Alive, Sober And Joyful

I got sober for the first time in San Diego in 1987, when I was 17 years old, which helped me to graduate from high school, but then I relapsed a year later when I moved away for college in Santa Barbara. There was a lot of drinking on campus and, at the time, I wasn’t fully convinced that I was really, truly, an alcoholic and not just some teenager with issues. Thankfully, it only took a year of drunken puking, embarrassing sexual encounters, bad grades, and self-loathing for me to become convinced that I was both an alcoholic and a teenager with issues. I was granted the gift of desperation and got sober again in 1989.