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Most of her drinking was not only excessive, but illegal, because Jill W. sobered up when she was only 22.

She´s one smart young woman. She boozed her way through Shorewood High School in Shoreline to graduation, got a degree at Edmonds Community College and then her bachelor´s in psychology at the University of Oregon, all the while binge drinking and drugging and making and breaking relationships. Somehow, she had the mental and emotional resources to fight her way to an education through some very heavy going.

It all ended and a new life started when she finally had enough and joined A.A. on April 6, 1997. That was in Eugene, Oregon, while she was finishing at the University of Oregon. She drank and blacked out with a friend.

When she came to, she realized her degree was in jeopardy. She called A.A. and went to her first meeting, at Sacred Heart Hospital. She was familiar with the location because she´d come in as an emergency room patient three times before.

"somehow, I could relate to what was going on. I kept quiet when the invitation came up for newcomers to speak, but at the end of the meeting when the secretary asked if there were any burning desires, I announced I was an alcoholic and wanted help. A bunch of women flooded around me offering their phone numbers." As she kept going to meetings that spring, she found out more of what A.A. is all about, and graduated sober two months later.

Degree in hand, she came home to Shoreline and started going to meetings in Richmond Beach. Living at home, her new found interest was a shock to her parents. "What turned them around was the annual Christmas potluck. I brought them with me; they were really impressed with the honesty and openness of everyone."

For a middle class kid with a stable home and parents who loved her, Jill led quite an extra-curricular life, starting in high school. "It was a double life," she said—"church friends and drinking friends, and it was the latter where the fun was. We were going into abandoned houses-we called them haunted-partying on the beach at night, drinking and dancing."

From Shorewood, she went on to Edmonds Community College, "and that´s where the drinking really kicked in. And I topped it off with an abusive relationship while I was there."

She carried her lifestyle with her to U. of O. and drank her way through most of four years, interspersed with trips to the Sacred Heart emergency room. She´d had one such trip to Stevens Hospital here too.

On one of those trips, she heard the nurses saying "the guy on the other side of the curtain was there for drinking too much. I thought, "Wow, I´m glad I don´t have that problem. I thought I was there ´cause God was mad at me.´"

While still an undergraduate, Jill was an exchange student in Sydney, Australia, where she found Aussie beer was stronger than ours.

She was using anti-depressants most of this time-to excess, of course, so she had that to deal with when she sobered up too.

Back in Seattle with a college degree, Jill got a job she loved with the Pacific Science Center. It was her first taste of major travel, in this case, all over the state of Washington. She was in another disastrous relationship at that time which, when it ended, "felt like a divorce. We were living together."

To heal her broken heart, Jill took a job teaching English in a remote mountain town in Ecuador. She found a Spanish-speaking meeting where she was welcomed with open arms. An aspiring writer, she had an article published in the January 1998 Grapevine while she was there. She also used her job as a jumping-off place to travel all over South America, and even made it to Antarctica. "An amazing place."

Jill came home for a year, then signed on with the Peace Corps to teach English in Macedonia from 2005 to 2007. There were no A.A. meetings there, but she came equipped with speaker tapes and A.A. literature. She also joined A.A. Loners International, where people who can´t get to meetings can stay in touch. She still gets mail from five expat A.A. members around the world.

Macedonia may have been the highlight of Jill´s career, so far. "We created a national English essay contest which continues today." The downside was that she contracted a near-fatal virus while vacationing in Tanzania. She was met at SeaTac by her parents and an ambulance which whisked her off to a hospital. "My first time sober in an ambulance," she noted.

"There was some question whether I was going to make it," Jill said. "I was severely dehydrated. But I got to my sister´s wedding in a wheel chair and then recuperated at home. Friends brought meetings to my house.

"That experience made me re-examine my priorities, and I concluded that they are my family and my health."

She went back to school at Seattle University when she recovered and earned a master´s degree in education. But she graduated into the recession which is still ongoing, and could not find a job. Another blow. "I really needed my program then." She did substitute teaching for six months, but found she would not be rehired on the same day that a relationship tanked.

"I was devastated, but eight months later, thanks to A.A., I have a new job and a new, very serious relationship. I´m going to Shanghai to teach English at the Shanghai Maritime Academy at the university level.

"And my relationship is stronger than ever. He is coming with me."

"Life´s an adventure. Just do it sober," Jill said. "I´ve learned to stop letting fear control me, and today I have a new way of life. Through this program, I have learned to let go of the fear and hold on to the faith."

Interviewing and writing by Dick S.