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Today is Memorial Day, and I always try to take a moment and be grateful that I’m not planning on spending the day passed out in my basement.
I used to plan for drunken holidays—they were the perfect time to get obliterated. Everybody’s off work, drinking and hanging out. And if you overdo it, hey, no big deal, everybody is getting after it today.
I’m glad I don’t have to live that like that any more.
But I am also glad I learned to treat holidays like any other sober day, too. Early in recovery, I went to meetings Monday through Friday, took off over the weekend and hit the recovery ground running again on Monday. When we’d go on vacation, or travel for Christmas or Thanksgiving, I wouldn’t hit meetings.
I’d tell myself that it’s a holiday, and I was 200 miles from my home group, so I rationalized that I could just get back on track with meetings when I was at work again the following week.
Finally, after my first Thanksgiving and Christmas, I had a rough first day back in the office and was voicing my confusion about that. I was working a solid program; why did I feel so squirrelly?
A sober friend said to me, “You’re working a business week program. You can’t treat recovery like a Monday-Friday thing. You never did that with your drinking, right? Drugs and alcohol were a 24/7 problem for you. It didn’t matter whether it was an important holiday, did it?”
No, it absolutely did NOT matter if it was a holiday. Like I said, those were the days I felt like I could really hit it hard.
So now I try to treat my sobriety the same way I did my drinking—no off days. For me, this disease is around the clock, 365 days a year. The good news is, I don’t need to get to 365 meetings a year. But I do need to do something spiritual and program-related every single day. I’ve found out the hard day that taking a break from recovery produces not-so-great results. I think I haven’t gone more than three or four days without a meeting in more than five years. It just doesn’t work for me.
That means this Memorial Day I am going to take a few moments and think about the men and women who have died in service to this country over the years. And then I am going to take my family to a friend’s farm because she has some baby goats she wants us to see. So we’ll go laugh and smile and pet some baby goats and be grateful to be spending some beautiful family time together.
Just kidding, I am expecting a lot of whining and complaining. I can already hear my kids going, “It’s too hot… it smells bad… when can we leave?… dad, why do you keep encouraging the goats to bite our hands?”
There is a really good chance by the evening that I am thoroughly tired and annoyed, and so that’s why I am excited to have a service commitment at a meeting on Monday night. I can go and fill up the spiritual gas tank and hopefully come home not wishing that a goat herd had eaten my family
So… happy (sober) Memorial Day!
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 heroin junkie got frustrated with his sponsor for not giving him straight answers.
“Can I still drink alcohol in recovery?” the newcomer asked.
“Keep coming,” his sponsor said.
“What about gambling on football games?”
“Keep coming,” his sponsor said.
“What about overdoing it on pornography?”
“Keep… uh, yeah, don’t do that,” his sponsor said.
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