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My kids got their report cards a week or two ago, and they all did great. I’m so proud of them.
But I went to a meeting a few days afterward where we read the piece of program literature that says, “In actual practice, we usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient. Many of us thought it necessary to go much further.”
It was a good wakeup call that there is a reason that my kids didn’t write their own report cards, and I don’t do my own employee review, and NFL draft prospects don’t write their own scouting reports, and restaurants don’t do their own Yelp reviews. Well, they probably do write their own Yelp reviews, but that’s beside the point…
The biggest thing that clicked into place for me is that I am still a pretty shaky narrator of my own story, which means I am a pretty shaky evaluator on many things in my life. I do personal inventories regularly, but it’s dawning on me that my best inventory work usually involves including another sober person or two.
For me, it all comes back to the concept of “A sick mind can’t fix a sick mind.” I accepted that as 100 percent true when I first got sober—I recognized that I needed a completely new way of living, and I needed to learn it from others because I was someone who two weeks earlier, had been crushing up Vicodin in McDonald’s bathrooms and wiping fentanyl patches in my arm pits “for more effect.”
Fast forward a few years. I’m avoiding McDonald’s bathrooms entirely—not a fun place to hang out when you’re clean and sober, either, it turns out—and my marriage is much better, I’m performing much better as a dad and employee and friend. It was inevitable that I would start to think I can handle evaluating myself.
I do think that the place I’m at is pretty damn solid. I know what I want my ideals to be, and I stick to them most of the time. So I don’t think I’m in a spot where I need to run every email or resentment past a panel of five sober friends. But I do think when I collect a few resentments or lingering bad feelings, I should work through them on my own using the Fourth Step and then do a Fifth Step with someone else. I often find a lot of revelations myself when I plot out why I’m upset, what part of me was affected and then what my role is.
But a second set of eyes and ears can be invaluable. Something tells me this holiday season, I may need that quite a bit. And since my kids aren’t allowed to give themselves report cards, maybe I should stick to that rule, too.
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:
OVERHEARD AT SEA
In the dining room of an ocean liner, a lady asked, “Who is this Bill W., anyway?”
“I don’t know,” replied her friend. “But I’ve been on six cruises, and he’s been on every one!”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, October of 1994)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
