Friendship

The path of friendship can be especially winding for an addict and at times morseo once in recovery. You see, we are told quite often that we have to change our “playmates, playgrounds and playthings,” meaning we must not simply return to life as normal while attempting to no longer drink, drug or act out. We must change our way of life along with our way of thinking and neither task is either easy or painless.

If our drug of choice is alcohol, we pretty obviously cannot regularly go hang out in bars and you typically find pretty quickly that the “friends” who accompanied your “good times” aren’t too interested in watching movies or going for a run. They may or may not have the same drinking problem you do, but your change in lifestyle requires the same of no one else. Some folks will stay and many folks will drift out of your life; they leave with no malice but they probably feel that they don’t really have much in common with you any longer.  

The parallels with any other manifested addiction are obvious – many of the people who partook with you probably won’t want to hang out with you after that partaking is out of the picture, and that is fine. It is their choice and there is little that can be done about it shy of using or acting out again, and then their reborn loyalty will not be enough to shield you from the inevitability of consequences.

You begin to make new friends who are both fellow recovering addicts and “normals.” It is a unique day indeed when you realize that you have an entire segment of friends that have never known you as an active addict. It can also be scary - those folks have only a limited appreciation of how far you have come and can often laugh off your “war stories” as hilarious hijinks more of a comedic nature than the blood and bone desperate sickness that it truly belies.

It can be hard to be close to many people. It is difficult to begin a new life as an adult and make a whole new set of friends. The beautiful thing about this new life is that we are no longer strictly self-seekers whose selfishness smothers our every good impulse. Much like in most of our sober undertakings, an addict makes a heckuva great and loyal friend. It is in our new nature to be of service, humbly grateful and to be rigorously honest.

It is an amazing gift for new people to be willing to become our friends in spite of our past. The gracious warmth of understanding, unconditional friendship is almost overwhelmingly good. It is humbling and means an untold amount to us. Most days I still cannot fathom what so many of my newest old friends see in me but they are truly among my life's greatest blessings. While they may not have known me as the self-destructive force of yesteryear, they might in fact know me as my truest self. I am not a lying, manipulating ball of self-loathing falsity. I am genuinely who I am, and I'm pretty okay with that today.

For those who were able to weather the storm of our insanity and remain our true friends in our sobriety the payoff in gratitude is unable to be quantified. You stuck by our side when we least deserved it and you will never truly know what that means. You saw us walk through the fire and come out transformed on the other side of our awakening.  Your willingness to stick with us is probably one of the fundamental things that made this all doable.

Humankind was meant to live in community. The addict is not different and like most things for us the need is probably magnified. Thanks to all the old and the new friends for being willing to walk this winding path beside us. We never know where it may go, but the fact that we aren't alone makes all the difference.