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When I got to rehab back in 2008, every group session began with each person saying when their sobriety date was. As I recall, everybody in the room had a week, or 13 days, or 25 days, and I remember a few people eventually got to a month or two, and we celebrated like we’d won the Super Bowl. The idea that anybody could get 30 days sober seemed so unfathomable that I remember smiling ear to ear and thinking that person was a superhero.
And then one day when I had about 20 days sober, a guy named Lenny (not his real name) showed up. When it was his turn to say his sobriety date, he said he’d been sober since July. I remember being perplexed, because it was mid-December 2008 at the time, which meant Lenny had five months without drugs and alcohol. He basically had more clean time than the entire room combined. We were all quite mystified.
As the days went on, he was very quiet, and I still didn’t understand why he was there. So I did what any gossipy, shoulda-been-minding-my-own-business newbie at rehab does… I launched a full investigation. After all, I had been sober for, what, 10 minutes? Obviously it was time for me to start figuring out other peoples’ problems now!
I tried fishing with our counselors, and they gently emphasized the concept of patient privacy and also that maybe I ought to concentrate completely on my own life rather than other newly sober people. I asked other addicts if they knew anything, and they all shrugged their shoulders, too. Lenny was a big mystery.
But over the coming weeks, Lenny shared some at group sessions, and I got to be friendly with him, and he eventually laid out why he’d been sober so long and was still back in treatment. It’s one of those stories that I am so glad I heard, at that exact moment. It feels like fate when I look back on it.
He basically told me that he’d been a hardcore opiate user, but he drank every day, too. Then he went to rehab—this exact rehab—and sobered up. He’d stayed sober for a few more months before he ran into trouble—but not drug and alcohol trouble. He said he’d found himself eating bad, behaving bad, lying a lot, smoking more cigarettes than he ever had, watching too much porn, and a bunch of other bad habits.
That’s when he busted out the old recovery cliche, “If you hang out at a barber shop long enough, you’ll eventually end up getting a haircut.”
I remember looking at him, confused, and saying, “Wait, are you saying you have been getting too many haircuts, too, and that’s why you’re back at rehab?”
He got a big ol’ laugh out of that, and he said, “No, my point is that if I am living a life that is the exact same way of living I had been doing, just without the drugs and alcohol, I’ll eventually use.”
I still looked a little perplexed, so he tried a football analogy on me. “You ever watch a football game where a team drives down the field every series but doesn’t score for awhile?” he asked me.
“Uh, sure,” I said.
“Well, eventually if you’re in the red zone over and over again, you are going to get into the end zone. So in my life, that meant I was at the 2-yard line, very close to using again even though I hadn’t. So I checked myself back in here,” he said.
I pushed him a bit, because I thought it might have been easier to just go to some more meetings or something else that didn’t entail checking back into rehab.
“Listen, man, let me tell you something you should always remember: If you’re looking for the easiest, softest way to stay sober, you are already in trouble,” he said. “You have to go to any lengths to chase sobriety. You have to fight and scrap for recovery the same way you fought and scrapped for drugs and alcohol.”
He went on to say that a reboot of sobriety seemed like the right thing to do, to take no chances messing around inside the 5-yard line, to put himself back in a lockdown facility and try to build back up.
I’ve thought about that ever since. I haven’t gone back to rehab, but I’ve gone to pretty extreme lengths when I feel like my sobriety is running low. I remember when I had five or six years sober, I made a commitment with another scuffling sober guy to hit 60 meetings in 90 days. It was pretty hard, but I did it and it worked. I acted like a newcomer again, and I felt the benefits of the gift of desperation.
So thank you, Lenny. I am so glad you showed up in my life at that point in time, and I am so glad that I tried to be Rehab Sherlock Holmes for a bit to get to the bottom of it. Because what I found there is something that has stayed with me for 13 years now.
In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)
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:
While talking after dinner with his sponsor, an AA member mentioned that he had had a really rough childhood.
His wife added, "Yes, and a very long one, too!"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2005, by Robert M.)
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