Living Life, Growing Up Through good times and bad, these AAs turn to the Fellowship and their Higher Powers and keep going
Snapshots of Sobriety May 1999
Sober in the Sixties July 2006
Experience Sobriety February 2011
An Archway to Life January 2009
CHAPTER NINE
A Few 24 Hours Later Young old-timers talk about where their journey has taken them, and about passing it on to the next generation
Who Says an Old-Timer's Got to Be Old? April 2001
Sober In School September 2007
Young, Drunk and Broke January 2011
Good, Bad, or Indifferent July 2008
Welcome
Young & Sober is a collection of Grapevine stories about the joys and challenges of recovering early in life, and about recognizing alcoholism after a drinking history that in some cases has only lasted a few years. Are the stories of those who came to AA in their teens, 20s and 30s different from those who got sober later in life? No … and yes. “Being young, we recover fast physically,” writes the author of “Young Peoples’ Groups.” “But our insides still boil like mad … the young person … has little or no productive past, and organizing a life terrorizes him.”
Chapters One and Two are a collection of qualifications—the places drinking took young alcoholics and examples of how they earned their seat at the table. Chapters Three through Five explore relationships with family members who have long been part of AA, with old-timers who helped show them the ropes, and finally, with people their own age.
Chapters Six and Seven talk about further coming to grips with alcoholism and recovery from it. Several writers did not fully accept their disease until some event finally got their attention. Some describe how getting involved in service helped them feel more a part of things, while others write about how working the Steps showed them a way out of their misery.
“What we are like now” is covered in Chapters Eight and Nine, with topics such as acceptance, growing up, growing older, and experiencing joy and pain in sobriety. “Having the opportunity to watch this program work in young peoples’ lives the way that it worked in mine is one of the greatest joys of my sobriety,” says the author of “Fountain of Youth.” Written by alcoholics of all lengths of sobriety, Young & Sober is about coming into AA at an early age, learning to have sober relationships, doing the Steps and getting service commitments—and most of all, it’s about learning how to live life joyously.
CHAPTER ONE
What It Was Like, What Happened
Their drinking careers weren’t long—but long enough
What brings an alcoholic through the doors of an AA meeting? What brings a young person, perhaps still working his or her way through high school, into the basement of a church, into a meeting room where the other members there are often older, married with children, established in a career, engaged in community activities?
“No way was I going to spend all my time with those old fogies. They were all over twenty-five!” one member recounts in “Nothing Left to Lose.” But after more experimentation, more problems, and several more treatment centers, she returns.
“My options were very obvious: jail, the streets, or death. I was also suffering from liver disease,” the author of the story, “Homeless Bound” says. For him the repercussions of drinking were concrete and physical. For others, the devastation was more emotional and internal. “I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror,” writes the author of “Teen Nightmare.”
These and the other AAs in this Chapter, as well as throughout this book, have drinking histories that anyone can identify with. “I never went anywhere without a mug full of whiskey and cola. All but one of my friends had had enough of my erratic, violent, and rude behavior while drinking. I always drank to get as drunk as I could.”
The age they came into AA or the length of time they spent drinking are, in fact, small details. It is the loneliness, the alienation, the humiliation and sickness that comes from drinking alcoholically that finally brings them in, or finally convinces them to stay. “Alcoholism has no minimum age requirement. I realize that many fellow AA members have lost homes, marriages, and children to alcohol before I acquired any of those things. But I lost enough.”
Young or old, newcomers or old-timers, there is something of all of our stories here.
Noticed
October 2007
I had my first drink when I was twelve years old. I loved it. I loved the way it made me feel, and the way it made me not feel. I grew up yearning for a place to belong, and when I drank, I found it. My first drink allowed me to become someone completely different. It allowed me to have a voice, and believe me, people heard it. It made me feel like I finally was being noticed, and I never looked back.
At
