Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.
This weekend, I had a few people tell me they like what I am doing here and asked how they could help. If you feel similarly, I’d say the biggest thing you could do is tell somebody to find it (NelsonH.substack.com) or hit the purple “Share” button at the very button.
Which is a good transition to what I wanted to talk about today.
I’m a huge fan of sobriety literature from the 12-step programs—any 12-step program, really. I do identify as an alcoholic and an addict, so I enjoy a lot of the neighborhoods in the addiction community. I personally have participated in four different 12-step fellowships during my time in recovery, and all four played a part in helping me get sober and stay sober.
So I wanted to reference one piece of recovery literature that I love: Just For Today. It’s similar to Daily Reflections, but aimed at addicts, not just alcoholics.
What I love about it is, you can put in your email address on the JFT web site and start getting them emailed to you every day at midnight. They’re around 100 words long, and they almost always give me a really good little micro dose of recovery.
I get them at around midnight, so I can either read them when I wake up in the morning… or while I am up way too late watching an NBA playoff game. (Wanna guess who’s planning on doing that a lot these next two months?!)
I recently read the May 14 entry of Just For Today, titled “Oops.” It’s about mistakes, and there were a couple of points that really hit home for me.
A big one: We all make mistakes. Doesn’t matter how much clean time I have, how many meetings I’ve gotten to that month, or how much college I’ve got under my belt… I still screw up things, and I probably always will.
The second thing that jumped out at me is a line that says “Many of us feel that our entire lives have been a mistake.”
Whoa. At first that hit me as a little grandiose and harsh—our whole lives? Isn’t that a little much?
But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that I did spend a good 30 years feeling really bad about myself, mostly because I did bad stuff all the time. No matter how much your parents or spouse love you, if you behave like I did, there’s no way you can feel good when your head hits the pillow.
So there is that part of me that just feels like a damaged can of corn at the grocery store. It gets thrown on the clearance rank, and then if nobody wants it at a discount, it gets tossed in the garbage.
The third thing from the reading is that mistakes are actually vital to growth. There’s a line that says addicts are hard-headed people and mistakes are sometimes the best teachers for us. Wow, that is so true for me. I don’t like messing stuff up, but it does take that for me to learn. That happens a LOT.
And it always has: I didn’t quit drinking and drugging because it was the right thing to do, or I saw a powerful movie, or somebody explained that I was an addict and needed help. No way—I only took my hand off the stove when it was on fire.
The fourth thing that stood out to me is from the final two lines of the reading, which said this: Just for today, mistakes aren’t tragedies. But please, Higher Power, help me learn from them.
That hit me for a few different reasons.
One is just the idea that mistakes aren’t tragedies. Send a dumb email? Okay, fine, make it right, move on. Say something mean to your kids? Apologize, move on. Maybe you were in traffic on the highway the other day and a guy in a sports car tried to merge onto the highway but darting in front of you, and his lame music was so loud that it drowned out your VERY COOL 90s grunge from your car, and maybe you sped up a bit to make sure he didn’t get in front of you… okay, that is a super-specific example that may or may not have happened the other day.
You probably get my point, though. When I screw up, I can bounce back. It is not a tragedy.
I need to keep saying that: It’s. Not. A. Tragedy.
It can be hard to break the pattern of converting oopses into tragedy, though, and that’s where that last line comes in regarding mistakes. “Please, Higher Power, help me learn from them.”
ALCOHOLIC 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.
From a sign outside a 12-step meeting:
NOTICE: Elevator to sobriety out of order…
Please use the steps.
If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.
