The Gift of Need

Sometime early in 1970 after slipping around for a year and a half, I got a few people together started what I later learned was the first young people's group in western Massachusetts. I was so newly sober that I was ineligible to speak, but I was asked if I wanted to help clean up after, I remember feeling grateful at being included. After eighteen months in and out of sobriety, I had acquired a "loser's" aura that was hard to shake.