Cherise R. AFG Female

**Cherise** (0:00)
Hello, everybody, my name is Cherise. I'm in recovery. And about 10 days ago, I got a text from Dave, and led to a phone call with Chris, and he asked me if I'd be willing to fill in for somebody who couldn't speak on Sunday morning on the 12th step for 20 minutes. And I said, if I'm not the keynote speaker, forget it. I don't want to do anything else.
And then I said, one of my friends likes to say, when they're at a funeral, they want to be the corpse, and when they're at a wedding, they want to be the bride. And I really just shared that with them on that call. Chris on that call, and I just love that. I just think it's so funny.
Like Chris mentioned, or maybe it was Todd, I don't know. I came to Al-Anon in 1986, and my story is a little of a few fellowships. I was first in AA for six months prior to being led to Al-Anon, and I was so obsessed with this. And I'm just, I'm from the Hudson Valley in New York, about an hour north of New York City, and I know I know everybody from New York thinks they're so much better than everybody else. I just want you to all know that I realize I'm only a little bit better than the rest of you at that.
Anyway, so my sponsor in AA, as we were going into a Tuesday night meeting, I didn't even know there was an Eleanor meeting there, but I was so obsessed with this individual in my life. They literally, this is a, they literally pushed me in this door where there was a few women sitting, said, this is Karen. And he said to Karen, they need you. And he pulled the door shut, and he walked down the hall of the AA meeting, and that was my introduction to Eleanor.
Obviously, that was a previous life. And I'll share an experience that was really an early experience, one of my earlier memories in Eleanor. I was probably in about maybe six weeks, maybe two months, and I was sharing, and this woman in the meeting interrupted me, like mid-sentence, and I'm like, what's going on here? And she said, excuse me, but we focus on ourselves in here. And I was like, oh, I just wanted to crawl into the table, because I had no idea how outwardly focused I was, and how obsessed I was with this individual, and how it's all I was talking about. So that was a really early experience in Eleanor, and that really kind of brought me up short, and kind of showed me, like, you know what, you need to, you got a long way to go before you can get your focus where it needs to be. And for myself, Eleanor was an invitation to, you know, get focused on myself. And my story is gonna cross just a little bit in the beginning at least, because that's just the way it is. What I've got to share is my own experience, strength, and hope, you know? And if I don't share me, we got nothing going on, so that's what you get. And for me, intimacy is about me being me and me allowing you to see me. I pretty much shoot from the hook, so one thing I'll just share, I know that Guy read the 12 Traditions, something that has served me a lot in my recovery. Yeah, anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, every minor place principles about personalities. And that's super important that I don't talk to people about other people I see in the rooms and break their anonymity. And I thought that's all it meant. But the fact of the matter is, for me, even more important is to listen to the message and not like just scratch you off because you're the messenger and I think you're this or I think you're that or you're a jerk or whatever. It's so that I can like grow and here and be a channel from whatever you've got to offer and not like put you in some category and just shut myself off because I used to do that in my early recovery. So you may like me, you may hate me, you may think I'm crazy, whatever. It's totally fine. I'm not going to try to please you all. I can promise you that. I learned that in Al-Anon too. If I'm going to try to please you all, I got a real co-dependent problem happening.
So yeah, I came into Al-Anon in 1986 and was going to at least, well, I can't even count. I mean, I was just immersed in meetings and I became a service junkie actually. I hope I'm just going to share because it's part of my story. I helped build the Narcotics Anonymous Fellowship in the Greater New York Region. And I was doing way more than, I didn't understand my motivation for some of it until I crashed and burned at about three and a half years in my recovery process. Crashed and burned really hard. And I'm grateful that you mentioned, you know, you talked a little bit about ACA, ECRA stuff, because my story is definitely that of an ACA. And where I was at three and a half years, I was laying in bed for 16 hours a day for three months straight. And a friend of mine said, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. And I will say this, if it wasn't for 12-step fellowships, I wouldn't be here today. If it was only for 12-step fellowships, I wouldn't be here either. I know that for sure. And 12-step fellowships have taught me to trust myself. They've taught me to identify what I'm feeling, which to me, you know, these steps are a pathway to myself.