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Last week was the one-year birthday of LOL Sober, my sober newsletter. I thought it’d be nice to say thank you to all my subscribers. This isn’t a giant million-subscriber newsletter, but I feel like we have a nice little community here of people trying to stay sober and smile while doing it. So thank you.
I thought it’d also be worth talking about what I’ve learned in the year of doing it. So I’ll mention a few things.
First, let me discuss the anonymity part. I wrestled with this for awhile before I started LOL Sober, and I still am. I’ve read sober literature and talked to lots of respected sober friends, and I still find varying opinions. I try to be very respectful of the programs I participate in and not mention them specifically. But what is the right answer? Can you write an anonymous newsletter? Can you post o Facebook when it is your sober anniversary? I don’t know.
I am comfortable with the way I have been doing things, which involves general discussion of specific programs and also not using my real name. But if you wonder about doing a sober newsletter at all… I sometimes do, too! It’s a tricky topic.
The second thing I wanted to bring up is what the newsletter has helped me with, which is that I spend a lot of time thinking about it. When I hear something at a meeting that makes me think, or I read an interesting passage in literature, or I have a life experience that relates to sobriety, I will often type it into my notes app on my phone. That’s a trick I learned when I started doing standup a few years ago—it’s so important to quickly jot down a good idea when it floats into my brain so it doesn’t float back out. So I am constantly latching onto things and thinking about them and trying to form them into ideas that I didn’t necessarily do a year ago.
I also spend quite a bit of time writing and voicing these newsletters. I publish twice a week right now, and I probably spend about an hour or an hour-and-a-half working on each one. So that’s three hours of actual work every week. And then I spend probably another hour or two thinking about and playing around with other ideas, gathering up jokes to include on the newsletters and then posting on various forms of social media when I do publish something.
So all told, I spend about five hours a week working on this newsletter. And that is five more hours devoted to recovery than I would if I didn’t do the newsletter. I’d love to say that if I stopped doing the newsletter I would take that time and start reading Bill Wilson’s letters to Dr. Bob or some other recovery book. But the truth is, I’d probably watch another two or three basketball games or MMA fights.
I guess that would be my main message one year in—that adding in recovery to other corners of a sober life is really beneficial. I honestly would be pissing away those five hours on TV or resentments or some other activity that has no real value to my life. I think those five hours have helped me inject 10 percent more recovery into my life, and that’s been a big deal. My gentle suggestion would be to maybe try to add in something fresh that keeps you thinking about sobriety more than usual—it could be reading a recovery book but it could also be a podcast or two, finding a good sobriety person who has a YouTube channel you like, or just hanging out with sober people outside of meetings for an hour or two every week, anything else that just keeps sobriety plugged into your life. It’s certainly helped me a lot.
So thanks to all my readers and listeners for coming along for the ride. It’s helped me, and I hope it’s helped you, too.
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:
Heard at meetings:
“I think alcoholism is contagious. I know I caught it after going to a few AA meetings.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2000, Alan M. from Melbourne, Florida)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
