I’m grateful for a really quiet evening. I’m grateful for hot and sour soup. I’m grateful for a bunch of new records. I’m grateful to be having a full house for Christmas. I’m grateful for what can change. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I like to make cryptic references about Sober HQ and such, but there are actually a few of us working together to launch something in the New Year that I think is pretty exciting. I started posting a gratitude list on Twitter in February 2021 and it became the “Daily Gratitude List" and then we started doing this and here we are.1 And there is a “We,” which is pretty cool.2 What we’ve realized is that there are a lot of people who want to know more about alcoholism, addiction and recovery and it’s not limited to alcoholics and addicts. So, we’re in the process of building something that we think will be pretty cool.
It will continue to feature everything you like about this, will also include all sorts of resources, including the re-launched podcast, Big Book Study Groups and even more really brilliant writing about addiction and recovery and everything that’s in between, from a whole variety of perspectives. And I think the “whole variety of perspectives” is really important. While alcoholism and addiction are not so choosy about victims, AA can be kind of a judge-y environment. There I said it. There are a lot of people in AA with very definite opinions about how one should go about sobriety, and while I wish more of those opinions were based on the Big Book, a lot of it is stuff that is passed down from AA generation to AA generation over the campfire.
There are unfortunate consequences to this. People in early sobriety are very, very fragile specimens and the commitment to trying to find a way out is like a cheap match on a windy, winter day. It doesn’t take much to discourage a person like that or convince them that AA is only for really hardcore, desperate, kind of preachy people. I think reading “Working with Others” in the Big Book gives a really great roadmap about how we alcoholics are supposed to help each other; it also provides a lot of insight for non-alcoholics about the process of coming in.
Anyway, the first part of this is recognizing that there are different gradations of alcoholism and addiction. The Big Book recognized that there were certainly people who had not yet gone far enough, or were different in some other respect, and might not need the full-boat spiritual awakening thing. The reasons we drank, how we used it to navigate life are important because they suggest different approaches to sobriety. For some people, it might be possible to have just one careening bounce off the guardrail; Some self-knowledge and some changes in thinking and approach might be all that’s necessary. It’s possible that some people could return to controlled drinking. Then there are people like me.
Look, I tell people all the time, the point of all of this is to lead a happy, fulfilling, sustainable life. Seriously. That’s it. I’m not here writing this every day because I hate alcohol and the people who can drink it. I loved it, that’s why it was an everyday thing with me, and that’s why I needed the full-boat, complete spiritual revamp. My life, with alcohol, had become unmanageable, unsustainable. But that was my life and what I needed to do. If you need something different, well, that’s okay and we should all be able to get behind those differences and the differences in approaches they suggest.
When I share my story, I’m offering it as an example, not a prescription. We may suffer from a common ailment, or that common ailment may impact our lives, but we all got here in different ways and the way out will be different, too. That is actually a very cool thing, I think, and that’s why I’m excited about launching what it is that we’re going to launch. We hope to be able to provide a whole host of entertaining, thoughtful stuff from a wide variety of perspectives. We hope to be able to promote more understanding and help people find what they need to find their own path out.
This is a very long-winded way of saying that we’re going to put some surveys in here in the very near future. We’re really looking to figure out what would be the most helpful stuff for us to do. I have assumptions about all of this and who reads this and why. One of the things I’ve learned, over and over, is that most of my assumptions (about most things) are very, very wrong. This is part of why I was a model alcoholic, but it’s also why I would like your help. Of course, everything is anonymous and all of that, but I really, really would like to hear your views on this.3
If you want to know what I really think: I think the way of life I found while getting sober is a pretty magnificent thing. Reading the Big Book, and following its recipe pretty scrupulously, has yielded tremendous results in pretty much every area of my life. I’m happy and feel like my life has purpose and I’m pretty sure I can get up tomorrow and that will be true then, too. I’m also not drinking. You should know, the changes in my life, my contentment, did not flow from the mere cessation of my drinking; They began happening when I adopted a new way of life, a new way of thinking—and that came from studying and applying the Big Book. In my case, knowing where I came from, embracing those principles produced a miracle, and I’m far from the only one. What I really believe is that this miracle is available to everyone, it comes in a lot of different sizes and colors and you don’t have to be as far down the scale as I was to benefit. In fact, you don’t even need to be an alcoholic or addict for it to make life better.
But, in the end, the point of all of this is to bring the Program to the still sick and suffering alcoholic. It’s important not to forget that. That’s why I’m here and I could kind of use your help, plus, it’ll be fun. Just see.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
I very much hope that you are referring to us in casual conversation that you include “the.” As in, “Wow, the Gratitude List was pretty [fill in appropriate sentiment] today.”
There’s also a lot of “we” talk here in the early mornings, but that’s more self-contained.
If you have more views than can be described in a survey, you should feel free to email me: TFLMS Official Suggestion Box
Super interested in finding out more about this project. As someone who got sober in AA who is also a substance abuse counselor, I struggle with one size fits all solutions. My goal is for everyone I work with to find a solution that works for them, and sometimes that isn’t AA. Let me know how I can help