By the time I got to AA at age 47, I had lost my sense of humor, my interest in career, and my enthusiasm for everything that didn't involve drinking and getting high. I was arrogant, intellectually prideful, and emotionally aloof. I was stiff as a board, but worse, I knew better than you about any most every subject so reason or logic didn't work on me. I once heard a speaker say that she was so cool when she got to AA that she was frozen. That described me. And I'm still in the process of thawing out.
I was an isolator. I did most of my drinking at home alone. In fact for as long as I could remember I felt "apart from" rather than "a part of." It was better this way. If I kept my distance, no one could find out what a rotten so and so I really was.
It was in this state that my Higher
Power pushed me into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. The message
I received was "we don't care who you are or what you've done we're going
to love you anyways and there's nothing you can say or do that will change
our minds about you." This is the message I try to carry. Some
days I do better than others.