7 Paragraphs on 7 Years of Sobriety
Not a bad start!
The older I get, and the longer I stay sober, the less confidence I feel that I have anything worthwhile to say about getting older and staying sober. It’s a strange paradox, since getting older and staying sober is by all accounts what should qualify me to have something to say about those things, since I am succeeding at them - but the older I get and the longer I stay sober the more aware I become of my own limitations, and also of how certainly my life will change in ways that are completely unpredictable from where I now stand. It seems like the only time I can make any definitive pronouncements about my life will be the instant before my death, since there will be no more possibility of change and I will have the maximum amount of life to look back upon, but I don’t expect to be in the mood to write at that final millisecond so instead I’ll stick with expressing things that are horribly provisional.
Having declared myself completely unqualified to dispense insight into recovery I will now attempt to do so: if I could offer once piece of advice to my 7-years-ago self, it would be “take recovery seriously, but not your self”. By “self” I mean “everything that I think constitutes my identity and worth”. My “self” has changed rather dramatically in recovery - indeed, that’s the whole point - and almost everything that was once a part of my life has since gone away. I’ve changed jobs (I am no longer a part time plasma donor), I’ve changed relationships (the DRAMA), I’ve changed sponsors (it’s ok, you can do that), I’ve changed presidential administrations (no comment), and throughout it all I’ve stayed with the program even when I’ve been felt frustrated or hopeless or just plain bored.
Sobriety has involved a lot of change, which is uncomfortable for someone like me. I stayed drunk for a long time because of how predictable drunkenness could be. Yes, I would black out and anything could happen, but regardless of the outcome the feeling was a consistent one. Nothing made me feel better immediately like getting drunker - not being drunk, mind you, but getting drunker, the feeling of more alcohol entering my system. I was miserable but it was a familiar misery, and I clung to it because I felt like I belonged there.
Getting sober meant getting better while feeling worse, and then slowly feeling better. Things feel pretty good today! All of the self-centered stuff that I was once concerned with - how much money I make, how many people like me, etc - has improved considerably after I stopped being so concerned with it. People like me a lot more when I’m consistent in who I am, rather than acting from some constant desperation for approval. I make a lot more money when I aim to make more money for an organization before worrying about taking a bigger chunk of what money an organization already makes. To my amazement, people appreciate it when I deliver bad-sounding news rather than trying to hide it.
And so not taking myself too seriously has improved my self quite a bit. It didn’t work to try and discard myself, since I’m going to have a relationship with my self for as long as I’m alive and I am someone I’m responsible for taking care of too. It’s just been about finding that middle ground between thinking I’m a god and thinking I’m a worthless turd, making peace with being a suffering human among other suffering humans.
I don’t make any claim to universal insight or possibility - all I know is that if someone like me can do it then someone else like me can do it. My claims are much smaller than they were when I was younger, since I’ve found that what I can speak of with any authority is very limited indeed. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to pronounce on what is good and true for all humans who have ever existed, but it’s hard for me to imagine that happening.
For now, I have 7 years of sobriety, which is not a bad start. Tomorrow I’ll have 7 years and 1 day of sobriety, and life will go on. And no matter what happens someone out there will know what I think and how I feel, and right now that’s you. Thank you for helping me feel just a little less alone