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Right after I got sober, my life began to get better almost immediately. I couldn’t even believe it. My family was great, I felt great and I was having professional success. I’d begun to repay what was massive financial debt. Everything had turned around in a big way. Sounds great, right?
Well, because of all that positive stuff, I started to wonder, “Hmm, was drinking and drugging really that bad? I mean, I’m cleaning up the mess. Maybe when the mess is all the way gone, I wonder if I could go back to drinking. Maybe I actually didn’t have that bad of a drinking problem.”
Luckily, I had some sober people in my life at that point who explained that once you’re a pickle, you can’t be a cucumber again. It was over. That mess that was getting cleaned up? If I picked up again, it would be back, and it would be worse than ever… and that’s if I didn’t die, which was a possibility every day from about 2005-08. I used drugs and alcohol like there was no tomorrow… and that meant, there might not be a tomorrow.
So that sank in. Thank God that it did, because it doesn’t for everybody. I’ve met many people whose addict brains tell them the same story that mine did, that maybe things weren’t as ugly as they were. Or, I’ve also had the thought many times that now that I have a program, and spirituality, and am active in my kids’ lives, and so many other things—maybe I can be a normal drinker again since I have grown so much.
What a crock of s**t. I know it’s ridiculous, and yet that seed gets planted sometimes. A few years ago, I was working with a guy whose life had turned around since he started on a recovery path. But when we got into the middle of stepwork, he pulled back. He told me he wasn’t ever sure he was an alcoholic, that he didn’t quite drink like other people in the rooms had. It was probably true. He’d been one of those people who would have a terrible month with booze and then stop drinking… but smoke weed for six weeks straight. Then he’d feel like that was becoming a problem and he’d mess around with pills for awhile. He would just shuffle the deck on substances but the issue was the same—he had to numb out somehow. I get that; I had a similar addiction history where I cycled on and off things in a way where I could probably convince myself I never truly had one specific issue.
But he eventually decided that sobriety wasn’t for him. He acknowledged that his life had changed for the better since he’d gotten sober, that his work life and personal life had dramatically improved. But he just wasn’t sure recovery was for him. I tried pushing back once—I always try one time, but usually no more than that, because I have found that sobriety isn’t something you can really convince someone to try if they don’t want to.
One thing I told him that I had heard once in a similar situation was, “If the solution works, maybe you have the problem.” Here he was, explaining to me how recovery had been working in his life. So why walk away from that, even if you have doubts about the magnitude of the problem? What about the magnitude of the solution?
He nodded his head and said he understood what I was saying… but he did end up walking away. I never saw him again.
I thought about that a lot recently, because I noticed myself going to a lot of meetings. Like, once a day, almost every day, and I had a few days where I went to two meetings. Earlier this week, I went to a meeting on Sunday, then two meetings on Monday and two meetings on Tuesday. Five meetings in three days? That’s pretty intense! I’m not sure I ever did that when I had 10 days or 2 months sober.
But I felt great. I felt like I had quite a few tricky situations in my life, and I thought I was navigating them really well. So, as the old saying goes, if the solution works, why worry about the problem?
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 used to pray as if I was using 911. Now I find prayer is best used as 411."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2005, by Mandra)
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