Hello and welcome to Sobercast. We provide AA speaker meetings and workshops in a podcast

format. We are an ad free podcast and if you enjoy listening please help us be self-supporting

by visiting sobercast.com, look for the donate link and drop a dollar to into the virtual

basket. Also, if you're a member of NA or have friends that are, please tell them about

our other podcast, NAPOD. NAPOD features NA speakers and workshops in the same format

as sobercast. We upload a new speaker every day and it's easy to subscribe by searching

for NAPOD, N-A-P-O-D, or one word on any podcast player app or go to napod.xyz if you'd like

to listen online. Hope you enjoy the podcast and have a great day.

First of all, I'd like to congratulate all the diversity people, the fantastic line of

birthdays. If anybody ever needed evidence that this works. Also, they welcome all the newcomers

and I hope you stick around. Everyone in this room was a newcomer at one time and we're

not because we stuck around, we kept coming back often against our own will at first

and but it seemed to work that way. And Andrea is a hard act to follow. What a great

and powerful talk that was. My story starts at the beginning. As many of you could tell,

I'm not from around here. Originally, I was born in Northern Ireland, which is close

to Ireland geographically. My family was kind of middle class. My mother was a school teacher.

She was the principal of the school and my father was a businessman and neither of them

was alcoholic. They had other problems, but alcohol was not it. And for some reason that

I don't think is even relevant maybe here, I wound up just feeling completely alone in

a family that was perfectly normal otherwise. And something about me, just as Andrea said,

you know, I felt alone, I felt separate, I felt I was different and I felt I had to have

all the answers myself. And I did well in school and I was going to be the doctor in the

...