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I was at the ultimate sweet and sour kind of meeting recently—a meeting when someone from the rooms of recovery dies of our disease. I didn’t know the guy who died very well. But I knew his name. I saw him at meetings. I’ve hugged him a few times. So even though I didn’t have his phone number or know his last name, I saw him pretty much every week for a few years. He was in my life.
It’s sour for obvious reasons. I find it haunting to look around the room and know where a guy was sitting one or two weeks ago, and now people are announcing his funeral. It’s terrifying. It’s sad. And it’s realistic. I know if I ever go back out, I might not come back. I didn’t consume alcohol or drugs at a reasonable rate for about 10 years before I got sober. I don’t think I ever will. Which means if I relapse, I can’t pretend that I know I will get myself back to rehab or meetings. Hell, I could go back out and not make it through one day of drinking and drugging the way I used to do it.
It’s sweet because of the way that sober people rally. I’ve found that in sobriety, there’s an incredible resilience to the people in the rooms because we all know we could have ended up in jails, institutions or caskets from our previous life. So that morbidness and brutal honesty leads to the ability to hug and laugh in a way that is hard to describe to normies. I often chuckle about how many times I have heard someone share a terrible moment from their life and they laugh, and the whole room laughs with them. We know the highs. We know the lows. We know it often takes a sense of humor to get through the darkness.
At this meeting, lots of people shared for 3-4 minutes where they verbalized their heartbreak, then how they’ll move forward. Inevitably, the best message for me is when I hear people say the No. 1 thing I can do is be more sober today than I was yesterday so that if someone reaches out for help, I am ready to grab it. To do that, I need to turn that sadness into a drive to do service and carry a great message. I have had phases in the past when I’ve lost a good recovery friend and I immediately felt the need to pull back and protect myself—who wants to get close to people if the end result is that kind of loss?
Well, I’ll tell you who wants that: me. I need it. I need the biggest possible sober network of people I am close with. I need people who will walk with me and laugh with me, through sunny days and dark days. I know I’ll have both of those at some point in my life, and I am so glad to have the sweetest people for the sweet and sour stuff.
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:
Tacked up on a cork board in an AA meeting room: "For sale: Wedding dress, size 8. Worn once by mistake."
(Credit: Grapevine, May 2008, by Anonymous)
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