Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition

Olive Branches

Hello my friends!

It's me again, welcome to another week of Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition :)

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If you’d like to read this on the website or you can listen, too: Sober Girls - Olive Branches

In an effort to be rigorously honest… I have been very angry and very resentful as of late..which is terrible for my brain and my sobriety.

This morning specifically, I had plans to wake up early, make a cup of tea, mediate and pray and start writing to you guys all before the ripe hour of 9am. I must have been dreaming because I woke up promptly at 8:54 AM, flew to the shower, got dressed, made the bed, called an Uber and rushed downtown for an 11 AM meeting for work.

So - I did not pray, I did not mediate, I did not start writing and I'm twitching from too much caffeine. I had inbox full of emails from people who irritate me and I was pissed. Pissed at myself, the world, all of it.

But then….I made the conscious decision to not sit in my misery and text my sponsor. Who in turn, reminded me to ask God to “bless them and change me.” So I did exactly that, and proceeded to write another gratitude list, confirm the person who is going to speak for me at the meeting I chair on Saturday, called another alcoholic, and sat down to really start writing.

Almost as if it was magic, I felt better. And while I do like to believe it really is magic, it's just the gifts of AA that people talk about. The gifts aren't (usually) a new house, a fancy car, all of the material things. To me, one of the gifts is the ability to pause. To reframe. To ask for help. To reach out to others and get out of myself and all of my wallowing. It's being able to ask for others to be blessed even if they irritate me. It's being able to ask for the next right action. It's knowing when I’m starting to get restless, irritable and discontent before I get lost again in the darkness.

Those are such precious gifts to me. And by no fucking means do I have it down perfectly. But I’m trying and learning and growing and most importantly not drinking.

It's so wild to me because in just two months I'll have one whole year of sobriety (one day at a time!). I remember this time last year, I was so close to my bottom and I didn’t even know it. I was still a tornado ripping through my family, I was still numbing myself every single day. But now…it's been 10 months of feeling and friendship and commonality.

I heard someone say last night at a meeting that even if your first ninety days or six months or year is painful and miserable, the people with a lot of sober time are here to guarantee you that it does get better. And I have no choice but to trust that. Because even when its so unbearably painful and I’m lost, I know that no line of cocaine or shot of tequila will make anything better. But staying sober, and working the steps will in time…100% make life better.

All of this leads my to my final point - I couldn't stay sober without my community. Recently, I’ve been watching the show Mom on Hulu which for those of you who aren't familiar, the show is centered around a single mom who’s in AA. It's hilarious and honestly kinda comforting sometimes because they literally show the main character in an AA meeting talking about everything that we really talk about in meetings.

Annonymity is the baseline of our fellowship, absolutely. As we say at the beginning of every meeting - “Who you see here, what is said here, let it stay here when you leave here” - that is sacred. But for me, I’m super loose with my annonymity. I prefer it, if everyone knows I’m sober and I personally need to make AA the center of my life.

For others, they want to remain completely anonymous and that’s totally okay!! But Alcoholics Anonymous itself is not a secret. So for me, letting you all know that I’m in AA, and I'm so grateful and I’m here to help anyone at any time who might feel like they have a problem…that’s important to me. I want to be an olive branch that anyone can reach out to who is willing to hear me. That….is what keeps me sober.

So to conclude this novel and a half that I have written today (as per usual), I hope anyone who needs it knows I am always here to help, I hope everyone is finding their own gifts of AA, and that we continue to build a community of beautiful people who are just trying to recover..one day at a time ;)

With so much love always,

Jane