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I read a tweet the other day from a sober person that made me smile.
Then I looked at it again, and it made me laugh.
Then I read it a third time and it REALLY made me laugh. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.
It is so simple, yet so profound and so true… here goes:
“The worst part of being sober is knowing what’s going on.”
I found it funny for multiple reasons. One is just the literal meaning. Yes, when I got sober, I finally knew when my kids needed to be places, and when the actual deadline for work projects was, and how much money was in my savings account.
When I was drinking? Not so much. I buried my head in the sand every day with drugs and alcohol. That must have been such a nightmare for people dealing with me.
The second part that makes it funny is how true it is that knowing what’s going on can be painful. There was a reason I was numbing out every day to avoid being an adult—because being an adult can be tough! One of the fundamental slogans of sobriety is “life on life’s terms,” which is basically a direct answer to that tweet.
And the third thing that’s funny about it to me is that it’s not like I got over that feeling—I still have days where I don’t want to know what’s going on. I don’t want to know that that bill is due, or that one of my kids has to go to Target to buy socks and the store closes in 11 minutes, or any of the other b******t that gets in the way of me doing whatever I want, whenever I want to do it.
I had a tough work week last week, so I decided early this week that I would throttle down and relax. Go to the gym, watch a bunch of TV, and do the bare minimum as I recharged.
Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. I had a car fail its emissions test, I had multiple unexpected pickups to do for the kids, and a leaky faucet that had to be fixed right away… how dare the universe bog me down with all that b******t? Don’t you know how this was supposed to be my throttle down week?
Then I thought about that tweet, and remembered that if I don’t roll with what’s going on every day, I am going to be miserable. It’s impossible to plan out life and then have the whole plan go perfectly. It just doesn’t happen, and I know that, and I don’t know why I even try. It’s so silly. And yet… I’ll probably do it again tomorrow.
The good news is, like so many other things in sobriety, the more I laugh about it, the more it loses its power. So I owe a debt of gratitude to all the Twitter jokes—I am actually glad that I am sober and know what’s going on.
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:
OLDIE BUT GOODIE
"Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic," was the meeting topic, prompting a newcomer to wax philosophic at great length from the point of view of reincarnation: "Was I an alcoholic in my previous lives? In some but not in others? Will I still be an alcoholic the next time I come back? And in the life after that? And hundreds of lives after that will I…?"
The stunned silence following this line of questioning was finally broken by an old-timer who patted the pilgrim on the knee and said gently, "Don't worry. In AA, we try to take things just one life at a time."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2008, by Paul C. of California)
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