I'm grateful for cloudy days. I’m grateful for all of the things that are different. I’m grateful for seeing what wasn’t meant for me. I’m grateful for learning how to let go gracefully. I’m grateful for peace and contentment one day at a time. I’m grateful to be sober today.
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I don’t know if you notice, but there is often only a very tangential connection between the actual gratitude list part of this and the rambling that comes underneath the picture.1 I’m not sure how that happens, but sometime between the time I post the gratitude list on Twitter and say 9:00am, we often veer dramatically off course. And since I used the word “we” for the first time, I would like to say a very big “I’m grateful” for all of you who read this, share this and comment on this. When I started writing this, I had no idea how important it was going to become for me and for my budding sobriety. I had even less of an idea how important all of you would become to me.
Here’s the first gratitude list I posted on Substack, I think I had three subscribers then and two of them were me. When I read this, it doesn’t paint the prettiest picture, does it?
There are plenty of days when I sit down to write this and literally nothing comes. There are plenty of afternoons and evenings when I wonder what I’m doing, when I get discouraged and tired and don’t really feel like writing anything. There are plenty of times when I think, “maybe taking a few mornings off wouldn’t be so bad, people wouldn’t really even notice.” And then, invariably, one of you pesky readers2 says something really nice, or really moving, or shares something really hard with me, or worse, tells me what this means to them. I groan, “Oh shit, guess I’m writing another gratitude list…”
Don’t get me wrong. I love doing this. Writing these has become the foundation of my sobriety, really, the foundation of my life. Every day starts like this for me, and while I worry about tweaking the format and the volume and the look to lessen the burden on all of you, the fact is that I do this for myself. I’m usually up while it’s still dark and those hours used to be the absolute darkest for me. They were the hours I was alone with my thoughts and fears. I couldn’t sleep to escape them anymore. Those mornings were even more horrible because I usually wasn’t drunk and was often in mini-withdrawal. The minutes until the Commissary opened at 8am literally crawled by.
Mornings are pretty different these days and I think I owe most of that to these gratitude lists and to all of you lovely people. I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s different these days and there is so much that has changed so much. There have also been a lot of hard realizations and one of them has been how I consistently understated my role in other people’s lives. The fact is, one of my troubling core beliefs, like a lot of alcoholics and addicts, is that I just don’t matter that much to people. That’s a thought that’s been in my head since I was a little kid. It explained to me why it was so hard for me to keep making new friends in all of the new schools, why it was hard for me to really feel connected to other people, it helped explain why I felt so barren and lonely inside.
Maybe I had good reasons to feel that way, but those feelings led me very far astray. The notion that I didn’t matter to people was what made it possible for me to drink the way I did. When you really think that people don’t care, well, it makes it a lot easier to drink. The problem is, pretty soon that belief requires that you drink. There were plenty of times during my drinking career when I would convince myself that not only did I not really matter that much to people, but that most people might actually welcome my absence. I actually thought that way about my kids sometimes. As a father, I find that idea incomprehensible and repugnant, even though it was my own.
The point of this is not to generate flowery acknowledgements of my role in everyone’s world—that sounds truly insane and not very sober. Like everything else I’ve been “realizing” lately, it’s about changes to myself and the way I see the world, not the way the world sees me.3 I celebrated three years of sobriety yesterday because a lot of people showed me that they cared, that what happened to me, mattered to them. The problem, the thing that kept me drinking, wasn’t that there weren’t enough people loving me or telling me or showing me that they loved me, it was me and my beliefs. One the most pernicious was that I didn’t matter to people; that me drinking my life away at the end of a bar somewhere was okay with everyone, especially me.
I could say something corny like “What a Difference a Year Makes,” but that’s not the right unit of measurement. I have another year of sobriety because of 365 mornings where I started my day finding a few things to be grateful for and sharing it with all of you. I’m grateful for every one of those mornings, and the dark ones before that, because that’s how I got here, that’s how it works.
And I’m not sure you know how much it means to me when I write this part every morning, but seriously,
Thanks for Letting Me Share
No, I don’t mean the part where I beg every day for email addresses. Ironically, I think those and the footnotes are maybe the best part of my writing.
That sounds super impersonal and you know I don’t mean it that way.
Often times, these “realizations” feel like hammer blows.
Grateful for you, and especially grateful that you’ve kept writing every morning. I would miss your posts if they disappeared, even for just a few days.
I don’t know what you say in AA but in Al-Anon we end every meeting by reminding each other: keep coming back; it works if you work it, and you’re worth it. (And you are. You’re worth it and you matter.)