Four for 4

“Birthdays” don’t keep us sober, but taking a moment to recognize the milestone affords us the opportunity to positively reflect upon just how far we have come in the days and years since we last picked up the drink or drug. My life is nothing short of a miracle on even the worst days.

At the time of my birth, there was a genuine risk of being stillborn or brain dead due to my body’s position during the delivery. A bit more than twenty years later my life nearly ended on a grassy highway median. More than once in the years that followed I drank or used enough of other substances to have killed a person on multiple occasions. In spite of all this, I am still here. I’m alive and for the last four years I have really lived as well.

The days leading up to my sobriety birthday tend to both threaten and reinforce my sobriety. As counterintuitive as that may seem, you should certainly expect that type of duality from any addict. The weeks preceding November 4^th tend to find me emotionally drained as flashes of my old life and especially of that final binge play on the movie screen of my mind. If I am not mindful, I will begin to drift into a really negative and dark place. A time that should find me especially gracious and grateful will instead find me curt, angry and trying to isolate if I make the choice to focus on all that drinking and drugging took from me instead of all the things that sobriety has given me.

Gratitude is certainly one of the cornerstones of my sobriety and sanity; it is necessary to remain grateful in the constant battle against guilt, shame, self-pity and remorse. Gratitude is choice about your way of thinking and your way of living. Your ability to remain grateful in even the worst of times says a lot about how much you’ve grown emotionally or how much growing that still needs to be done.

Another of my cornerstones is the expansion of my spiritual life. While I am wholly faithful to my beliefs I am secure enough in them to allow you to have your own as well, even if they directly conflict with my own. Nothing about my life or my sobriety necessitates anything from anyone else, which helps me in my effort to stay clean and to stay I my own lane. I choose to live and let live; I also choose to pray for the very best for all of you at every chance I get.

A third cornerstone for me has been crafting a life that I no longer want to escape. It goes hand-in-hand with dealing with life on life’s terms and makes it a bit easier to do. You see as an active alcoholic and addict I was operating in cowardice behind a veil of bravado and hubris. If I could convince you of how great my life was, maybe I could eventually convince myself as well. I viewed everything through a lens of negativity, anger and pessimism and was so busy feeing sorry for myself that I forgot that I alone was responsible for the life I make for myself. When I got sober I learned that I had to stop blaming others, grow up and be willing to accept the consequences of my choices, good or bad. I made the choice to do what I could to make my life what I wanted it to be and that has made all the difference.

Last but not least is that which has been by far the most difficult and necessary part of this journey: becoming willing to love myself enough to want more out of my life than what I had become. I honestly struggle moment-to-moment each and every day with the two wolves inside my mind: one representing self-love and the other, older and stronger one that is representative of my self-loathing. While I choose to try and “feed” the self-love, the self-loathing has never known a moments’ hunger. My days consist of a million instantaneous decisions about how I’ll feel about myself and I don’t always make the right choice. Today, though, I at least have a choice to make. I am no longer bound and a slave to the hatred with which I regarded myself for far too long.

This has all been hard to reconcile at the most difficult times of these past four years; no one will ever tell you that life gets any easier when you get clean and sober unless they happen to be a pathological liar. Bad things happen in this world every day to nearly everyone. Life does, however, get better as you begin to understand what “normals” intuitively know from a young age: that this life is less about what happens to you than it is about how you handle it.  

Thank you to all who have chosen to walk this path with me, in person or in spirit. I would not be the man I am today without your patience, love and support. I hope and pray that we continue this journey for many, many more turns around the sun.