I Never, Ever, Ever Forget Where I Came From.
If I stay sober today, tomorrow I will celebrate 30 years of sobriety. Officially, in my mind, this means that I’m an “old timer.” And being an old timer means I get special applause at Alcoholics Anonymous conventions. This was my only goal in sobriety, that someday I would get the special applause.
Newcomers often ask old timers, “How did you get 30 years of sobriety?” And old timers say: “You don’t drink and you don’t die.”
Quite honestly, that is how I got here. At this point in my life, I believe it was much easier to stay sober than it was to stay alive. It’s not that I’ve had so many (sober) brushes with death, but I’m kind of a hypochondriac.
So I didn’t drink and I didn’t die for three times longer than the bulk of my drinking. I was plastered between the ages of 15 to 25 – 10 solid years – and then I spent another three years wrestling with relapses.
In my head, this much sobriety can’t be possible. My mind races every day with things that happened to me during those 10 years. I have flashbacks; I have vivid memories. I never, ever, ever forget where I came from.
Remembering my past does not keep me from complaining about my first world problems – like a restaurant giving me the wrong pizza. In fact, remembering where I came from only means that I feel pretty grateful, underneath all the complaining, about 97% of the time. The other 3% of the time, I am so distracted by my complaints that I forget to be grateful.
I am reminded though, every night, that my life is a miracle. It’s really, truly a miracle. And I thank God for that.
Thirty years is a long time. I could never have stayed sober for that long. The only thing I did was stay sober for one day. And then the next day, I managed to do it again. I got a lot of help from AA, family and friends, but mostly from God.
Other than divine intervention, one simple principle saved my life: One Day At A Time. I can’t stay sober for my entire life! It’s unbearable, the thought of doing anything for my entire life. But for one day, I can do almost anything.
Every day, I make the conscious decision not to drink or do drugs. And I’ve made that decision for 10,956 days.
Sometimes, though, I had to break it down into smaller sections. There were days when I would watch the second hand go around on my clock – TICK TICK TICK – sometimes for hours. I watched that second hand not until midnight, because I wasn’t waiting for a new day. I watched until 2:00 a.m. because that’s when the bars closed.
That’s when I finally felt safe. From 2:00 to 7:00 a.m., I could rest.
I am aware of the insanity of such desperation – the near inability to hold myself back from consuming a substance that, for me, is poison. Fortunately I learned, as the days went by, how to be less obsessed with alcohol and more concerned with learning how to live without it.
For 30 years, in fact, I’ve been learning to live without alcohol. “Learning to live” – changing, growing, adapting, adjusting, fighting hard to grow up while not losing my childlike wonder. It’s been an awesome challenge.
Still, not dying was much harder. That’s the part over which I have absolutely no control.