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I saw a funny cartoon the other day from the artist Will McPhail and am including it in the written version of this newsletter. For those listening, it’s a drawing of a couple on the beach in nice chairs, with drinks in their hands. It’s the perfect setting, or so it seems. The quote at the bottom from one of them says, “Oh no. We’re still us.”
That reminded me of the common recovery phrase about how wherever I go, there I am, which of course is intended to convey the idea that I can’t escape me. I need to change. There’s no place I can move to, there’s no place I can go on vacation to, and there’s no new thing I can buy that will change the fact that it will still be me sitting there.
I liked that cartoon because it adds a little twist to the old saying. It has an undercurrent of TWO people in a relationship thinking they can go somewhere and be different, and that got me thinking about that old saying two different ways.
One is that I tried moving many times when I was still drinking and drugging. The reason that phrase is a cliche is because many, many people thought a move would help them start fresh, too, and that’s certainly what was going through my head.
I gotta say, there is some logic in that concept. New surroundings do sometimes seem to help people start fresh. I have a little bit of positive experience with that before and after my active addiction years.
The problem is, that new house in that new town always included a person living there named ME, and it was only a matter of time—usually a few days—before I was the same old lying, cheating addict that I’d been in the old house.
Then I got sober, though, and I started to really go to work on myself. As I always hear in sobriety, alcohol is but a symptom of my disease—I still had to root out as much as possible all the stuff that pushed me to drink and drug.
I feel like I have done a pretty good job of that, and so I’ve actually found the concept of fresh starts to be mostly true since I have been in recovery. My family and I rented a small house for seven years, from 2011-18, and the house was kind of a dump. There were constant issues with plumbing and heating, and we had to constantly nag the owner of the house to make the repairs. Sometimes if we had done something that may have contributed to the issue, he’d ask us to contribute to the repair and we’d end up haggling about that. The house just wasn’t a good fit for us anymore, especially after we had our third kid.
So we moved to a bigger house four years ago, and one of the things my wife kept saying was that it was going to be nice to have a lot more light that poured in through the windows. I kind of blew her off…. but damn, if she wasn’t right. I remember a few weeks into moving there, I did actually feel like we had a fresh start, and more sunshine was one reason why!
Let me get into the second thing that cartoon brought up for me, which is that when I got sober, I had a lot of important, existing relationships that had gotten sicker as I got sicker and sicker. And just because I went to rehab and got a 30-day sober chip didn’t make those relationships healthy overnight. That cartoon references a couple sitting on a beach, not just one person, and they’re realizing whatever they have between them, it didn’t disappear because they flew down to a nice beach. It was still just them sitting there looking at each other.
This comes up for me sometimes these days because I got a program and started changing a lot. It was abrupt, and not easy for people around me. So even now, with over a decade of sobriety under my belt, I think I need a regular reminder that just because I got sober doesn’t mean all the stuff I did, all the character defects that I brought into my life, all the resentments I had and also caused… they still need unpacking. I can’t really have the same thinking as the guy I the cartoon that maybe if this one thing changes, everything will be great.
So I’m glad I stumbled upon that cartoon because it gave me a lot to think about. I think tomorrow morning I am going to go into the bathroom, brush my teeth, put in my contacts and just say with a smile, “Oh no, I’m still me.”
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:
Q: WHY IS THERE NO AA SOFTBALL TEAM?
A: Because we'd all be out in left field.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, by David E. of Gaylord, Michigan, from August 2006)
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