My talk from last night on the occasion of my 10th anniversary in GA, a 12-step program

I’ve shared my war stories with many of you before, but I know there are some people here who are relatively new to this meeting, so I’m going to try to hit a few of the low notes so you can have some idea what I was about as a gambler, and maybe find something to identify with both in my screw-ups and in the ways in which this program is helping me find my way today.

My life as a kid was not exactly a primrose path, although it wasn’t any worse than countless other people’s lives. But a couple of differences between me and lots of other people, I think, were, one, I learned a lot about the value of keeping secrets if I wanted to survive at home, and two, I became adept at a very early age at using various kinds of extreme behavior to self-medicate against depression, hopelessness, and pain.

Sometimes the extreme behavior was what some shrinks call positive addictions. I ran marathons, I was a 70-hour-a-week star at work and school, and there was even a time in my very, very distant past when I was what you might call physically sculpted from hours and hours in the gym and on the trails. Like I say, that was a few years ago.

But less positive addictions came just as easy to me, and may have had more self-medicating power. I even learned how to manage my addictive behavior so that it was somewhat episodic and the result was that I could be very high-functioning and successful, and even fulfill my responsibilities as a father and husband, not perfectly, but well enough so that I never got thrown out of the house.

I got to be 47 years old, survived the painful end of my first marriage, and that year as I was getting married for the second time I was actually beginning to think that I might outlast my demons and move more gracefully and quietly into middle age. Not so much. I had denied a lot of pain that was associated with the first divorce, the pain it caused for my daughters, and the fact that I went to work every day in a strange setting: a company owned by my ex-wife’s sister. I got no help, no prescriptions, nothing. Thought I would tough it out. Not so much.

That same summer I got totally blindsided by the appeal of daytrading in the stock market. Never saw it coming, never thought it had anything to do with gambling, and never, once I got started, had the slightest bit of control or power over what I was doing. That seems weird to say, because I got up at 4 a.m. and made elaborate trading plans just about every day I was in action. I was the very picture of apparent control. The picture was a total lie.

I had a couple of special problems that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. One, I had $17 million a year coming across my desk. Two, it turned out that I was a wizard at cooking the books. The picture got uglier and uglier, and passed over the next few months from being a picture of cowboy recklessness to a picture of criminal behavior. I was looking at a different picture, focused on magical thinking about the profits I would surely turn over to the company and a tiny strand of possible legality based on the authorization I had been given to invest the company’s funds. I was investing, yeah, that was the ticket. Nobody wants to see himself as a crook, after all. But the fact that I was keeping my activity secret was all the proof I should have needed to see what I was doing. I never did see it until I had run out the string and burned through an amazing amount of money.

Then, when it was really over anyway, I turned myself in. Not so heroic when you wait til all the bullets are used up before you hand over your six-guns.

So, I lawyered up, fessed up, quit my job, made an appointment to see a shrink, and found my way to my first GA meeting on March 5, 1999 at St. John’s Church in Watertown. Two weeks later I told my daughters, which was the toughest night of my life, worse than the night I was indicted or the night I pled guilty, worse than my first night in prison, and worse than the night my second wife Annie told me our marriage was over.

During my first two years in the program, back in 1999 and 2000, I didn’t think I had much going for me. A lot of it was what we call “white-knuckle” time. I knew that I had to stay away from my next bet, my next gamble, my next colossally brilliant and incredibly self-important strategy for transforming my life and the lives of the people I cared about into a magical Garden of Eden again.

I didn’t know what the next bet might be, or how far away it might be. There was a lot about the program that I didn’t yet get, but I did get this: however long it might take me to convince myself, with all kinds of ornate and elaborate mental gymnastics, to go ahead and let myself have one more bet, I would then be ready to go on at the speed of light, the speed of thought, to a second bet, and a third, and a fourth, and on.

So I knew that one more bet would spell doom. It would be a slap in the face to the few people I still had in my corner. It would be reckless self-destruction for me.

So I held on, with those white knuckles. I made meetings, and meetings kept me sane, and thoughtful, and soft enough in my outer shell to listen, to hear, and to learn how to live in my own skin again. I’ve been to a shrink or two in my life, and I am convinced that there are very few shrinks who could help me as much as I have been helped by sitting in these halls week after week, month after month, year after year, listening to the wisdom of others and trying to dredge up some wisdom of my own from my daily experiences and struggles.

I occasionally indulge in a kind of reverse magical thinking: what if I had never gambled? But while it is true that some things would be better, I believe that it is also true that I would be worse off in many ways than I am today. I might well never have done the work that I think is at the core of my worth as a human being today, and I know I would never have gotten to know some truly wonderful people.

Like many of us in this program, I’ve been blessed with a hell of a brain. When it is working against me, it is obscenely powerful. But set it free in surroundings populated by my wise, supportive, caring brothers and sisters in this program, and it is a brain that can serve me well, and even help me do some good in the world.

A couple of years ago I remember sitting in this room and telling an old Indian story about a good wolf and a bad wolf, the wolves that we all have inside of us. Which wolf wins, was the question that the young brave asked the elder. The answer is clear every single day of my life. The wolf that wins, good wolf or bad wolf, is the one that you feed.

Being connected in all kinds of good and fruitful ways with good men and women is the best way I know to feed my good wolf. It works, and I guess it is just dumb luck, my dumb but very good luck, that with all of these connections, in this room and in other halls and in the other relationships and connections that I try to make with people, not only do I get to feed my good wolf but I also get to laugh, and love, and become more and more comfortable in my own skin. More human.

When I first walked into a GA meeting I was sure that I was at the world’s deepest and lowest bottom, to use terminology that I learned later. I always did have to be #1. Nobody could have a life as pathetic and hopeless as mine. I actually thought that I would end up panhandling in Harvard Square next to that guy who is out there every day with a sign that literally asks you to give him money for weed and whiskey. Within a few weeks I sold houses, cars, and timeshares just to stay afloat. I wanted intensely to experience the serenity and comfort that I saw in the faces of people like Nicky I and Leo and Jim C at the meetings I attended, but all I knew to do was to keep coming back, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep reminding myself that I had been tough enough to accomplish other great things in my life, so now maybe I could be tough enough to stay away from a bet, to stay away from committing suicide, and to stay away from magical thinking.

So I held on for dear life with those white knuckles and I stayed free from a bet. Eventually I struggled through the steps, worked off and on with a sponsor, took on responsibilities in the program, and started to feel at times like I was living this program.

Eventually I began to feel there was real distance between what I was doing in my life each day and what I had done when I was in action, playing the stock market, making 50 bets an hour, burning through an obscene amount of my own and other people’s money. Not so much distance that I felt protected or powerful, but enough that my self-loathing began to lift. Enough so that I began occasionally to find humor and integrity and courage and hopefulness in the way I was living my life, to replace the depression and hopelessness and self-hatred that had settled in over decades.

I’ve had my share of opportunities to make amends, and I am still working at it. 1220 days and nights in prison were a start, and the restitution and back taxes that I pay each month are nothing to sneeze at. But the most important amends that I can make to my children and, frankly, everyone else who has been affected by my actions, is to have come through at this end of this grim tunnel with my eye still on the light and my life still filled with hope and energy. None of that would have been possible, and I would not have survived prison and solitude in my current reasonably intact condition, without my having let this program and its lessons and principles and steps and people into my life totally.

One of the paradoxical things about this program, as I understand it, is that to succeed, I have to let go of my will and my willfulness, and in a daily process of meditation turn it all over. At the same time, I know that in my own life I need a strong will to be open, and honest, and steadfast in my commitment to be what I need to be for my children and the other people who care about me.

This program would not work for me today, if all that it offered was a chance to get back to some spiritual and human break-even point where all I could manage was a pathetic, teary “I’m sorry for being such a screw-up.”

But the more I put into this, the more I get in return, and I get much more than just breaking even. I believe that this program is one of the cornerstones of the ability that each of us has – on a spiritual and human level – to be great people again. Whether it is love, or life, or work, or 12th-stepping, or personal comfort, or helping others to thrive, it isn’t magical thinking if we pour all of our humanity into making it real.

So here I am, again, brimming with confidence and energy like a young kid.

At the same time, every single day I feel insufficient. I feel incredibly powerful regret that could take me over and reduce me to a puddle of tears and depression.

If I let it.

I’m not going to let it.

I will keep coming.