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What I Learned from Mandatory AA Meetings

What started out as a punishment, evolved into a positive

Brian Relay
6 min readApr 20, 2019
Photo by Zoltan Kovacs on Unsplash

When I was around 28, I had too much to drink one night and basically terrorized my girlfriend at the time. I have a tendency to be an angry drunk and it wasn’t pretty. I’ll spare the details, but let’s just say I’m lucky the police didn’t shoot me on the spot.

They would have been within their rights to.

Thankfully no one got hurt and I went with them peacefully. It was a rough time in my life. In the end, I wasn’t convicted and was sentenced to two years probation.

The judge said, “No drinking, and no more Samurai swords.”

Fair enough.

One meeting with my probation officer she had me piss in a cup. I told her I had been smoking weed. She got serious. I said I thought I just wasn’t supposed to drink since that was what caused the issue in the first place. Rather than send me to jail, she put me in an IOP (Intensive Outpatient Program) for 90 days.

That seemed like a good trade off.

When I got there, I discovered that I was in a program for heroin addicts. I couldn’t believe it. This was not where I belonged. I had done my share of recreational narcotics, but heroin? Sure I sniffed it one time, but…

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Brian Relay
Brian Relay

Written by Brian Relay

Aspiring novelist/director/podcaster/spiritual guru/normal person

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