The experience of dissipation towards recovery, and not the theory, this is what I can bring to another alcoholic. How precious is that? What a price I paid to obtain it! More than any Ivy League tuition, a tuition that paid for a graduate degree from the school of hard knocks and my school colors were black and blue… I paid it myself through countless vain attempts to drink like a normal person and did not obtain recovery easily or at the top of my class. It is this experience I bring to the man or woman shut off from life, isolated from it by the horrors of this disease. It is the experience of a man who has looked into the gates of hell and turned away.

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