RRP 105 — Mark S.; The Group Is My Higher Power: One Atheist’s Path Through Addiction and Back

They Dumped His Alcohol and Took Him to a Meeting. He Had to Find His Own Way Back.

We almost lost Mark S. more than once. There was the night he ended up on Laguna Canyon Road after throwing a television through a window, hit by a car, left with partial paralysis. There was the bathtub in Eugene, the fistfuls of pills, the slashed wrists, the three-day coma he came out of to find out his partner of 28 years was not coming back. Every time we talk to someone whose story runs this close to the edge, we think about the people who did not make it. Mark made it. And he is sitting in his home in Oregon right now, two years and eight months sober, hosting Zoom AA meetings, doing service work, and redefining what a higher power can look like.

Mark grew up in a strict Pentecostal household in Southern California where alcohol did not exist and being gay was something his church said deserved death. He knew he was attracted to other boys before he had words for it, and he carried that shame into a decade of drinking, blackouts, and survival on the streets before he ever sat in an AA meeting. His first drink was in 1968 at a family wedding. By his early teens he was already living a double life, and by 16 his father had caught him and thrown him out. What followed were years on the streets and in the bars of Southern California in the 1970s, a time and place Mark describes with a candor that is as funny as it is heartbreaking. You need to hear him tell it.

Mark found AA for the first time around 1979 or 1980 in Laguna Beach, drunk and suicidal in a motel room. Two AA members came, dumped his alcohol, and took him to a meeting. He kept going for a while. Then he did not. That pattern repeated for decades. He moved to Oregon around 1984 fleeing the AIDS crisis. He found love. He built a life. He also kept drinking, kept destroying things, until the night he took every pill he had. After a month in the hospital and a month at Cedar Hills rehab in Beaverton, he got four years of sobriety. Then a single joint ended it. He drank again until COVID, when a friend told him about Zoom AA meetings.

That is where he found Extended Family, and that is where Julie first met him. Today Mark hosts his own Zoom meeting, does significant service work, and meets weekly with his sponsor John, who has 42 years of sobriety. He does all of this while homebound with COPD, running his meeting with more energy than most people bring to any room. What we find most powerful in this conversation, and what we think you need to hear in his own words, is how Mark talks about a higher power. He is an atheist. He says so plainly. And he has one.

Mark recorded this episode just days after losing his mother, having lost his father four months before. He talks about grief, about death, about what it means to still be here when you spent decades trying not to be. This is a conversation about surviving yourself. If you know someone who thinks AA is not for them because they do not believe in God, send them this episode. If you know someone who has tried and relapsed and tried again, send them this. If you just need to hear that it is possible to come back from almost anywhere, this one is for you.

Listen now at https://mdcr1.com/105.

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