Where Do I Go From Here?

Have you recently left a treatment facility? There is continuing help offered by AA.

Soon you’ll be back out there in the real world again. You’ll find it’s the same old world with the same old problems.

No matter where you live, you’ll still have your full share of those problems. Plus the one problem that can make all the others seem a lot bigger than they really are.

You’re not the only one who has come face to face with a drinking problem. There are about 2,000,000 of us who are not alone anymore.

Back in 1935, two men saw that alcohol had ruined their lives. They knew it would kill them if they didn’t stop drinking it. They wanted to stop, but couldn’t do it alone.

Their families and friends and doctors couldn’t do it for them. There was no personal loss or calamity big enough, no threat, treatment, or cure strong enough to make either of them stop drinking. Willpower didn’t work, either. The countless and sincere promises they had made to themselves were broken over and over again—over that first drink.

Each of the two men had been diagnosed as hopeless alcoholics. Worse yet, they saw themselves as hopeless. Until they saw each other.

By strange coincidence, they met and began to share their common experience with alcohol. They found they understood each other’s problems better than their families and friends and doctors did. This mutual understanding gave them the strength each desperately needed to pass up the first drink that had always paved the way to disaster.

Very gradually, their new strength restored their hope for life and a future. They survived to share their experience with other so-called hopeless alcoholics.

Today, Alcoholics Anonymous is made up of an estimated 2,000,000 men and women who once felt just as hopeless. We still meet regularly to share our experience, strength, and hope with each other. Our every- day lives are a lot better now than they used to be. And each of us once had to ask ourselves that question: “Where do I go from here?”

We live and meet everywhere now and at many different hours of the day. And we hope you’ll want to talk to one of us when you get out. We’ll be waiting, because somebody waited for each of us. And that made all the difference.