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As I’ve said before, I am a big fan of Just for Today, a daily meditation book from one of the 12-step fellowships. I love that you can subscribe and it arrives in your email inbox every day with a little dose of something spiritual for breakfast. (You can subscribe here.)
I really enjoyed the June 9 entry, titled “Old dreams needn’t die.” The passage lays out how many of us spent our childhoods creating what we wanted to be when we grow up. (I personally don’t remember ever dreaming off eating 50 Vicodin, 8 beers and 2 Ambien every day and then barfing all over the inside of my car.) For me, addiction ruined many of those dreams, or at least postponed them.
There’s one line in particular that hit me: “In recovery, we find a reason to hope that our lost dreams could still come true.” Then it ends by encouraging us to tell ourselves, “Just for today, I’ll do whatever I can to realize my dreams.”
Early on in recovery, my life was a dumpster fire, so my dreams were things like, “Someday I want to pay the electric bill on time.” I still remember when I had about two months sober, collection agencies were hounding me day and night for overdue bills. This is not an uncommon issue in recovery: Our literature addresses similar situations, and I have a bunch of people in my inner circle who all had to work through significant financial issues.
So I knew what to say and do. The woman on the other end of the line seemed to be in utter shock that she’d managed to get me on the phone. It was like she’d discovered concrete proof of alien life. Total shock.
I told her I was new to recovery, that I couldn’t pay the whole amount today, but that I’d like pay $100 now, and set up payments for the remainder. I swear, every time she spoke, it was with such incredulousness that I felt like I was some sort of debt collector’s unicorn.
That whole story may not seem like much, but financial shame was a real thing for me. I don’t care that much about money… I just don’t like buying things and not paying for them, to feel like around every corner was somebody I’d stiffed who wanted me to pay them back. That definitely wasn’t on “When I grow up, I want to be…” list as a kid.
As a great blessing of recovery, I have cleared up almost all of my debt, slowly but surely, one day at a time. So let me now talk for a minute about big dreams.
As a kid, I loved standup comedy. I subscribed to Columbia House pretty much just to get comedy tapes and CDs—you remember Columbia House right? You could sign up and get 15 tapes or CDs for a penny, then for the next year, you’d get one CD per month for $29.99. It all averaged out to just about exactly what you’d pay if you bought everything at a music store.
Anyway, I would listen to standup and think, I can do that. Or I at least wanted to try to get on stage some day and make people laugh. It was a deeply-felt dream of mine.
And when I graduated college in 2001 and got a job in New York City, I thought, Whoa, New York is one of the best comedy spots in the world! There are open mics every single night and probably 10 comedy clubs within a half hour of my apartment in Queens. Jackpot!
Well… I never once tried standup. Not a single time. I was drunk or high pretty much every night.
Fast forward to 2018. I’m 40 years old, with 10 years sober, and I’m basically in midlife crisis mode. There was a point where I felt what apparently many people have felt over the years—an overwhelming sense that more doors were closing around me than were opening. That missed opportunities and adult responsibilities meant I had to settle into a safe place that didn’t leave room for chasing a dream.
Some sober friends encouraged me to take a look at Steps 8 and 9 and think about making amends to myself. “Whaaaaaaat?!?! You can do that?” I asked. I’d never heard that I might owe myself an amends or three.
When I worked through those things, one prominent adventure left untried was… standup comedy. For me, amends aren’t just saying sorry—it’s asking the question, “How do I make this right?” And I got a few nudges from sober friends that I needed to make it right with myself.
So in October 2018, I walked on stage for the very first time in front of about 100 people and did five minutes of (alleged) comedy.
I bombed horribly. Five minutes of sadness and silence.
But it was a spiritual experience for me. It changed the way I view addiction and recovery, similar to the way the reading described. The dreams I thought might be gone forever might just be me closing the door on stuff myself. As I often do, I need to remember, “To thine own self be true.”
I’ve been doing comedy ever since then, and I have some shows coming up that I am excited about. I might never become Amy Schumer or Jim Gaffigan but I’ll always know that I tried, and that pills and booze couldn’t take that away from me.
When I hear somebody in recovery talk about lost dreams—sometimes it’s career stuff, sometimes it’s a family dynamic they badly damaged and think will never be the same—I try to just say, “Are you sure?”
Then I tell them my story, and how I know probably 50 others who had dreams that they thought they’d been flushed down the toilet forever before they got sober and reached deep down in the toilet and pulled that dream back out.
Okay, that’s a pretty gross example to use to make the point, and it actually doesn’t even make any sense upon further scrutiny. But hopefully you understand what I am driving at… and by now, you’re also probably realizing why that Netflix special of mine ain’t going to signed any time soon!
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKES OF THE WEEK
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 newcomer is struggling to get the ketchup out of the jar when the telephone rings. “Would you get that, Jenny?” she asks her 4-year-old.
The child eagerly obeys. “It’s your sponsor,” she informs her mom. Then she goes back to the phone.
“Mommy can’t talk to you right now. She’s hitting the bottle.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2003, Richard M. from Golden, Colorado)
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