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When I hit rock bottom with drugs and alcohol, I went to rehab. More specifically, I went to an intensive outpatient program at a rehab facility. I had never been to a 12-step meeting before.
So I started out there and got close with the counselors. Almost immediately, I learned that I wouldn’t be able to leave rehab until I had a program outside of the rehab, too. So then I started to go to 12-step meetings.
I picked up a sponsor right away because that’s what my rehab counselors said I needed to do, and for the first month or so of sobriety, my program was going to meetings, meeting with the rehab counselors and other patients, and talking to my sponsor.
It worked pretty well. But then I remember my sponsor saying to me, “Hey, you have to get other phone numbers and find other people in the program.”
My first thought was, “Oh no, he wants to break up with me,” but that was just the very insecure newcomer part of me.
My second thought was, “He’s worried that he might be busy and not able to pick up a call from me.” I said that to him, and he smiled.
“That’s one part of it. But the bigger thing is, I don’t know everything. In fact, I know very little. I know what worked for me. So that’s why you need to find a wide network of people.”
I pressed him on that a little bit, because I really looked up to him. When I looked at him, I thought, “He has what I want.”
He explained it some more, that you want a very diverse lineup of people in your sober life so that you can always find someone to lean on for whatever kinds of issues you might run into. I nodded along but I still didn’t really understand the need to have 10 people like my sponsor, when I already had him!
But the good news about me in early recovery, I really did have an open mind. More than I would have thought. I remember thinking, “OK, I really trust this dude and he is saying this helped him and might help me. What the hell do I have to lose?”
When I look back on early recovery, being open-minded might have been the most important single thing I had. And it’s not like I had anything to do with it—I felt so broken inside that I just surrendered to the world and said, “Tell me what to do and I will do it.”
Fast forward 13 or so years, and I have an awesome network of sober people in my life. I have assembled people who who are young, who are old, who are literature experts, who aren’t literature experts, people with kids, people in corporate life, people who aren’t…. it’s an incredible rolodex of people with all different kinds of backgrounds, for all different challenges in recovery.
Sometimes I need my network for big things… and sometimes for small things.
Case in point: I was at the airport near my house last week, listening to a podcast on my AirPods when there was an announcement. I barely heard it but thought, “Hmm, that kind of sounded like they said my name.”
Like most responsible adults, I said, “Ah, it’s probably somebody else” and ignored it.
Then my phone started to ring. It was a sober friend who had also texted me right before he called. It said: “Get back to security.” I answered the phone call and he said they’d announced my name and that I needed to go back to the TSA station.
So I hustled back to security and discovered that I had left behind one of my cards from my wallet. It would have been a giant pain in the ass if I hadn’t gotten it back, and I might have never even figured out where I had left it.
That was reason No. 417 for why you want to have a lot of sober friends, not just a few. Sometimes my network saves me from big stuff, like drinking and drugging, or getting arrested because I am enraged about something. And sometimes they save me from smaller stuff… like losing a credit card.
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:
HEARD AT MEETINGS
"I was a functioning alcoholic. I about functioned myself to death."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, from Deanna S. of Canton, Georgia, from October of 2008)
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