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I was thinking the other day about how messy my life was when I got sober. My kids were 3 years old and 6 months old. I had just bought a house. I was scuffling to figure out a career. And I was only 31 years old, which means I could have kept digging my bottom for another five or 10 or 20 years.
That got me contemplating how lucky I am to have gotten out then, rather than continuing till the pain got even greater than it already was. And it made me ponder a difficult question: When is the easiest age to get sober? And conversely, what is the toughest age to get sober?
From first-hand experience, I can tell you that early 30s with young kids is no picnic. Early sobriety was obviously quite difficult, and then once I got my feet under me, I had tremendous family obligations that caused me to often break out the dreaded phrase, “I’m too busy to get to a meeting this weekend.”
So let’s keep 30s as an age group that might be the toughest.
But what about younger? In my own experience, I would definitely say it is tough to stop drinking and drugging in your 20s. I just hadn’t accumulated enough bad moments yet to make me believe I truly had a problem. In my sobriety, I’ve definitely seen younger people struggle for that reason, plus the fact that almost all of their peer group is still meeting and partying at bars. It can be tough to have a social life that doesn’t involve lots of temptation.
That brings us to 40s and 50s… first of all, I can’t imagine having my addiction issues and living until age 40. It wasn’t going to happen on the trajectory that I was on in my 30s. I had maybe another year or two before something really bad happened.
But I guess there could have been a version of my life where I got sober for a few years, relapsed, got sober again, and kept hanging on into my 40s and maybe even 50s. But geez, by then, I think it would have been damn near impossible to get sober. That is a longgg time of active addiction without much of a solution working out.
All right, that brings us to 60s, and I’ll throw in 70s, 80s and 90s because you can probably guess where this is going. I can’t imagine having been an active alcoholic from ages 20 through 60 and then going to rehab. I would have been dead or stuck in that life. So that wouldn’t have been an easy age to get sober, and nothing over the age of 60 would have been easy, either.
I swear I didn’t set out on this newsletter entry to land where I am going to land… but I think the easiest age to stop drinking and drugging is none of them, and the toughest age to get sober is all of them. Which means the answer is that you get out as soon as possible, and you stay out. The older I get, the more I realize that addiction takes no prisoners and spares no age group, gender or anything else. And as hard as it might be to get sober, it’s harder to not get sober.
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:
An alcoholic who had abused his family, imposed on his few friends and generally been a public nuisance, finally died. At the funeral service, the preacher asked, "Does anyone wish to say some kind words about the departed?"
There was a dead silence. The minister repeated the question. Finally, a man stood up and said grudgingly, "His brother was worse."
(Credit: Grapevine, March 2009, by Anonymous)
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