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I was at a meeting this week and I looked around and realized how many of my best friends were all sitting there. It was such a beautiful thing.
I didn’t always cross the streams of my life. When I first got sober, I treated recovery like doctor’s appointments. I went for an hour, waved goodbye and headed back to my “real life.” On nights, weekends and holidays, I hung out with friends and family. They were in a different compartment of my life than my sober network.
And then I remember going to my first party where it was only recovery people. Wow, they seemed like they were having a lot of fun. I can recall saying something to my sponsor about it and he laughed. “What’d you think, that a bunch of people who spent their whole lives partying wouldn’t know how to have a little fun sober?” he asked me.
“Uh, yes,” I said. I actually did think that.
But, as time went on, I found myself slowly gravitating toward wanting to hang out with sober people more than just an hour every other day. It wasn’t because I needed recovering alcoholics and addicts around me to protect me from picking up again. It was that I found myself happier and, frankly, more sober and better behaved.
To sum up what I’m saying: I am better off when sobriety is a lifestyle for me, not a small part of the day. When I was drinking, I was under the influence of booze and drugs. Now that I am sober, I love being influenced by recovery people.
I’ll give you a recent example. I went to a very fun, very rowdy party a few weekends ago with my kids. It was all sober people at the party, and we had a helluva time. But I had a moment where I got cooking on a rant about an airplane debacle I’d had the week before. At one point, I blurted out, “And on the plane ride home, I got stuck in a middle seat between two butterball dudes.”
The guy I was speaking with raised his eyebrow, which in recovery is the universal symbol for “You’re being an a*****e.” And just as I was translating that stink eye, someone else walked by and said, “Hey, that’s not very spiritual.”
I had to laugh. Years ago, I might have processed that as sober people being sticks in the mud. But now that I’ve been in recovery for awhile, I love that we look out for each other that way. Were those hairy, sweaty gentlemen on the airplane actually butterballs? Uh, well, that’s mean and not something a spiritual person such as myself would ever comment on!
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.
The defense attorney for a woman who had got her third DWI was cross-examining the arresting officer. The plea was not guilty, and he was trying to discredit the officer’s testimony.
“Tell me, Officer, what made you think that my client was drunk?” the lawyer demanded.
“Well, for one thing,” said the trooper, “she fumbled around in the glove compartment for about five minutes looking for her car registration.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” exclaimed the attorney. “It could easily take me ten minutes to find the registration in my glove compartment.
“She was in my car,” the officer responded.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2001, Mike J. from The Woodlands, Texas)
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