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I wanted to end this week on a positive note, and I thought of something from Wednesday. I was with a group of sober friends and we read the July 21 entry from Daily Reflections, titled “A Priceless Gift.”
I’ll summarize it quickly: The reading gets at the idea that the deeper we get into sobriety, the more likely it is that we got rid of our “devastating defects.” Maybe we still have lots of smaller issues. But the big stuff—lying, cheating, stealing—often times goes away once we start to work a program. The reading ends by saying, “This newfound peace is a priceless gift.”
That entry made me think about how bumpy things can get when you’ve been sober for awhile. It ain’t always easy to be accountable for actions, to work through resentments rather than stew over them, to call yourself out on character defects, to make amends promptly once you realize you messed up. That is a high bar!
And by having such a high bar for our new lives, it can get heavy. It sometimes feels like I am flagging constant errors that I make, nonstop nitpicking at the way I react to things, consistently pushing myself on bad thoughts.
The specific thing that has been tough for me lately is that I have been catching bad moods and behaviors from others. By that, I mean, I am doing fine on my own. Then somebody plops down in front of me and they’re grumpy and suddenly I’m grumpy too. Or somebody starts gossiping and s**t-talking and suddenly I’m right there with them. Basically, my spiritual tank must have dipped a bit because I have been picking up other peoples’ issues to throw on top of my own.
I’ve had a few times when I say to a trusted sober friend something like, “Work is crazy, and my kids have been grumpy, and my car needs work, and we don’t have enough money saved up for vacation, and I’m supposed to be driving our family home for the holidays, and now my cat who’s five pounds overweight hasn’t been cleaning his ass very well and there’s turds and litter laying around the house once a day…”
When I’m done ticking off all of the things from my very busy, full life, one friend of mine sometimes says, “Well first off, congratulations on all of that—even the cat turds.” And then… well, I don’t really remember what he says after that because that’s really all I need to hear. Congratulations. I mean, I should be dead, right?
When I think about where my life was at in 2008, in the throes of active addiction and almost daily brushes with overdose/death, nobody was counting on me for anything. Nobody really cared if I came to their house for Christmas or their wedding. Nobody at work was asking me to show up to meetings. None of my cats would even come near me. It was a pathetic disaster.
Contrast that with now. Is there pressure to be a grown up? There sure is. Do I wish I could get plow through life and say “F— you!” every time I feel like it. Yes, sometimes I do.
But I’ll come back to that phrase: This is a priceless gift we have. So if you’re sober today, pat yourself on the back. I don’t always remember to think about it this way, but I’m thinking of it right now—that every time my head hits the pillow at night without drugs or alcohol in my system, that is a win. I accomplished the most important thing in my life that day, and everything else is whipped cream on top of the sundae.
Now, I gotta go scan the hallway floor to make sure there’s nothing that any of my cats left behind for me to scoop up…
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
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.
The wife of a not-yet-recovering alcoholic visited the fortuneteller.
The mystic stared into her crystal ball and proclaimed, “I have some terrible news. In the near future, your husband will suffer a hideous, violent death.”
The poor woman was visibly shaken. “W-w-will I be acquitted?” she asked.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2001, Bob M. from Cleveland Heights, Ohio)
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