I’m grateful for a really lovely time with my daughter. I’m grateful for a late-night basketball adventure. I’m grateful for some stirring music on a cloudy, foggy morning. I’m grateful for some more Lab weather. I’m grateful to be sober today.
It’s a foggy, kind of humid morning. I write often about my affinity for what I call “Lab Weather.” My Labs loved cavorting in this kind of weather and so do did I. I’m not sure what exactly about it appealed to Kayla and Buddy, but they were always super frisky on mornings like this at the Dog Park. When I was on the Safety Patrol in 5th and 6th Grade.1 I loved the rainy, damp days because that meant I got to go to school early and put on one of the big huge rubber Safety Patrol rain slickers.2 These were the bomb. I probably looked like the guy on the fishsticks package, and it was super hot in there, I didn’t care, I loved it.
I still love being outside on days and nights like this. I’m sure there’s some ego play at the bottom of the glass, I am an alcoholic after all. Maybe it makes me seem rugged and tough, impervious to even the worst natural forces. I don’t know. I want to tell you today about someone who is really rugged and tough and if you met him for the first time that’s definitely not the impression you would come away with. But he is and I know that because he’s celebrating a year of sobriety today.
S. has been my sponsee for about 18 months now. He’s smart, funny, kind, shy and quiet and today he’s got a year of sobriety. I had been working with S. for a few months and he was taking a trip to a place he’d lived during the bad, old days. As the trip approached, bits of apprehension started floating up, but the dam burst during the trip and S. had a really, really bad relapse around Thanksgiving last year. Bad as in he would call me in the evenings and not be able to talk, I’d just hear noises in the background for a few seconds before he hung up. It was scary and I felt helpless and, to be honest, wasn’t sure he was going to make it back out.
A friend of mine advised me that it was probably time to move on, because it didn’t seem like S. was coming back and there are lots of people to help. That seemed pretty cold to me and, in what I consider a pretty major miracle, S. came back in.3 He was apologetic at first and as a chronic relapser, that just makes my heart break. Those feelings are still there for me and still very, very raw. I know us relapsers are impossible to understand, incredibly frustrating and, ultimately, heart-breaking. I would never diminish the pain and suffering I caused to the people who loved me, but if you’d like to plumb the depths of worthlessness and self-hatred, not being able to stop drinking is pretty far up there.4
It’s the thing that is ruining your life. It’s the thing that is ruining the lives of the people who love you. It’s getting worse, not better, and the repeated failures seem like they’re driving the nails in, one at a time. And you can’t stop. Or maybe you can stop for a week or 30 days before you secretly start again. You drink again knowing how much pain it’s going to cause everyone, knowing how it is literally tearing the fabric of your life on the inside. It’s the thing that mattered the most to the people who love me and it was the one thing that I was incapable of.
Feeling brave, courageous, intrepid—that’s pretty much out of the question. The only thing I knew was drinking, I couldn’t imagine my life without it, I couldn’t manage my life without it. So I kept on drinking. I think S.’s relapse was similar—he got to a familiar place and felt some of the familiar feelings, and, well, you know where that goes. It did for S.
But S. came back in. There’s an awful lot I admire about S, but what made an impression on me was that when he came back, he wanted to get to work. And we did. I told him it was going to be easy to remember his sobriety date, December 7th, because that’s a pretty well-known catastrophe marker. We got to work. I’m not sure S. always enjoyed the reading and the writing, but I know he does now.
Bill W. famously recognized that helping other alcoholics was keeping him sober, even when his efforts failed with others. Bill knew it was the act of helping others that did the magic, but I’m going to tell you, watching someone go from horrifying, I-just-drank- a-handle -of -vodka phone calls to accidentally quoting the Big Book in conversation—that will definitely make a believer out of you.
S. has a year today and that is a f****** miracle. About 100,000 of us die every year. I think that number is way higher. Not nearly enough of us make it out.5 S. has a year today and a completely changed life. You know how we did it? It was two alcoholics reading and studying the Big Book a page at a time and "working" the Steps. That's also how it worked for me.
When S. called me a year ago and asked if I’d be willing to take him back on as a Sponsee, I knew things were different right away—something in his voice, in him, had changed. It was humility, a real desire to change his life and, most importantly, a willingness to believe that there might just be a way out. Of course, those are the magic words:
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
Big Book, p. 12
Congratulations, S. A year of sobriety is a big, f***** deal. Enjoy the victory lap, but then it’s time to get back to work. Because that’s what sets us free. A page at a time and a Step at a time.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
I was the Captain of the Safety Patrol, a Sixth Grader with a clipboard and you’d better be at your post when I came riding by on my swanky yellow Schwinn Sting-Ray.
Ok, the new trend is the "The Damp Lifestyle?" I’m all for this, but couldn’t we come up with a better name. Name me something you really like that you would describe as "damp.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.
I believe I gave you my definition of" “major miracle” yesterday.
I guess, “down there” might have been more appropriate.
Only about 7-10% of the people with this disease ever even seek treatment
S! Yes we can