I just joined here yesterday. I had been visiting for a few weeks. I actually found this place by investigating some alonon stuff. I am an alcoholic and have been since I took my first breath. Some become alcoholics because they drink too much. I drank too much because i am an alcoholic. I like to start off my shares by saying that by the grace of a very loving GOD I dont suffer from the obsession to drink, but I suffer from the obsession to run my life, and lately, I been suffering from the obsession to run someone else's life. And that can be just as painfull. My first drink was at 11 years old in upstate NY, where I grew up in a house where alcohol was not a problem. In fact niether of my parents drink. So my alcoholism was not caused by a learned behaivior. But my first drink was a drunk and a black out. I knew right away that this is what I had been waiting for, although i didnt even know it. the tazmainian devel was let loose and my parents had no idea what had happend. To them it was like one night someone stole there son and replaced him with someone who looked just like him. I started hanging out with the kids who were drinking and using other accsesories. School was taking up too much drinking time, so I didnt get there too often. The school bus was just a ride to the party. I went from a good kid who got good grades to the class that you could not teach. I didnt last in school too long. I droped out at 15, and things really went down hill. I was always in trouble with the cops, but managed to stay out of jail. Around 17, me and some running partners got arrested for robbing a grocery store. before I got to AA i used to make it sound like it was some bad ass robery,  but truth be told, we just tryed to walk out with a shoping cart full of beer one too many times. We thought we were some kind of gang, when in fact we were just a public nusance. The judge gave me the option of a year in co jail, or go in the service. So i joined the navy. I was gonna see the world. So I left NY for the Great Lakes for boot camp and then was shiped to Grotton CT. an hour and a half from home. Me and the navy were not a good fit. My alcoholisim was out of control, and at the age of 17, booze wasnt worling any more, although i dint know it. I can remember sitting at the bar out side the base like I did many times after that. All alone in my 2 feet of space drinking for oblivian, or being an arogant ass hole looking to take whatever I wanted from whoever had it. The navy asked me to leave after onlt 18 months, something that would happen to me a lot in my life. I had become a taker of things and a user of people, and I pressed myself on the people who cared about me like a thumb on a bruse. For the next 18 years I ran around the country chasing after the Gratfull Dead for a while, working contruction in different places, trying to be free I would say but infact I was just trying to run away from me, though I didnt know it at the time. I spent the last few years out there in Las Vegas bouncing back and forth from drinking to oblivion, and periods of self abstinance trying to find GOD and I was killing my self. I showed up in the rooms in 95 in Las Vegas after being arrested in Newport Beach CA for grand theft telephone booth. It was a full moon< we were drinking hard and walking down the board walk saw a couple of guys beating on a phone booth, have no idea why. But me and my drinking buddy intuitively knew how to handle this situation, so we jumped right in there and gave them some help. some how they disapeared and when the swat team showed up they found me and my buddy carrying the phone booth up on the pier to see what kind of splash it would make in the ocean in the light of the full moon. Still just a public nusence. I hit AA in vegas and could not connect the dots. I heard that if I just put the plug in th jug and found GOD I could be just as happy as they were. I thought to my self, I had already been doing that and it didnt work. I must not be an alcoholic something else must be wrong with me. But what? If I really tried hard I could stay away from the booze for a while. But I would always go back.  It was my wife and those kids and that job and that damn town I lived in, Its VEGAS what do you expect. Any way for about four years I didnt drink for as long as I could and then I drank for as Long as I could. I was ready for the nut house. I was not able to hold a job, I was trying everything i could to figure out what was wrong with me. Group therepy, mental health, church, you name it. My family and I were dieing of untreated alcoholism and didnt even know it. We were doing the dance of death, and I was asked to leave home one more time because I.m a raging asshole with nothing to treat my alcoholism. I was living in a little 19 foot camp trailor and was a week off my last drink on a friday night nov 1st of 1999 and knew of an AA meeting at the place I went to domestic violence class. I dont know why I went but I did. It was my night. I heard a guy tell of his drinking and his trying not to drink and what he went through in between his periods of abstanance. He talked of drinking as long as he could and not drinking as long as he could. I said to my self if he's an alcoholic, so am I. It was that night I found out that I sufferd from an illness that only a spiritual experience would conquer. And I bought it.  I've done just about evrything wrong that you can do wrong here and no one asked me to leave. you just told me to keep doing it as long as I could stand it, and when I was ready you had the solution for me. And you were right. today I have a solution that lets me be comfortable in my own skin. In the words of that guy at my first meeting in 99, I have found in AA what I was looking for in the bottom of the bottle. AA and God has given me a way to feel ok wether life around me is ok or not. I live in Reno NV now. I'm been out of work for a real long time. I rent a room in someone else's house and I got relationship issues, but my life is good. I have people in my life who care what happens to me and I care about what happens to them. almost everyone in my life is on the spiritual path trying to stay in the sun light of the spirit.  I will end with this: WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP ITS BEEN