- Alcohol
- Faith
- Friends & Family
Submitted by: Amy Cooper
The moral of my story is that God took a drunk biker and turned her into his daughter and a lady.
I used to be the person in my family that nobody wanted to talk about.
My name is Jessica and I work in substance abuse treatment in a couple of different capacities: admissions coordinator/counselor, intake coordinator, and now community liaison marketer. My sobriety date is August 3, 2010. I currently have had six and a half sober years.
Everything in my life has changed since I became sober. I had a lot of a lot of consequences from my use. I had legal consequences, financial consequences, and, of course, family consequences. I had three DUIs, two ex-husbands, and a mother who wouldn’t even speak to me because she was tired of watching me kill myself slowly and painfully.
My last DUI was August 2, 2010 and I had some clarity and, while it was brief, it was enough for me to put myself in treatment. I think a little bit of me decided that I was going to do all the stuff that these people were telling me to do and when it didn’t work for me, it would just prove to them that they were wrong and I wasn’t like them.
I was the person who was raised in the church. I went to church on Sunday and I sang in choir and I taught Sunday school and I did all those things because that’s what I thought the girls from my family were supposed to do– but I had no relationship with God. It wasn’t until I sat down that I actually did my fourth step and saw everything in my own handwriting that I realized how God had been protecting me (mostly from myself) all along. For a girl who never felt like she was enough and always strove to be perfect her whole life, the knowledge that I might be a beloved child of God really changed my life.
In 2015, my dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer. It was very sudden. He called me one Tuesday night after I just gotten home from my mom’s house. I went to check on him and then took him to the emergency room, where he presented with generalized weakness and shortness of breath. In four short hours, they diagnosed him with multisystem cancer in his lungs, liver, stomach, and pancreas. Cancer was everywhere. It looked like somebody took white paint and just threw it all over the MRI. Within four hours they were meeting him and talking to me about hospice– he only lived a month longer. That was June 24, and we buried him on July 21.
I got to be the one called to take him to the hospital that evening and be there with him. If I had still been drinking, then that wouldn’t have happened. In my addiction, I was not dependable or reliable. In fact, my father probably wouldn’t have known how to find me. Fortunately, I had already become the person that worked a program of recovery.
I was there. I got to care for him. He was never with strangers and no one took care of him besides me. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I gave his eulogy, and I got to stand in that church and talk about the man that was my father. Never once did I think about picking up a drink. I got to be there for my brother and sister, I got to be there for my father’s parents who were both in their nineties and still alive—and still had had to bury their son, my dad.
My father was 62 when he died. He had a lot of mental health issues in his life, particularly anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He would call me at three o’clock in the morning to make sure I unplugged my toaster because he was afraid my house was going to burn down, and I didn’t even know where my toaster was! My father was an amazingly talented musician and he was a genius and very bright, but his own addiction paralyzed him.
He never did anything with all of that God-given talent. After his death, I realized that even in recovery I had been living a very safe, very calculated, very comfortable life. I had this beautiful little bubble that I had built and everyone that I knew was in recovery. I worked in treatment, so my coworkers were all in recovery. I met my friends in the rooms and I was part of a motorcycle club with mostly sober members. Everyone in my life except for my immediate family were all in recovery and I had no idea how to function in the real world.
I decided I to move to Florida. I had just gotten out of a relationship and I packed the dog and my stuff—I called my buddies in Tallahassee, FL and moved to Florida. I didn’t have a job lined up, I didn’t know where I was going to be, I had no idea what I was going to do. When I got there, I just knew I was supposed to show up and I knew that if I did everything that I was supposed to God would do the rest.
So, I immediately found a job in running a detox. I was commuting from Tallahassee and ended up finding a home in the country on a cattle ranch. In the beginning, I felt that I was in the middle of nowhere, because I went from being completely surrounded by the program to having no program and working all the time.
I realized early on, holy smokes you better figure it out quickly. Find recovery and get back into a program. It’s amazing because I have faced the fears surrounding so many things, and now I’m okay. I’m sober and everything is good and God is good and now he’s continuing to just build this person He wants. When we quit using, it is only the beginning.
I got the prescription that Dr. Bob wrote in 1937—it is the cure for alcoholism: Trust God, clean house, help others, that’s it. Everything else is just about extra– it’s a bonus.