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For a 44-year-old, I watch way too many internet videos. Quite a few of them are from people talking about sobriety… but that might also be me rationalizing the fact that I also watch a bunch of dumb TikTok dances and Twitter kitten videos.
The other day, I saw an Instagram video where a woman was dancing and shouting out all the different reasons getting sober was awesome for her.
She talked about feeling free, about repairing damaged relations, about keeping a job for the first time—all the basic immediate improvements that recovery can provide—and then she said two things that really made me pause and think.
She said that she didn’t have hangovers any more, and then she said that her looks came back.
For the first one, I had an instant feeling of gratitude. I forget sometimes how freaking terrible it felt to drink till 2 a.m., pass out, then try to scrape yourself out of bed in the morning. I remember being very over-tired, perhaps a little drunk still, and then trying to get a shower and drive into New York City for work. Those mornings were horrrrrrrrrible. I could barely function.
Now throw in the fact that I did that almost every day for several years… oof.
It helped to think about that because I catch myself grumbling sometimes that I went to bed too late and “only” got seven hours of sleep. Or that my cats started fighting in the middle of the night and I had to get up to break it up.
Uh, hold on a second. I used to pass out with my face in my own puke and wake up four hours later to clean up and drive through the Lincoln Tunnel along with 5,000 angry FedEx drivers. I’ll take the cat fight breakup scenario.
The other thing from the video was about looks. I never had much in the looks department, so I don’t really identify with that as “I used to be good-looking, drank too much and looked like Jason Voorhees without the mask, then I got sober and looked good again.”
But there’s no question whatsoever what drinking and drugging did to my body. Oh my god, when I started thinking deeper about it, I remembered a bunch of other things.
I’m not going to get into anything bathroom or bedroom related other than to say… I think we all have drunken horror stories from both of those places, and so do I. I’ll spare you having to hear mine, though. Just think of your own terrible drunken McDonald’s bathroom story in my honor.
I will throw a few out there that I just remembered after contemplating the looks idea.
One is basic medical care. During the last few years of my active addiction, I stopped going to my regular doctor, my optometrist and the dentist. So during my worst 3-5 years of treating my body, I had no actual medical care.
The second one is diet and nutrition. I did no exercise whatsoever and ate painkillers nonstop on many days, while balancing a chronic pain situation with my feet. Somedays I would be so high that I would eat one or no meals. Then the next day I would eat fast food three times.
It was a total health disaster. At one point, I had someone comment to me that I had lost so much weight that she thought there was something seriously wrong. The look in her eyes was, “Do you have cancer?”
A third thing is any sort of therapy. I went to a psychologist for awhile but I wasn’t honest, so it was a waste of time—his and mine. I’m grateful for being able to make up a lot of ground when I got sober. But I think about how if I had been sober, I would have been able to use professional mental health treatment to work through some of the tougher moments of a young adult’s life—my chronic pain situation, getting married, becoming a dad for the first time, sorting out financial issues.
Oh well, the point of this post is about how much gratitude I have for where sobriety has lifted me, not where addiction dragged me. And sometimes the most basic memory—like, not being hungover for 13 consecutive years—is enough to really sneak up on me and remind me for at least a few hours that not drinking and drugging is actually the easier, softer way.
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 cop was patrolling his beat when he came upon a drunk, trying to shove a key into a lamp post. "It's no use," the cop joked. "There's no one home."
The drunk replied, "Ah, you're wrong. There's a light on upstairs."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, Oct. 2006)
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