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My name's Daniel, I've been kind of in this meeting for a few years now, and I guess eventually I was going to have to speak at it.

So, here I go.

I don't know, I've been feeling kind of, I'm coming up about two years, and it's taken me 40 years old.

I went to my first meeting when I was one E3, so it'd be the math right, it's been 17 years, so it'd take me to get two years silver.

And during those 17 years, I tried every of which way, and I did not want to come here.

A lot of mine is, I didn't want to come out cause, and I was, I didn't want to go to our carcinomas, I didn't want to go to our carcinomas, I didn't want to be silver, I wanted, I tried every way imaginable to not end up in these rooms, and here I am.

You know, I think this is a family disease, my grandfather died in this disease, my mother's grandfather died in this disease, somehow I skipped her, and somehow I end up in these rooms, and what long story short what happened was, I mean I was never born with any kind of like Auschwitz or break, or, you know, I hit the road running when I started drinking and using it, and I grew up,

like I grew up in the city, and so it was just easy to get, easy to get drugs at a young age, and when I turned 21, started my daily drinking having, like right away, and, you know, I love drinking really.

Like, I love having like a bar fly, I love doing things like camping, or festivals, or concerts, anything that gives me a license to fucking drink, as much as I possibly can, I like doing, I like doing, and you know what, I do some of those things today, and you know, obviously I do them silver, and I actually enjoy it like way more, like going dancing silver, and I enjoy it way more.

Going camping silver, but it's been, it's been really hard, I guess the last couple weeks, you know, there's like an ebb and flow to life, and I feel like I'm in the ebb right now, and I've been like super depressed, and my mood's been all over the place.

At some moments during the day, I feel like this like empty shell, and I'm just like completely hopeless and lost, and other parts of the day, I have like this incredible sense of compassion and connection to humanity, and it's kind of crazy, it's kind of like using a little bit, just sitting here trying to feel my feelings, I am just fucking all over the place.

So what happened was I ended up going a long-term treatment, like four years ago, yeah, four years ago I went into long-term treatment, and I'm one of those alcoholics that got to the point where like, I couldn't just, you know, be in my apartment, and like go to a meeting, and then go home, and like expect to like not drink the next day.

Yeah, just I had to get fucking locked up. I got locked up for six months, six whole months, and you know what, I looked back on it, it was actually a gift for me, it was a gift to be able to like, shut it all down, and go somewhere safe, and go to groups, and get like a buffer before I got released back onto the streets, I guess.

You know, when I did, I started working the steps again, I have a sponsor, we've got a sponsor, and I started working the steps again, I did a really thorough four step, and I started writing my eight step amends, and I realized again, and that was, that was in May of 2016.

And I went back to that treatment center, and I kind of did it all over again, and I got out, I got a new sponsor, and while I left off was a, was a ace step list, and I told him I was like, dude, I gotta, there's some amends like, I gotta make, there's some shit that's like really like on my back right now, and I told him like, you know, and there were four steps last time, he's like, fuck it, let's do these amends.

And to me, I think you hear like a psychic change, or a spiritual awakening. For me, it was, it was after I started going back to those people, and taking responsibility for my behavior, and taking accountability, and doing whatever I needed to do.

There's a couple of people that I didn't know, like I ripped them off, like they had no idea, I thought they knew, but they had no idea I ripped them off, and there's a couple of other people who like out amends, who just didn't answer my, didn't answer me when I reached out, but I ended up doing them thinking, I didn't do an amends to like my child, and his mom, and my mother, and like a lot of like really big amends, and I don't know if this is a reason, but like I think this is like, I think that's a big reason.

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