SUNDAY GRATITUDE EXTRAVAGANZA
| Breakfast with an Alcoholic Episode 32 Liner Notes | Three Recovery Discoveries: "What I Learned on Vacation" | The Sober Library | TFLMS Archives | Much, Much More |
I’m grateful for 4 years of sobriety today. I’m grateful for everyone who shares that with me every day. I’m grateful for what’s changed and for what had to be left behind. I’m grateful to see that fear is only fear. I’m grateful for what’s in front of me.
Happy Sunday. It is the 22nd of October and that would mean that I have four years of sobriety today. I’ve been trying to think about really profound learnings and such, but not sure I can manage too much in that department. I actually think that’s a really good thing. There is a certain monotony to my sobriety these days. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been writing a gratitude list on a daily basis since November of 2020 and every one of them ends with,
“I’m grateful to be sober today.”
I say that every day, and mean it every day, because it’s the foundation of my life. But what I’m coming to understand is that just having a foundation, well, wouldn’t you rather have a whole house? When I think back on the first year or two of my sobriety, just establishing that foundation was all I could do. It was hard work and I clung to the words,
“I’m grateful to be sober today.”
It meant that I had made it another day. It was a hard, dark, lonely time and while the idea of drinking was ebbing away, it hadn’t been replaced by enough yet. I felt lost, alone and empty. I spent a lot of time wandering the streets of my new home, the fabulous city of New York. It was the pandemic, so those wanderings had a certain dystopian quietness to them. Anyone remember midtown in the Spring of 2021? Shouldn’t there be something here? That’s how I felt.
You know the story from there, little miracles started happening. Part of the problem was that while I was drinking, I didn’t notice things like “little miracles,” I was looking for something on a much larger scale. Anyway, these little miracles often took the shape of kind, beautiful people. People I never expected became pivotal parts of my life and my budding sobriety. Happiness and joy and purpose began to slowly creep into my life. As I began writing this, I saw parts of myself that I didn’t know were there, learned things that set me free, saw that the chief impediment to my own happiness had been me.
Not all of the people stayed. I’ve come to understand that the Universe is a pretty relentless change-agent. In early sobriety, I was very focused on establishing routines—they are critical—but I think I mistook the routines for sobriety. I saw sobriety as more of a “Lather.Rinse.Repeat” affair. If you want to produce another day of sobriety today, what worked yesterday is a good start. That’s logical, but I don’t think that’s how the Universe works. I think it’s more:
Learn. Recover. Repeat.
Learning is not always fun. The most important lessons are often the most painful ones, but I’ve learned that pain attends progress. Not in a masochistic, “admire my suffering,” kind of way, but real learning begets real change and real change is not easy or even that pleasant. Learning hard things requires recovery, in the same sense that a really hard workout requires recovery. Wash that lactic acid out, do some stretching, get ready for the next one. But in a semi-cheesy play on words:
Learning hard things drives recovery.
That’s the command of the Big Book: Continued sobriety requires the continued expansion of our spiritual lives and experiences. My Higher Power, the BMIU, is pretty relentless on the learning thing.1 There have been two direct communications from the BMIU. The first, “Do the thing you don’t know how to do,” was not limited to starting a podcast. I’ve come to believe it’s the Prime Directive. The second communication; “You hung on to you,” is critical, too. I’m trying to change me, if I lose me, that job becomes pretty much impossible.
My focus in the last couple of weeks has been the First Step. It’s the subject of Episode 32 and Daniel and Sean and I had a great conversation around the First Step. I think one of the principal objectives of the First Step is the recognition and defeat of self-dishonesty. The two biggest lies every alcoholic and addict tells themselves are these:
I can control this
Things aren’t that bad.
The First Step is the antivenin for these self lies, that’s why the word “admitted” is used. When done correctly, the alcoholic is forced to open their own eyes to their own perfidy. It’s when we first start to see that the problem is not external, it’s us.
That’s a hard place to live. But that’s early sobriety. It’s that first hard learning that opened me up to what came next. The miracle for me wasn’t that I stopped drinking. To be really honest, that was accomplished by simply taking a pill that would make me sick every time I drank. The miracle was the life that came to be all around me. A life built on the foundation of sobriety, but dedicated to the idea that doing the next right thing is all that is required for the next right thing to happen.
Not all of the “next right things” were happy. But they were necessary. They taught me the lessons I needed to learn and prepared me for what is next. I don’t know what that is and I find that to be extremely terrifying and unsettling and yet, I proceed oddly apace with a sense of calm and peace. Maybe it seems like I’m trying too hard sometimes, trying to convince everyone that sobriety is this really great thing, rah rah rah. You might accuse me of trying to put lipstick on the pig of not being able to ever drink again. Like tipping cows, applying lipstick to an actual pig would be really disturbing and difficult and frankly, probably impossible. Instead, maybe this is more the make it a “pig in a blanket of sobriety” approach, because those are always delicious.
I do wonder why this time sobriety “stuck,” when it didn’t so many other times. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyze my thinking, trying to see how my ideas and conceptions about the Universe and my place in it began to change. I really wanted to come up with a pithy, profound and unbelievably funny, yet moving, series of insights collected from these four years of sobriety and present them to you today. As I tried to generate that list, all the things I did differently this time, that I didn’t do all of the times I couldn’t quit drinking. I realized there was one thing staring me in the face.
Gratitude isn’t mentioned in the Steps. When I finished the First Step, and saw that my entire life was built on flawed premises, self-lies, a certain amount of dejection and bleakness set in. A very wise Sponsor told me to do a gratitude list every day. That’s what nourished my budding sobriety, it’s what let me see that I was not living out a horrible defeat, playing out the string in a losing season. I was building a new life. Every day, I wrote and shared a list of things that I was honestly grateful for and that is what helped build the house that sits on that sober foundation. It really was that simple:
I’m grateful to be sober today.
If you’ve already listened to the podcast, then we’ve covered this. But, this is now a “regular” feature on the podcast, wherein a variety of people share “Three Recovery Discoveries:” This week it’s Sean and Jane sharing things they learned about sobriety while on vacation!
:
Sean:
As for me, I didn’t go on vacation, but I love this poem and it’s on the subway all of the time, usually next to where I’m sitting:
For us, reading and writing have been a big part of recovery and sobriety. We thought we’d start sharing some of our favorite books on the topic of recovery, addiction and general happiness and telling you how they helped us! If you have ideas, thoughts, comments, suggestions or if there are some books that you’d like to chat about, well, we’d love to do that with you. 2
Now, here’s something new. You may have heard me mention something about writing your story in the style of Bill W’s: and this is where we are going to do it. If you want to write your story and share it, I’ll be happy to put it here for other folks to read. If you’d like to record yourself reading your own story (I highly, highly recommend this), I’ll put it here, too:
The “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous
It’s the “Anyone Anywhere” meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, this Tuesday evening at 7pm. We’re ready to go and hope you can join us this Tuesday! It’s 1/2 AA Meeting, 1/2 Alcoholic Book Club and 1/2 something else we haven’t figured out yet. We’ve been reading the “Stories from the Back of the Book,” and they are all so great. It’s a fun way to learn more about the Big Book and reading these stories out loud is a little like listening to the legends of AA share.
Hope you can join us!
From the TFLMS Archives:
How Can I Help Support TFLMS??
Like “BMOC,” but “in the Universe.”
Seriously, write a book review (or we might expand into movies!) and we’ll probably put it up.
Congratulations!
Congrats on 4 years of learning how to be an adult...😂. You’re story is similar to mine, I finally darkened the doors of AA at age 54, long past the time I should have been here. I was also under the illusion that I had it “under control” and my life wasn’t “that bad”. I had a good job, big house in the suburbs and substantial money. However, what I didn’t have was any dignity or self-esteem because I was hiding in my garage drinking alone. I had no friends and my wife detested my existence. What I found in AA was hope, looks like you found it too.