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I had a plan for what I wanted to say on Thanksgiving. Something about gratitude, and family, and blah blah blah.
Don’t get me wrong. I do feel some of that. But I need to be honest and call myself out on what has been a pretty grumpy week for me.
I went away for a few days, so I had my own hotel room and plenty of silence. I could eat what I wanted whenever I wanted, watch whatever I felt like and I didn’t have three kids barking at me. It was quite peaceful… but I also missed them a lot.
Then I went home and it was chaos. I was definitely dealing with some HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I’d gotten to one meeting in four days and made a bunch of phone calls. But my spiritual gas tank was a little low, for sure.
And I felt it. I’m at that point in sobriety where I don’t think I am particularly close to drinking. But the world record for emotional sobriety is also 24 hours, so my spiritual clock resets every morning. That means I ended up having a pretty hard time with my family on the first night back. The sober term I hear a lot is “squirrelly,” and I was squirrelly. I still am.
That’s the big message I would pass along. “To thine own self be true” means I call myself out when I am squirrelly and then I am responsible for doing my damndest to get unsquirrelly. I am one of many people who already find the next six weeks or so to be especially tough because it’s easy to drift a bit. Even if I do 10 percent less program stuff… that means I’m probably 10 percent off. And that means, out of every 10 nasty reaction thoughts I get in my head, maybe one of the 10 slips past the goalie and suddenly I am telling my kids they suck and I want new ones for Christmas.
I actually feel pretty thankful for that realization. I’m one of those people who has an unbreakable bond with God that constantly comes and goes, but maybe this is one of those higher power moments where I had a bumpy Nov. 22 so that I won’t have an ugly Nov. 25 or Dec. 25 or Jan. 1. Maybe it’s a little stocking stuffer in advance to remind me what an a*****e I can become with just a tiny slip off the beam.
So let me leave you with a Happy Thanksgiving, and thank you for helping me stay a little more sober today. Remember, even if you might feel really spiritually fit today, maybe somebody else in your sober network could use a phone call from you more than you could.
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
A one-dollar bill met a twenty-dollar bill and said, "Hey, where have you been lately?"
The twenty answered, "I was on a cruise ship for a while and hung out in the casinos, then I came back to the States and flew out to L.A., went to a couple of baseball games, out to dinner, took in some of the new movies, that sort of thing. How about you?"
The one-dollar bill said, "Oh, you know, the same old thing—meetings, meetings, meetings."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2006)
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