Thanks for this post, Di
I didn't know what I was looking for was this program.
There's a sentence in the "Why are we here?" reading from N.A. that says "We had to have something different and we thought we had found it in drugs." For me, this sums up why just stopping drinking would not have been enough.
Before I started A.A , I was so certain that the program was not for me. I'd never been to a meeting, read the books, or even talked to a person who had been to a meeting or read the books, but I just knew. My perceptions of "who is an alcoholic?", "who goes to A.A?", "who needs a program to tell them how to live?" and "what will life be like if I don't drink?" were just plain wrong. But also, I did not want to really accept that I was an alcoholic because I did not want to stop drinking. I wanted badly to believe that there was a big difference between someone who drinks like an alcoholic and a real alcoholic.
I thought I was not a person who needed A.A., but A.A. turned out to be exactly what I needed. My experiences in the program have been essential in finding that something different which I'd been looking for all my life.