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Let me ask an existential question: How do you define cool? Who is cool? What makes them cool? Is it not even cool to use the word cool any more?!?!
I ask because I was thinking back recently on a conversation I had maybe two or three years ago on the playground at my kids’ school. I remember some parents were talking about another mom and dad and oohing and aching about how cool they were. At first, I thought they were all saying that the kid was cool, but no, they were talking about the mom and dad, not the kid.
I know the people they were talking about, and I realized two important things. One is that I hadn’t ever even thought about who the coolest parents were at the school. And secondly, if I had, well, let’s just say they wouldn’t have been my picks.
Regarding the first thought, it struck me as the first time in my life that I hadn’t already carefully come up with cool rankings. And that meant for the first time, it dawned on me that I hadn’t curated a cool list and then gone out of my way to cozy up with the cool kids. What a gift. I don’t miss keeping that list AT ALL. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Regarding the second point, about these particular parents, they’re not my cup of tea. I don’t dislike them. I say hi to them. They say hi to me. They seem perfectly fine. Just not for me. There’s a lot of bragging and gossiping and clout chasing that I just choose not to be a part of. They know they’re the cool parents and they’re trying to live up to the hype. You do you. But for me… no thanks. I’m not rooting against them. It’s just not what I am looking for.
So what am I looking for? Who is cool to me these days? I hadn’t ever thought about it like that before, but I flashed back to early recovery. Because even without drugs and alcohol in the picture, I was looking to be among the coolest kids in recovery when I first got clean and sober. I went to rehab when I was 32, and I remember meeting a group of mid-20s who were young and sober and smoking cigarettes and going to movies together and doing social media. I remember thinking I wanted to hang out with them.
Even when I was looking for my first sponsor, I asked the guy in really expensive looking clothes who was chairing the meeting. I thought he must be the most popular guy in sobriety, so obviously we should work together. Luckily, that dude was an awesome sponsor, and he wasn’t the Prom King of recovery and wasn’t trying to be.
He really emphasized to me that when I build a network of sober people, it should be people who have what I want. That quote has stuck with me for a long time—who are the people who have what I want? I was a married 32-year-old who didn’t smoke… did I really want what those single 20s people had?
So for the first time, I re-evaluated what “cool” is and my relationship to it. What I discovered was, I had been chasing cool people my whole life. And usually, they weren’t people that I thought were cool. They were people who other people thought were cool. It’s a little like dating someone who you are not attracted to but everybody else thinks is attractive, or taking a job that everybody else loves and you want to be able to have that social currency. How does that usually work out?
I’m proud to say, I now have a good definition of what cool is. It has nothing to do with the surface level stuff. I have friends who have money and friends who don’t. I have friends who seem popular and some who might not be. I don’t really freaking care. They’re beautiful people, inside and out. (That used to be a big one for me, always looking to hang out with the hotties because I didn’t feel like one myself.)
Most of my friends these days are all trying to stay sober. They all live by principles that I want to live by, too. They’re people who look at their side of the street on a daily basis. They’re people who are trying to understand rather than be understood. They’re people who lean toward love as much as humanly possible.
Are they cool by society’s standards? I think so. Are they cool by my standards? They absolutely are.
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 doctor advertises brain transplants. A man goes to see what kinds of brains he has to offer. The doctor says, "I have a lawyer's brain for $100,000; a doctor's brain for $200,000; and an alcoholic's brain for $500,000."
The fellow asks, "What makes the alcoholic's brain cost so much?"
The doctor replies, "Look at it! It's like new—hardly used!"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, by Earl T. of Buhl, Idaho, June 2006)
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