A happy ending
In many ways I could begin this letter with the words ‘once upon a time’, because when I was a young boy, the stories that were read to me that began with those words had happy endings. On 25th May 2025, I achieved 44 years of unbroken sobriety. 44 years of freedom from alcohol and its accompanying misery.
On 25th May 1981, I went to an AA meeting and after the meeting, a guy who was present gave me his landline telephone number (there were no mobile phones or www back then), and said to me, “The life that you have been living doesn’t have to be the life that you continue to live when you leave here this evening.” That guy was three months sober and for him, it was a great achievement. At that time, he was serving in the Royal Navy and the following year his ship was bombed and sunk in the Falklands conflict. He lost 22 of his pals but he was physically unharmed, and didn’t use his sad loss as an excuse to drink and he remains sober to this day.
Today, I know with absolute certainty, that the words he said to me that evening were the right words, from the right person, at the right time, and were spoken by someone who lacked fear of being contradicted. When I arrived at that AA meeting I had no idea that I was standing at the threshold of change to such a vast extent, and I haven’t taken another drink of alcohol since.
Up until that point in time my life had been a failure. School was a failure, work was a failure, relationships were failures, crime was a failure, and alcohol was a failure because I had never managed it, it had managed me. So many people had tried to point out to me, as I continued down my destructive path of misery, where I was going to end up. I had particular names for such people! But those people knew, and they were right. They could see that which I was incapable of seeing.
I’m still making progress by trying to grow along spiritual lines. I often recall the words spoken to me by my first sponsor when I asked him, “When will my character defects be removed?” He replied, “When you stop practicing them.”
KEVIN, Plymouth
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