Chris C. AA Female

**Chris** (0:00)
Hi, everybody, my name is Chris, and I'm an alcoholic.
Oh, wow.
First of all, I definitely need to thank the Winter Gathering Committee for asking me to come and do this.
And I need to thank Brittany for that amazing introduction. I just love her. And I was sharing with a new friend of mine that you all would be much better served if I would just sit down and for the next hour, Brittany serenaded you. She has got the most amazing voice I have ever heard in my life, bar none. And there's some girls sitting in the front row going, yeah, because we all got the pleasure of hearing her at the Women's Safe Place Retreat. And she's just, she's an incredible spirit. I only hope that I can live up to that introduction. I seriously doubt it.
I'm a little off-kelter today, and I'm just going to start off with that. I said, I feel like somebody has blown insulation into my head. And right now, as I'm talking to you, I'm hearing an echo of about three other voices up here. So I said halfway through my talk, if I go, really? You did that? I'm just talking to myself because I can hear it just going, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam up in here right now.
I don't know if you guys got it here in Columbus, but over in Coshokton, half of our town has like having a near-death experience with this bug that's going around. And I work as a secretary at an elementary school. So what that means is I work in a very large Petri dish, okay? And just, you know, my brother got a hold of me who's like this uber-athletic guy out in Colorado, you know. He's just all this stuff. And he goes, you ought to take up running. I haven't been sick in 13 years. I said, when's the last time somebody walked into your office and barfed? You know, and he was like, oh, okay, never mind. But yeah, I was just, it was real give and take last weekend whether I was even going to be able to make it here. So Wednesday was the first day I got out of bed, because what happened was I got that crazy crud going around. And then I wound up getting fluid backed up into my lungs. And so it wasn't a good time. So I am beyond delighted to be here tonight.
I was really worried that I wasn't going to make it. And I used to come to this conference all the time. And it's one of my favorite conferences. And so I am absolutely delighted to be here tonight. And I was blessed with a seat in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous on October 29th of 1994 And if you're sitting in here this afternoon, and you aren't feeling too blessed, and you're here because your sponsor drugged you here, or you were threatened within an inch of your life, I get that.
That's pretty much how I went to a lot of my firsts in Alcoholics Anonymous. It was completely against my will, but I didn't have any other options. You know, when I came here to all of you on October 29th, I was out of ideas, and I was out of options. And I don't think there is any better way to walk in to AA than being out of ideas and out of options, because you're willing, you know, at that point.
But my family of sponsorship says that I have to do a few things to maintain being a member in Good Standing and Alcoholics Anonymous. I'll try and get those out of the way right away. And one of those is that I have to have a home group, which I do. It's the Wednesday Night Miracles in Progress group back in Kishopton, Ohio. It's at 6.3 at night. It is a women's meeting.
I think it's the greatest meeting in town. We started it two years ago because we got tired of burying women back in my hometown.
There was a lot of water down AA going around, and we were literally planting girls in the ground. And so we decided instead of being a part of the problem, we were going to be a part of the solution and start a meeting that was focused on our program of action that's outlined in our first 164 pages. And what I can tell you is we are a tiny little town. I have two of the girls here with me from Kishakti, and we have about a fifth of the entire membership in Alcoholics Anonymous with me in Kishakti now. That's an exaggeration, but we are really excited to see what's happening in that meeting. We are a solution-based meeting, and we get very, very excited, and we're watching people stay sober. And we just had several anniversaries that we celebrated last Wednesday, and that wasn't happening. And we've got a girl with a couple years, a girl with a year, and we've got a lot of them at three, four, six, eight months, and it's exciting to watch. And probably one of the greatest things I've ever watched is to watch a girl come in that's going to have a baby, and know that her little baby, now she's had it, and we're all communally raising it. And that baby may never have to see a drunken mother.