The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

My time in AA began sans online resources. I'm not totally sure, but I think my first 12-step meeting was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at our local hospital (coincidentally, the same hospital in which I had been born). It must have been while I was in outpatient rehab during my sophomore year of high school; fall of 1997. The Internet existed, but only in a Geocities/DIY sense. Meetings still pushed paper pamphlets and printed books. And both NA and AA meetings had large signs- poster boards or actual pieces of particle board- painted with the 12 steps. This post serves as my plaque on the wall. Though my first encounter with the steps was through Narcotics Anonymous, I provide the version below excepted from the AA basic text. This is the original form of the text as it appears in the so-called "Big Book." I preserve some introductory remarks, from page 58-60 in Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed.:

If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it - then you are ready to take certain steps.
At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to old on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.
Remember that we deal with alcohol - cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power - that One is God. May you find Him now!
Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon.
Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.