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I saw a tweet the other day where a guy said he had just gotten sober a few months ago and he asked on Twitter, “Hey, anybody else out there who got sober and suddenly was worried about stuff they never worried about before?”
I laughed because my answer is absolutely yes.
I went to rehab in 2008 and my life immediately improved. Like, a lot, in a short amount of time. Everybody I cared about was cheering me on, and then I was going to meetings where I would announce I had been clean and sober for 24 hours and then 30 days, and everybody there cheered and hugged me, too. I felt like Jack in Titanic, hanging off the front of the ship yelling, “I’m the king of the world!”
And then reality set in: I couldn’t believe the amount of adulting that being sober requires. There had been a childishness that active addiction allowed me to do. If I was too hung over to go to work, or forgot your birthday, or got too drunk at Christmas—well, sorry, get over it. I was so numb all the time that I didn’t feel the damage I was doing.
By the time I had 90 days sober, I had begun to realize some shocking truths about sober life.
One is that you are supposed to pay bills on time. My old bill paying policy, which was to pile the unopened bills in a plastic bag and put the bag in the corner out of sight, wasn’t going to fly any more.
Another shocking truth: You have to feel things. Like, actually feel them. I cried more in my first 90 days than in the previous five years combined. I cried over good things and bad things. I still remember when one of my cats died, and I couldn’t leave the vet’s office. I was just a puddle of tears. I called my sponsor and shared with him that I didn’t even know what to do with myself, that the sadness was just a big lump in my gut that wouldn’t go away. He was gentle about it, but he basically said to me, “You’re actually feeling things for the first time in a lonnnggg time. It’s gonna be bumpy some days.”
A third shocking truth: I wanted to be a responsible person, but that apparently requires you to be responsible. That meant showing up at 4 p,m. if that was the time I was supposed to be there. Not 3:22 p.m. or 4:59. But 4 p.m. I used to have a policy of plus or minus 59 minutes from the start time was perfectly fine.
Guess what? People freaking hate a******s who do that. Now, I was supposed to be the kind of human who does what he is supposed to do, and that wasn’t easy.
To come back to that tweet, which used the word “worry” twice, I did also start to worry about things like I hadn’t in the past. My kids were at the top of that list. One specific example is that I used to be so drunk and high all the time that I’d take them to the playground and just nod off in the background as they hung from sliding boards and jumped off the swings.
Now that I wasn’t face down/ass up on the park bench, I realized quite a few times that I was pretty worried watching them do dangerous stuff. Holy s**t, what a realization, huh?
But ever since then, I have worried about my kids in a much different way. And I have found worrying about my kids to be the toughest kind of concern to wrestle, because I have truly needed a higher power to work through it. Even when I am doing the helicopter dad thing, there is only so much I can do. The kids go off to school and whatever happens, happens. If the kids go to the movies with friends and somebody hands them cigarettes or a beer, I have virtually no control over what happens. I have to trust the universe and hope I did an okay job. The rest is out of my hands.
So yeah, I do worry about more things than I did before. A lot more. But I also have quite a few tools to work through the stuff I worry about. So even though a good sober life has given me lots of stuff to worry about, I think I might actually be pretty good at processing it. So that means I might spend less time worrying than ever.
And that is such a beautiful, beautiful thing. You could almost say that I feel like I am king of the world!
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:
A newcomer was told to begin her mornings with a prayer on her knees. "Oh, I'll never remember to do that."Sponsor: "Are you a smoker?" Newcomer: "Yes."Sponsor: "Put your cigarettes under the bed so that when you get out of bed, the first thing you'll do is reach under the bed for them—you'll already be on your knees, so just begin praying."The next morning, she woke, hit the floor with a thud, and stuck her head under the bed, grabbing frantically for her smokes. Roused from sleep by her frenzied search, her annoyed husband shouted, "I already threw that bottle out!"
(CREDIT: AA Grapevine, December 2004, by Sherry O.)
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