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Happy Thanksgiving! Of all the things to be thankful for today, make sure you take a moment to be grateful for your sobriety. I have some thoughts on navigating the holidays but I will share those in a few weeks.
Today, I wanted to talk about Twitter, or X, or whatever we’re calling it these days. Twitter can be a very interesting place to hang out and discuss sobriety. About 90 percent of the tweets I see are helpful or inspiring or somehow beneficial—even seeing some random person hold up a 20-year coin and say today is their anniversary can be a nice little reinforcement of the recovery lifestyle that I have chosen.
But there is about 10 percent that is behavior that you would never see at a 12-step meeting. That 10 percent is mostly people proclaiming what works and what doesn’t, and that can be a little much. I also cringe a little because I don’t post anything like that because I think it paints an unfair picture of 12-step recovery. I don’t want to come off like a know-it-all a*****e who preaches that there are mandatory things about sobriety that everybody must do—as most recovery literature says, come if you want, leave if you want, take our suggestions if you want, or don’t. Your choice.
I saw a tweet the other day from a sober person that I wanted to bring up. The tweet said something along the lines of, “If you’re trying to get sober and you haven’t replaced your friends, then you are in for a rude awakening.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, and I will just say right up front, I disagree with this tweet pretty vigorously. I bring it up here, though, because the idea of hanging out with the same people, at the same places, doing the same things, is something that comes up a lot in recovery and there is some merit to reconsidering your lifestyle once you try to change your life. That was certainly the case for me.
I had a few specific thoughts about the text of that tweet.
First of all, I mostly drank alone, so I don’t know how qualified I am to get into the nuances of stepping away from a friend group that always meets at the bar every Friday and Saturday night. I did that early on in my drinking days but then became a solo drinker because I couldn’t find anybody who drank like me. I gotta say, I think most of the recovery people I know are similar—our drinking was so extreme and secretive that we end up in the basement, by ourself, not on group golf outings.
Secondly, if you are someone who has hardcore drinking buddies and you want to stop hardcore drinking, well… that tweet probably does apply to you. I have never heard of someone who keeps going to the bar with friends and just orders a Diet Coke to watch NFL games all day every Sunday. If I were your sponsor and you asked me if that is a good idea, I would say it doesn’t seem like the best option.
Thirdly, if you do have drinking buddies that you want to keep in your life, I think you just have to be honest with them that you’ve decided to change your life, which means no more boozing. If somebody gets upset with you about that, my guess is that it says a lot about how they think of your wellbeing.
Fourthly, I disagree with the binary choice from that tweet, that you either have the old friends or you don’t. I had plenty of people from my rowdier days that I remained close with, but I was upfront that the way our friendship had to happen going forward was a little different. So I do think there is a middle ground, where you reassess friendships and you figure out new boundaries for your old friends. For example, if you went to the bar every Saturday to watch UFC fights and drink together, then maybe you don’t go to the bar any more every week but you offer once a month to have a few friends come to your house and watch the fights instead. In that example, I definitely would say right up front that it’s a no drinking or drugging event.
Last but not least, I found that getting sober added new friends without subtracting old ones. There’s no law that if you have five good friends, you can’t add 10 more. So in my situation, I kept my friend group but sprinkled in a bunch of sober men, and I thought it worked out quite well. The tweet seems to imply that you have a set number of friends, and they all should be sober people. I found that adding sober people to the mix balanced out my friendship circle very well.
Overall, I understand the sentiment of that tweet, that you have to re-examine every aspect of your life once you make the sobriety choice. But I’m not sure there should be any hard and fast rules about canceling friendships from the past. If you have toxic friends who think you don’t have a problem and you should just meet them at the strip club, yes, I get how that could be debilitating for someone trying to get sober. But for the most part, I don’t see any reason why you can’t reshape old friendships and build new ones.
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 woman brought her son to an AA meeting. Later, as they were leaving, the mother complained about the hard seats, how long people had talked and how the chair didn't follow guidelines. Finally the little boy said, "Mommy, I thought it was pretty good for a dollar!"
(Credit: Grapevine, September 2009, by Chris K. of Lexington, KY)
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