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I saw a movie recently where a guy gets sober, and his mom hugs him and says, “I haven’t seen my son in a long time.” It’s a powerful scene, where you feel the weight of a loved one disappearing before a mom’s eyes.
Is it a little ridiculous? Yeah, probably. In the movie, the guy had a few weeks sober and all of a sudden he was back to his idealized, pre-substance abuse self. In my experience, that can take a little bit longer than Hollywood run times allow.
But it does capture a general truism that I have encountered: We vanish before the people who care about us. Sometimes it’s slow. Sometimes it’s fast. But whoever that person cared about gets swallowed up by the substance abuse, and the other person just has to watch it happen. Brutal. Absolutely brutal.
The only reason I feel like I truly understand that concept now is because I’ve ended up caring about so many people in recovery who go back out and continue to vanish before my eyes. That’s when the reality of addiction really hit home for me, and I had a new appreciation for people who stuck by me. They didn’t have to.
One other thing that hit me when I was watching that movie was the idea that that mom got her son back… but she better hope her son doesn’t go back to being the exact same person, just without the booze. In my experience, yes, my loved ones got me back. But to live a different life, I had to start to become somebody different, and that can cause some friction. If your loved ones missed the old you, and the old you needs to continue to grow in order to not relapse and die, then there could be some areas of conflict on the horizon. But those areas are important for that sober person.
I’ll give you one example from my own life. When I got sober, I really started to take commitments more serious than I ever had before. If I said I’d meet you at 1 pm, I would do everything I could to be standing at that place at 1 pm or a little earlier. Until I got sober, even before I became a raging addict and alcoholic, 1 pm and 1:15 pm were basically the same thing.
I remember in my early days of sobriety, I wasn’t drinking, but I’d still show up at 7 pm recovery meetings at 7:10. I’ll never forget going to a New York City meeting a few minutes late and raising my hand to share, and the chairperson said, “Sorry, you were late.” Turns out, they had a rule that late people couldn’t share. I remember how pissed I was at the rule, then I realized I was pissed at myself for that character defect.
The friction started happening at home because my wife and kids had never really paid attention to time before. We would roll out whenever we rolled out, and we would apologize and smile and do nothing about making other people wait for us to arrive. When I started to insist that we leave on time, woo boy, there was some significant whining and complaining and snapping at each other and pacing… so much pacing. Me pacing in the living room. Then me pacing out front in the yard, right in front of the windows so that my pacing could be seen.
That may sound like a little thing. But anybody who’s married with kids knows that this happens every single day, where you’re in the car and someone forgets something and you have to wait, and people start bickering with each other… it actually adds up to something pretty significant. I definitely could have cooled it down a bit on the pacing and acting aggravated. But I did think making a commitment to being timely was an important change in my life and our lives. So I am glad that it became more important to me.
So that is a good example of how many of us can’t just go back to being that 25-year-old version of ourselves. We need to turn into the 35- or 52-year-old version of ourselves that we were meant to be. And for some of us, that comes with a little bit of pacing in the front yard.
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: Show me an alcoholic whose Big Book is falling apart, and I’ll show you an alcoholic who isn’t.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2001, Earl T. from Buhl, Idaho)
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