The Addiction That Ended

I drank for twenty-three years. Not casually. I tried to stop nine times. On the tenth attempt — at sixty-two years old, in a church basement in Cincinnati I had wandered into off the street — something broke differently than the other nine times. I cannot tell you what the difference was. The meeting was the same kind of meeting. The people were the same kind of people. But something left me that night that had not left the other nine times. That was four years ago. I do not take credit for it. I was not stronger the tenth time. Something helped me in a way I had not been helped before.