"I wasn't alone anymore."
Bright and witty and beautiful,
Marty Mann had everything. And nothing.
Born to a wealthy family, she
attended the best Chicago schools. But just as she entered high school, she contracted
tuberculosis. Her parents sent her to recover in a California sanitarium,
although back then people euphemistically called such a place a "Western
ranch."
She married at 22. A year later, she
divorced. Then her father lost everything in the Crash of '29. The smart and stylist
Marty soon found work as an editor at a fancy magazine. She lived the high life
in Greenwich Village, and that involved lots of bootleg gin. Soon though she
quit her job and moved to London. As did her taste for liquor. She was drinking
at noon, then secretly. Then came terrifying alcohol-induced blackouts.
“Agony
Past Bearing”
One summer afternoon in 1934
calamity struck. While at a party at a country house, she staggered upstairs
and fell off a balcony. Whether she jumped or fell she never exactly knew. "At times I feared life so much
more than death that twice I sought death," she recalled. "Suicide
seemed a welcome release from a terror and agony past bearing." She awoke
with a broken jaw and leg and spent six months in traction.
Now penniless and unemployed, she
spent her lonely, bleary days in Hyde Park sipping booze on the sly. Returning
to America, she sought one psychiatrist after another, desperate to find out
why she was drinking.
In those days the word 'alcoholism'
was barely known. People thought alcoholism was caused a lack of morals and
poor willpower. They called alcoholics bums, losers, and worse. And it was far
more shameful for a woman to have drinking problem.
Then Marty met psychiatrist Harry
Tiebout. He let her stay, free, at his Connecticut sanitarium. He gave her the
manuscript of an upcoming book from a new organization. It title?
"Alcoholics Anonymous." At first, its religious message urging
alcoholics to seek the aid of a higher power upset her.
Then something happened: "You
let God in," she said, "And He comes out of you." She almost
seemed to faint. When she awakened, she was on her knees at her bedside, her
pillow damp with tears. Wonderfully, she felt confidence and a sense of peace.
“I Wasn’t
Alone Anymore.”
"I had come home at last, to my
own kind," she said. "There is another meaning for the Hebrew word
that in the King James version of the Bible is translated 'salvation.' It is:
To come home. I had found my salvation. I wasn't alone anymore.
“I
wasn’t the only person in the world who felt and behaved like this! I wasn’t
mad or vicious—I was a sick person. I was suffering from an actual disease that
had a name and symptoms like diabetes or cancer or tuberculosis—and a disease
was respectable, not a moral stigma.”
She
became one of the first women to join AA. She dedicated her life to helping
other alcoholics. She founded the National Council on Alcoholism, becoming its
long-time executive director, creating Alcoholism Information centers in cities
across the U.S. For more than two decades she worked ceaselessly, traveling
50,000 miles a year, appearing on TV and radio, striving to convince Americans
that alcohol abuse was a disease and one that was curable.
She
gave many speeches. Whenever she addressed an audience, this elegant woman
stood erect at the podium, and the first words she said—with pride—were,
"My name is Marty Mann, and I'm an alcoholic."
MORAL: Coincidence is when God winks at you.
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