Hi. My name is Luís. I am an adult child of an alcoholic. I've come to this meeting for the last seven years. But I can't understand how my friends never knew what happened at our house, how nobody could tell my dad was violent. He had a bad temper, and I was a small child. Even after he got sober, my life remained beyond recovery. I've been in the program for over thirty years, since I started college. My first year, I broke down. I cried at school each day of my third trimester. I dropped out of college on medical withdrawal. While at UC Irvine, a social worker gave me a book where I learned about ACOA. In 1988, this book was fairly new, released in paperback the year before.
It spoke to me from the first page, from "Chapter 1: Vignettes". It Will Never Happen to Me made me upset in a visceral way. I got good grades, but life was another story. For me, the big picture wasn't on the big screen, or on television, but an idea, I learned about from a buddy, one of my brother's friends from his fraternity. Fitting in with others was always a problem, even with my family. But I started meetings and found others like me; too bad no one has fun, too scared to enjoy life. The big picture swallowed me whole inside a whale. Forever in the dark, unable to relate, to find my niche, to live.
At this point, I just want to ride a motorbike from Chicago back home but first, I have to learn how to ride a bobber, and get a state license. My dreams at 52, a deck of playing cards with no jokers, are gone. But I may start over from scratch, begin anew. Learn martial arts again, play drums and go running, learn how to be a kid, and roll with the punches. After the pandemic, I can get a new job, travel to foreign lands, learn another language, fly back to India, and visit my homeland. The land of my birth place, where I never returned because of finances.
One day, I must retire but I have no savings, all to graduate school. At the school of hard breaks, I learned to trust no one, even at these meetings. Part of the laundry list, I've a long way to go to find recovery. To forgive and forget, to move on and let go, to live in the moment. I hope before I die, I will achieve some small glory in the real world. But it doesn't matter, so many people died from coronavirus, dreams of the big picture become moot to others, although we all suffer. Whatever the future offers, to be content, water off a duck's back, no matter what happens, life is never easy, but questions have answers, and some prayers are answered. Too bad I don't believe in God, the big picture, or that anyone cares, since life is meaningless without a shred of hope. Thank you for listening, I'm grateful to be here, grateful for the meetings.
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