Jim's Recovery Story...

I got sober a month before my 24th birthday in Nov. 1982.

I was a struggling Kinney Shoe Store Assistant Manager, in a management training program in the Inner City Los Angeles Area. I had a reputation of being a good salesman, but I had a habit of showing up for work in the morning wearing the same clothes I wore the day before for 12 hours, smelling like stale beer, cigarette, and Pete’s Chicken shack where we went after the bars closed the night before. My boss told me I smelled like a spearmint gum cocktail and he was tired of me blowing booze in the customer’s faces! I thought it was my little secret….

I had been transient since the age of 17 when I graduated high school and moved away from my parents’ home so I could like live life “MY Way”! I was soon homeless in the greater LA area for the next 6 years, always able to find another job, but not able to keep one. Damaged family and social relations because of my sneaky alcoholic thinking and that “Peculiar Mental Twist” the Bid Book talks about when I comes to alcohol and in my case drugs too--Nobody tolerated me anymore.

When my boss confronted me with my drinking, I knew that I would be homeless again soon, and I finally reached my bottom. I came into the rooms actually in June of 82’ but was a chronic slipper for the next 5 months because I couldn’t imagine my life without alcohol and drugs (I would eventually get to the place where I couldn’t imagine my life either with drugs and alcohol – or without. That was the jumping off place….). I was in and out of the rooms in rapid succession getting clearer about the seriousness my alcoholism and drug problem.

My first six months of sobriety were miserable. They were some of the loneliness days of my life when I was willing to attend 12-step meetings but determined to do the bare minimum and resisting change. Luckily I ran into a group for drunks (and addicts) in the South Bay called the Trudgers, and they told me: If you are tired of living the way you have been, “Come with us and do what we do”, and that was to take the 12-steps and walk this journey of recovery one day at a time.

The 12-steps are a lifetime process, and the people I’ve met in the rooms became life-long friends. I have been rocketed into the fourth dimension, and I truly know that there is life after recovery. I left Kinney Shoes Corp after six years of sobriety, and after making financial amends to the company while still employed, a valued and successful store Manager.  Opportunity knocked and I went on to start my own Manufacture Rep company and spent the next 20 years in the apparel business working with industrial hosiery knitting company’s in the US and Mexico.

I married and raised two great Sons. The marriage ended after sixteen years and to this day the mother of my children and I remain dear friends. I’ve changed careers--now working as an SUD Counselor for the last 12 years. Over the years I have traveled all over North America and everywhere I have traveled, I’ve found the recovery community strong, welcoming, and full of loving, caring, creative, and talented people walking the happy road of destiny. --