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I was at a meeting recently in Nebraska when several newcomers showed up and said they were at their very first meeting. I always feel a warmth toward newcomers because we were all newcomers at a certain point in our lives, and I also love the concept of somebody who might have found the solution sitting right in front of me.
I sat behind them and ended up staring at the backs of their heads for an hour. I watched them as they fidgeted and checked their phones and then got the hell out of there the second the meeting ended, and I smiled a bit to myself because I remember those days well.
That got me thinking about what it must have been like to see me walk into my first few meetings. I think my head was spinning and I was scared and I didn’t like some of the God stuff I was hearing. I also think I only could catch about 50 percent of what people were saying, which is something I take for granted now. There are so many things we talk about with short-hand language—resentments, the spiritual axiom, daily inventory, sponsorship—that you learn over time and then start to use yourself. But in the beginning? My eyes must have glazed over.
But as I stared at the backs of these guys’ heads, I also took note of what was happening around them in the room. There was so much laughter, so many hugs, so much clapping for anniversaries, that I flashed back to my early days and I had a spiritual experience thinking back on some of my earliest memories of getting sober.
I think the biggest thing that I got from my first few meetings was hope. I walked into sobriety broken down, with disastrous relationships with loved ones and friends, and a job that I should have been fired from. Put it this way: I didn’t have many people whose eyes lit up when I showed up.
But that’s what happened at meetings. When I said I was at my first meeting, people were thrilled. They clapped and lined up afterward to speak to me. People were begging me to take their phone numbers and to come back the next day. I got a long list of suggestions for other good meetings in the area, and all sorts of words of encouragement. I found myself at a point in life where no one was cheering for me to make an appearance, and suddenly I was Tony Robbins. It was awesome.
Setting aside being treated like the most important person in the room, I also found that the mood at meetings was so different from what I expected and so different than how I was feeling in other corners of my life. Sober people were hopeful and optimistic. When someone would start gossiping or whining, somebody else always seemed to reel them back in. I didn’t meet a lot of people who were interested in being sad or angry. They’d worked hard to get sober, and they were going to laugh and smile and enjoy life, dammit.
I didn’t realize until that Nebraska meeting how much I must have needed that. I couldn’t wait to get to meetings and see sober people, and I often chalked it up to the mysterious notion of pink cloud, a phrase that gets used all the time but is pretty squishy and undefined. I know lots of people experienced something I’d call pink cloud, including me, but how long is it? How do you get it? Why doesn’t every sober person get a month or two of pink cloud? Can you get it back, or is it one-and-done?
Well, I think I stumbled into my answer, which is that after not being able to stop drinking and drugging for about 10 years, I had stopped. I felt better. I slept better. I wasn’t puking every day. And then for an hour every day, I got airdropped into a room with shiny happy people who were farther down the same road as me, and they seemed so happy. It seemed like the moment I had put down the drugs and alcohol, I had been put on a journey with a bunch of bright lights up ahead. I felt the optimism in my bones.
I guess pink cloud implies that the glorious early vibes of recovery eventually wear off a bit, and life gets normalized. I think that’s true in my case… but I also think that I have pretty regular short bursts of that same pink cloud of incredible gratitude. And I also think that when I am open-minded about it, the pink cloud pours back into my brain when I see somebody who is on Day 1 or Day 17 or Day 39 of this journey. And the thing I want to make sure of is that when that guy on Day 39 shows up and is having a hard day, whether he is in his pink cloud still or not, I need to make sure that I am oozing that same amount of hope and optimism that was freely shown to me. So yes, I need to make sure I put my Tony Robbins hat on as much as possible.
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:
A guy goes out after five months in the program. He comes back to his home group one night, plastered.
The greeter crabbily warns him, "You ought to put the plug in the jug! I'd hate to come to your funeral!"
Slurs the drunk: "I didn't invite you anyhow."
(Credit: Grapevine, May 2009, by Tony A. of Massachusetts)
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