A Message For Young People

There are many young people in New Hampshire, and around the world, living happy and joyous lives–free of alcohol–thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Many of us who came to AA at a young age felt we were too young to have a drinking problem, or, having accepted our situation, struggled to relate or identify with older members. Some of them had been drinking longer than we had been alive, losing homes, jobs, licenses, and marriages, and suffering consequences from their drinking in life experiences we had never had.

We came to realize the wisdom of this passage in the chapter More About Alcoholism in the Big Book, “To be gravely affected, one does not necessarily have to drink a long time nor take the quantities some of us have.”

If your drinking is causing issues with your family and friends, at school, with the law, or simply holding you back from living life to your full potential you may have a problem with alcohol.

As AA members in New Hampshire, we know countless people who came to meetings and got sober in their pre-teens, teens, twenties, and thirties. Those of us who accepted our alcoholism earlier in life found that, while we may have felt there was no one our age when we first attended meetings, or that we hadn’t lived enough life yet to be an alcoholic, there were people just like us in meetings who had the same experience.

At first, we felt like we were being sentenced to a boring life which consisted of sitting in church basements with ‘old people’ who really had drinking problems and we would never be able to have any fun again. Nothing was further from the truth.

We found the ‘joy of living’ in our freedom from alcohol. We ‘avoided the last ten or fifteen years of misery’ that many other alcoholics had to endure and our lives were filled with more peace, contentment, and laughter than we had ever experienced when we were drinking. We have grown up in AA into contributing members of society, and we wouldn’t want to live life any other way. If you’re tired of your way of living, we invite you to try the AA way of life.