ego took control of my life, my mind and my body early in life. My ego found a high octane fuel in alcohol. That very high octane fuel burned me out and I began recovery. Here is an excerpt from my book that tells who I am:
Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, in the beautiful land of Honalee (which you may already know is the home of Jack P. and Puff D.), there was a young Lieutenant of the Royal Marines and his beautiful young bride, who were deeply in love.They radiated so much love for each other, that every one who saw them could feel it.Far away in the land of Silencio, there was also a young couple who was very much in love.The two lands had completely different cultures.Like America and Bosnia, the people look the same, but have different values, beliefs, and language.Both young couples had been praying to heaven for a child.Their prayers were answered.The problem started when the Spirit Distribution Department in heaven gave the Silencio childs spirit to the Honalee child, and vise versa.The Honalee child was born and was beautiful just like his parents.But, there was something very strange and different about the child.As the beautiful child grew, he didnt think the way Honaleens think, act the way they act, or talk the way they talk.A very, very wise and loving old woman noticed this and cast a spell on the child so that he would act and talk like Honaleens.But, she could not change the way he thinks.
So, the beautiful child looked and sounded like every one else in Honalee.But, every one, including the beautiful child, could feel and knew in their heart that he was different.Because the difference was something they felt in their heart, they could not fully share their love with the beautiful child, not even his parents.Because the beautiful childs heart was different, he could not feel their love when they tried to give it to him.The beautiful child lived a very lonely, sad, painful, and disappointing life for many, many years.However, the beautiful child discovered a magic tonic that took the bad feelings away for a while.The magic tonic worked by deadening his spirit, which was from Silencio.So the beautiful child didnt feel different, and could feel a filtered false kind of love.Love, any kind of love, is what he wanted more than anything.
And when he grew up, technology and travel had improved so that there were some people from Silencio living in Honalee.One day, with great fear, because he knew that they were so terribly different, he entered a room full of people from Silencio.Instantly, tears came to his eyes, and he was overwhelmed with the feeling of love.His spirit was leaping for joy inside of him because he had finally found people with the same kind of spirit.He could only visit this room once in a while though.Some time later, the beautiful child had an opportunity to visit the wondrous city of Gallaudet.He had heard about this city from the people in the room.He was struck with awe to find a whole city full of people that thought, acted, felt, and talked the same way he did.The beautiful childs parents were old now, and couldnt understand any of this Silencio business, so they rejected him.After years of not feeling love in a marriage, the wife he had taken rejected him.The beautiful child was left alone with his magic tonic and very few Silencio people to share with a couple times a month.Then one day, the magic tonic stopped taking the bad feelings away and instead, made them worse.The pain of his Silencio spirit being stuck in his Honalee body became so great that he nearly took his life to free his spirit.But, he knew of a society of mostly Honaleens who healed the wounds and grew their spirits, no matter what kind, so that they could feel true love and live happy, joyous, and free.The beautiful child joined this society that took their knowledge and wisdom from a Big Book and a Higher Power.He isnt up to happily ever after yet, just one day at a time.He has felt true love now.He has felt the pain of loosing that true love and been able to be grateful to be alive to feel it, and hopeful that he will feel true love again.Now, his Silencio spirit connects with Honaleen spirits through a Great Spirit who is the source of all love and power.
You can learn more about the book by clicking here:
Awesome Greg, I really enjoyed that. My friend and I used to set up massive sound equipment at the Gallaudet College in DC in the mid to late 90's. The sound pressures were off the scale and the students were dancing like mad. Great times. Welcome to the board. Do you every come up to St. Pete or Tampa for meetings? Our local area AA intergroup has large picnics at Ft. DeSoto Park, in Tierra Verde. With all the voice recognition software that phone systems are using (even computers) don't they have portable devices yet that convert speach to text? If not, it can't be far off.
Welcome Greg! Love the share and can sooo relate to the story!
__________________
"We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have. "
