(The following talk was given by Barry at the 5th SA Conference in Australia, held on April 23–25, 1999 in Sydney.)

Every time we say—and it sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?—we are trudging the Road of Happy Destiny, trudging sounds like a burdensome sort of thing, and Happy Destiny a bit odd, too. And every time we say that, which is at every meeting, there’s a sort of a snicker, or you feel a heaviness, or there’s a bit of a smile as you say “trudging the Road of Happy Destiny.”

That’s after five years, and there’re people who have been in the program a bit longer than me [who are] trying to come to terms with trudging the Road of Happy Destiny. Looking at that I get emotionally involved. Sometimes the tears or emotion that comes up in me—and I’m sure it’s part and parcel of all of us—is the pain of the past; we’ve been on such a tragic road that spoils relationships and perhaps even spoils the healthy sort of life. And maybe we’ve had such little control over it that there’s a bit of anger there as well. So it’s pain about the past, perhaps a sense of unworthiness, certainly on my part, that here I am, that I really don’t think I deserve this opportunity to turn my life around.

I suppose the other part of the tears would be something about the awesomeness of the future, that somehow I’ve been granted an opportunity to get it together again. And that’s trudging the road. We know where we’ve been; we also know where we are, and there’s an awesomeness and an unknown quantity about what the future holds for any one of us.

It reminds me of a story of the fellow who died and went to heaven, and God said, “Here’s 57 videos of your whole life”—he lived 57 years and there was a video for each year—”I want you to go through the whole 57 videos and I want you to make a 10-minute video for me. You’re dead now and you have all the time you want and I want you to make a video of 10 minutes of your life.” So he set about the task of cutting and after a long time God came back and the man said, “Here it is,” and God said, “I don’t want that, you keep that, I want the rest of the stuff you threw away.” [Laughter]

And that’s a little bit of the story of us all. Most of us want to throw away all those bins full of our life’s story, but somehow because of blessing and because of strange coincidence, because of a whole complexity of issues, we’ve come here and somehow been presented with the opportunity through this particular program, not just to say to God, “Well all right you take them away,” but for us to face that with our God. Because the program has something to do with a spiritual awareness, we try and fill the vacuum that’s been created by not acting out, to look at life anew and face up to our fragilities and our brokenness and our humanness—and sinfulness, if you want to look at it in those terms—and God’s there with us, and that’s an awesome part of the process too, because we’re really not too sure.

The Happy Destiny is really about integrity, making not just the 10-minute tape that we wanted to give to God, but to try to make the rest of the 57 years fit, put it together and say, “Look, I want you to walk through this with me.” I believe deep down that God is going to continue and has walked with me through that 57 years, but my god I suppose was a god of lust or a god for what I wanted, a god of selfishness, a god of me getting what I wanted, a god of my void being filled, a god of my personality coming together. But instead of it coming together on my terms it was really splintering and becoming more dissipated, disjointed and dysfunctional.

The trudging of the road is the fact that we know, I know, we all know that we’ve been over these 57 years of trudging, and if you’re walking the same path for 57 years it is just mud and slush. Because we know it’s brokenness, it has hurt us so bad and it’s hurt so many people, probably the people we least want to hurt are the ones we’ve hurt the most. And those people who are married and those of us who are single and those of us who have been in some sort of friendship and relationship, we know how destructive, how cunning, powerful and baffling our disease has been on others, because they haven’t been able to work us out. They sort of looked at us and said, “I can’t believe this, he’s just not present, he’s just not there.”

And that’s my story as much as it’s everybody else’s. So the trudging really is going through the mud and the slush that we’ve sort of worn over or tracked for 57 years, if you want to take the story of God and the videos. So it’s for us to set off on a new path that this program has provided for me and provides for us—as a new path of course it’s untrudged, it’s not slush, it’s not mud, it’s something we’ve got to do that hopefully, maybe, idealistically-speaking most people have done since the day they were born. But I don’t think there are too many people around who have not created some sort of mud and slush around themselves. I think that’s the course of us all but certainly we try in the program, or the program tries to get us to look at the mud and the sludge and what we’re trudging through. So the Happy Destiny is to somehow say, “All those pieces of 10-minute tape plus the other 57 years, God we ask you just to be with us to put it together.”

Because of our sexaholism, because of my sexaholism, my personality split into more disparate characters. It was 5 percent brokenness, and secrecy and darkness and in many degrees I suppose pornography and filth. My basic addiction was to same sex. For 40 years I tried to get that little piece of my personality to wed the other 57 years of all the rest of this big lie I was living, which to all intents and purposes everybody looked at and said, “He’s a reasonably well together human being.” But deep inside I was the most immature person and most insecure person you could possibly imagine, because I was frightened of this little 10 minutes of video or 10 percent or 1 percent of my personality that had the capacity to destroy the whole other 97 or 90 percent. It had that capacity because I knew there was this deep dark secret that was within me.

The Happy Destiny is that I can integrate those things, not by my own power—my own power got me into this program, me thinking that I was God got me into this program, lust being my god got me here—my Happy Destiny is that I can say, “Look, I’m not together.” The program encourages me and encourages everyone else to be honest and open, and say, “This is where I’m weak.” I can focus on my strengths anywhere else, and other people can focus on my strengths, but I don’t have any other place to go and focus on my weakness, so I’ve got to find a 12-Step program like Sexaholics Anonymous to say, “These are my most fragile points, these are the parts of my personality which are so destructive, and so powerful, and cunning and so baffling for me and for everyone else, that they can destroy anything that’s good.” I never believed anybody who said I had anything good about me at all, simply because deep within me I was saying, “You don’t know me, you wouldn’t know me from a cake of soap or a bloody broom in a cupboard.” And they didn’t. Because they weren’t aware of this little percent that was there that was so powerful and so destructive.

So the trudging of the road. It sounds like a slog, and to some degree it is a slog. Even today with five and a bit years of sobriety, of not acting out, I know I’ve got this well-worn track of 57 years, and now I’ve got to find a new path. So I’ve got to stop doing what I was doing and put myself into neutral gear and say, “I’m faced now with a vacuum, what do I do?” In all that 57 years, I had a God, I had a family, I had everything that was around me, but I also had the addiction, and that was the destructive aspect of me. Now I’ve had to sit myself into the vacuum; fortunately the program has facilitated me doing that, and say, “All right now, how do I fill that vacuum up?” And that’s been to find a God, not a God of my understanding, because the God of my understanding before was a lust god—”I’ll get what I want, and no one’s going to stop me. If you try to stop me, I’ll steal it, I’ll invade your personality. I’ll invade your person. I’ll invade your space, and I’ll take what I want because this is what I want.” That’s how ruthless and that’s how powerful, and that’s the mud and the sludge and the trudge I’ve had to go through. And that’s the 57 years of the stuff I want to put in the wastepaper bin. But I also know deep down inside me that that’s where my gold is. That 10 percent or that 10 minutes of video that I wanted to give up to God really wasn’t the gold because that’s probably the common denominator we have with everybody. The gold’s really in the rubbish bin that I wanted to throw away and God was saying, and continues to say to me through the program, that you can turn this around, you can turn all this around, all those wastepaper bins—that other 57 years minus 10 minutes—you can turn it into your gold. Because it extracts from you, it adduces from me and from you a sense of compassion and understanding that everybody’s on exactly the same journey, a sense of service, that the best way I can serve humanity is by getting my life together.

But I can’t leave it there. The program doesn’t let me leave it there, because the Steps continue to remind me that there’s another Step to go and that’s one of service. And part of that service in practical terms is coming and sharing my story, listening to other people’s stories, of empathizing with their pain and somehow say, “I can’t take your gold from you because it’s your gold. And it’s my gold, you can’t take it from me either but you can help me appreciate that it is the gold.” And that’s the painful part because it can lead me to want to suicide. I tried to suicide. It can lead me to jail, it can lead me to drink, it can lead me to all sorts of broken relationships, but still that’s my gold and that’s the trudging thing because I’ve worn that path so long and so often and in so many different disguises and in so many different ways over such a long period of time that it’s very simple for me to say, “I can’t cope with it anymore. This group is too small for me. I want the world to be my oyster.” As if it was the oyster. It was really the bloody hard shell. Even the pearl that comes out of the oyster is imperfect. Have you ever looked at a genuine pearl? It has always got little bubbles in it, little crevices in it. And that’s the way we are.

Thank God, this program—by saying trudging the road, don’t go back that way, be aware of where I’ve been and continue on forward—recognizes there’s gold in that path, and the biggest part of the gold is not to return there. And I’m not going to return there if I know that I’ve got people like you who are going to say, “All right, Barry, I’ll sit with you, we’ll sit with you and 57 years of wastepaper bins full of your stuff, and help you to appreciate that there’s gold in them.” Thank you.