Maybe you’ve been sitting with this one a while. Are you a real alcoholic, or do you just drink more than most people? Nobody walks into AA without having asked it, usually for years.
The Big Book has a phrase for this. So does Chuck C, whose writing plenty of old-timers still keep within reach; his version is a conscious separation from God and mankind. Big words, until somebody puts a life behind them.
Holly D put a life behind them on a recent episode of Sober Speak. Sober since September 28, 1996, living now in Jacksonville, Florida, she starts her story not at her bottom but at her first drink, at five years old.
Listen to her describe that drink and the Big Book stops sounding like a book.
What a Real Alcoholic Finds in the First Drink
Libertyville, Illinois, north of Chicago. Her father was a well-respected surgeon who was also mainlining amphetamines, and he had her driving at three and shooting guns at four.
“A lot of neighborhood animals disappeared during my gun training,” she said.
Her mother’s routine was martinis, crying, sleep. For four years, all of this was simply exciting.
Then kindergarten.
“My first day of kindergarten, I knew there was something really wrong with me,” she said. “I needed a drink that day.”
It took a few months. At one of her parents’ cocktail parties, her father handed the five-year-old a job serving drinks to the guests, which is how she ended up at the bar with a highball glass, vodka, and a lemon.
She called it a martini, because a martini was what her mother drank, and she drank the whole thing on the walk across the room.
“I didn’t get taller. I didn’t get beautiful. I didn’t get smarter. I was five. I didn’t even want those things. What did happen to me was a miracle. In an instant I fell in love with everyone in the room, and they all fell in love with me. I had been consciously separated from God and mankind. And I drank a glass of vodka, and I was connected.”
Read that again if you need to. It’s what Chuck C was reaching for, and it’s what the Big Book means by the real alcoholic. Somebody takes a first drink and finds the piece she never knew was missing.
Daily drinking by eleven. Hitchhiking around the country by thirteen.
What Incomprehensible Demoralization Actually Looks Like
Incomprehensible demoralization is the Big Book’s phrase. Holly borrowed it on the podcast and then translated it: “which I think is an eloquent term for hell, quite frankly.”
Hell looked like eight years on the road. Small for her age, nowhere near twenty-one to anybody looking, she woke up in California with people whose names she didn’t know. Iowa. Galveston.
Every time the police brought her home, they were bringing her back from further away.
A psychiatrist told her parents she needed a three-day evaluation. They collected her a year and a day later, when the insurance ran out.
Picture a fifteen-year-old on a couch with her arms crossed, listening to a doctor tell her parents to make funeral arrangements. Terminally insane. A sociopath. Not going to live.
“What happened for me in that moment is this man has degrees all over the world,” she said. “So what he did that day was he gave me an answer for what was wrong with me. Because I’ve known something’s desperately wrong with me since my first day of kindergarten.”
An answer, finally. Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” became her theme song, and she ran with it for another eight years.
Along the way came a wedding to her boyfriend’s best friend, in a New Orleans blackout, followed by eight years of staying married for the money. College came too, and a 4.0.
Her assigned thesis was on the effects of alcohol and drugs on pregnancy. Somewhere in the research, she found out she was carrying her first child, and she didn’t touch a thing while she carried or nursed that baby.
The day the breastfeeding stopped, she drank.
Her daughter was a year old when Holly vanished for nine months. Her mother eventually found her in Pittsburgh.
The Day at the Birthday Party
Some days in a drinking life are louder than the rest. For Holly, it was a second birthday party.
She’d just been brought back from those nine missing months, and there she sat at her mother-in-law’s house, watching her little girl open presents.
“I was sitting on the couch, smiling for the picture, of course,” she said. “No one was sitting near me. No one would let me have a drink. No one was speaking to me. I’m the mother that has disappeared for nine months. I’ll never forget that day. You could have just tattooed a horrifying person on my forehead.”
That day she made a decision: stay put, try to be there for her daughter. Her husband made a different one, filing for divorce and taking custody.
The drinking went on. In New Orleans, you drink in bars, so that’s where she did it.
February 2, 1981 was a night in a bar in Fat City. A man offered her something else to take; she left with him, and the night ended on a dock with Holly being beaten.
No blackout this time. Fully present, she looked him in the eye and asked him to kill her.
“I was done,” she said. “I just didn’t want to wake up anymore in that world.”
The request scared him off. He ran and left her there, and she passed out, came to, found her clothes, and hitchhiked home at five in the morning.
Then she picked up the phone.
The Magic That Keeps the Pipe Flowing Is Love
A copy of Chuck C sits on Holly’s nightstand, with a highlighter next to it. Not as a textbook, she says. For identification, which, as far as she’s concerned, is the entire program.
One line keeps bringing her back, the same line she opened her episode with.
“It is not God through you to me. I missed that the first time around. It is God through me to you. And that’s like a pipe with the water faucet on. As long as water is continually running through, there’s never an empty space. Ever. And the magic that keeps that pipe flowing all the time for me is love.”
Almost thirty years of sobriety, and that’s the summary. Not a cleaned-up life. A connected one.
The full episode has the rest: how she got into AA, what that first meeting was like, the women who walked beside her in the early days, and who she became on the other side of that five a.m. phone call. If one sentence of this sounded like your own head, give it the hour.
267- Holly D- Love is the Magic That Keeps the Pipe Flowing
As for whether you’re a real alcoholic, no checklist is going to settle that. It gets settled the way it did for most people in the rooms: by hearing somebody’s story and feeling the hair on your arms stand up in recognition.
That’s identification.
Plenty of people have wondered exactly what you’re wondering. They found out they weren’t alone, and some of them will be at a meeting tonight.
Keep Listening
Episode 351: Chuck C, A New Pair of Glasses, Part 1 — Uncovering, discovering, discarding, and the material old-timers have been quoting for fifty years.
What Powerlessness Actually Means in AA — Why Step 1 keeps getting bigger the longer you stay sober, and why Bill C. calls that good news.
This post is for education and personal reflection only and is not medical advice. If you are struggling with alcohol or other drugs, please reach out to a qualified professional or a local recovery group. Quotations from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, published by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services.
Sober Speak was founded by John M. as a place for honest conversation about recovery, the kind of talk that happens in meetings but rarely makes it online. New episodes drop every Friday, featuring people sharing their experience with the 12 steps, sobriety, and the work of staying well.
You can listen on Podbean at soberspeak.podbean.com, or find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.