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As the author of The Other Woman at the Well, my first book about battling cocaine addiction and climbing back up the steep slope to sanity, I had no idea my life would take an abrupt turn and I would begin to use my graduate degrees and not just personal experience to help other addicts and those needing information about addiction. Just this month my team and I have filed papers with the Attorney General in Arizona to make Addiction Overcome, Inc. an official non-profit (501 c3 IRS code) foundation. In other words, as I travel to bookstores in Washington or churches in Arizona or Rotary meetings across town and speak about my own experience, I have begun to add current trends and research to make my presentation not only interesting and entertaining (I hope) but also crisp and truly informative.

When I was first introduced to the 12-step programs early in my twenties, the current thought was that young people had not consumed as much as the old-timers had spilled and that stopping meant shaking it out with black coffee in smoke-filled rooms with the wrong temperature setting, no matter what the season. (See, I continued to drink like a college sorority - yes, the whole sorority) after graduation when my friends were settling into normal lives. I thought, having grown up a preacher's kid in an alcohol-free home, that normal meant pouring a pitcher of Manhattans before dinner with a tall swivel stick and stemmy glasses was being a real grown-up.

I had taken my first drink just before starting college, and by graduation I was by all definitions a full-blown alcoholic and a pill addict. I was always a fast learner. It was only when one of my friends came over after work one day and suggested that I was the only one who continued to drink like every night was a college party that I began to think perhaps the Martini pitcher and glasses from the parents of one of my sorority sisters had not been the most helpful graduation gift I had received. Over the years, I have come to view the best and most important gift from that time as the eight hand stuffed goose down pillows my grandmother lovingly sewed for me. At the time I thought, "Yikes, what am I going to do with ALL of these?" Little did I know twenty-five years ago how many people would be passing through my life, some staying longer than others, and resting their heads upon those pillows for often years at a time. My own child asked me yesterday if she got Mammy's pillows when she left home after college. I

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