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September 1989

The Power of a Pronoun

Changing "he" to "she" gave this alcoholic a different view of the Big Book.

Thrilled as a kid with a flashlight under the covers, I picked up my pencil and, in the glow of my desk lamp on a dark November evening, I started to change the Big Book. Everywhere I saw he, his, him, I wrote she, hers, and her. Within minutes I was transforming the way I looked at myself and at my program of recovery. The miserable drunk stumbling through those initial chapters suddenly became a woman like me. The alteration of that single pronoun ended years of mental reservation and tedious translation by bringing to life not just symptoms, but a person, a stubborn, suffering drunk who, like me, had desperately needed the rooms of AA and a power greater than herself. And with this sense of life came an extraordinary jolt: a feeling of great relief, promise, and energy lifting, releasing, balancing the weight of the past.

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