Sober Life on Walking in Sober Boots

Our writer has lost his voice

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 12:04:38 -0500

I feel that I’ve lost my voice in my writing. Since I started this blog, my posts have been largely confessional in nature. Early on, a lot of my posts were about my struggles with various aspects of the 12 Step world as I understood it at the time. Some, but not all, of those misgivings arose from my own misunderstandings of things.

Don’t Fake It — You Might Not Make It

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 10:56:05 -0400

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

— Polonius, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene III

Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes comes in the context of finances and very likely was received by an Elizabethan audience as the recommendation to take care of one’s self first and foremost — Polonius being one of the villains of the story. Just two lines earlier, Polonius advises, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend.”

1827 — Five Years, One Day at a Time

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 10:59:41 -0400

One thousand, eight hundred, twenty-seven days without a drink — one day at a time. But who’s counting?

Well, I am.

Five years is a long-ass time without taking a drink, considering that I drank daily for seven years, and at least weekly for 25 years, leading up to September 23, 2015.

Grateful for Technology

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 20:11:10 -0400

Since March, I haven’t been to an in person 12 Step meeting. I’ve been to meetings, just not in person. And really, at this point even as we’ve had in person meetings open back up and some have gone to a hybrid mode (in person and zoom at the same time), I have no intention of going back for the foreseeable future. Not because I don’t need meetings, I do, but because I am not quite ready to go sit in a room with other people in recovery who may or may not be taking this pandemic seriously.

Step 12: Give Others Hope

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 09:43:33 -0500

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Fundamentally, the 12 Steps are a roadmap for change as well as a guide for living a rich and full life. Whether one calls it a spiritual awakening or something else is immaterial. Some folks do feel that they have undergone a monumental psychic shift as the result of working through the steps. Others feel that the change is more subtle.

Step 10: Pay Attention, Admit When You’re Wrong, And Fix It If You Can

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 10:22:01 -0500

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

At this point in our journey we’ve presumably learned how to identify patterns of behavior and how they lead us to make mistakes as well as how to make amends for our failures. Step 10 asks us to practice these skills as we move through life.

My Fourth Sober Christmas

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 11:48:36 -0500

As is true if most days, Christmas 2019 was full of highs and lows. We started the day gathered around the Christmas tree, exchanging gifts. Our son is another year older, he no longer talks of Santa, but he’s still excited by the morning. Not so excited that he’s up at 5:00, but excited enough to have some really great reactions to his gifts. I took great pleasure watching him open his gifts, taking note of which ones were most exciting. There were some surprises in there, for me, not for him. He was as excited about the new scooter as he was about his headphones, but the biggest reaction was to the tickets to see The Beach Boys in April!

Step 9: It Must Be More than an Apology

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 15:00:40 -0500

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Most of us are taught from an early age that we must apologize when we do something wrong. We hear the words of a parent to a toddler:

Step 4: Honestly Recognizing Our Own Humanity

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 07:26:45 -0500

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

This step scares most people. The language feels foreboding, heavy, daunting. It sounds really hard. And for many people it is really hard.

This step is all about getting honest with ourselves. Some of us have suffered grave consequences and some of us have not. But we all know in our hearts that our addiction has caused harm. And so we must get honest about what we’ve done in our lives. Honest about how we’ve hurt ourselves and others. Honest about how our addiction affected others in our lives.

An Open Letter to the Guy Behind Me at School Drop-off this Morning

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 10:15:05 -0400

I get it. You had somewhere to be this morning and it wasn’t at your kid’s school to drop them off. Perhaps your wife usually does it. I don’t know your circumstances.

And you don’t know mine.

So when I stopped at the wrong spot to drop my kid off and then moved forward a mere 20 more feet, you really could have just played it cool, but you didn’t, you had to let me know that I’d somehow fucked up. And I get that too.

Really, I do, because there are a million little things that get under my skin on a daily basis. Like when someone doesn’t use their blinker when making a turn. Like when the barista at Starbucks doesn’t leave enough room in my coffee, or leaves too fucking much. Or when I thought I had my wallet and I don’t when I pull up to the gas pump. Yes, I get it, that my stopping short of the mark to drop off my son really pissed you off.

And you know what, I’ve walked in your shoes. I’ve been the angry asshole who made hand gestures at other people who I didn’t know because they fucked up in a minor way on the road.

Another Gift of My Sobriety

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 10:26:59 -0500

Reconnecting with my wife has been one of the most precious gifts of my sobriety. In the depths of my drinking, there were times when I felt that I’d lost her emotionally — times when I felt like we didn’t connect at all — and I didn’t know why. The reason is quite clear in retrospect, but when you’re stuck in your shit, you don’t see it.

Old Habits Die Hard -- Feelings, Self Pity, and Regrets

Mon, 26 Dec 2016 10:53:52 -0500

From a very early age, I harbored a deep sense that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t fit in somehow, that I was less than. Growing up in the country, my early feelings of unworthiness stemmed from the fact that my family didn’t have a farm, that I didn’t have my own bb gun, that I didn’t have a pocket knife and of all things, that I didn’t have a down vest. See, those were the things that the “cool” kids seemed to have.

As a kid, I was oblivious to the good things that I had. It didn’t matter that my father was a world renown instructor at the National Fire Academy. Never mind the fact I was sent to private school because my parents desperately wanted to make sure that I got an education in a town where education wasn’t valued as highly as a set of antlers mounted on the wall of your living room.

When I reached the age that little boys start to think that it might be nice to be around little girls, I felt like all the girls wanted nothing to do with me — and for the most part I think that was true. I asked the same girls to “go with me” over and over and got the same response every time, “no.” Not even a “thank you.” It didn’t help that my options were limited to about 15 girls in my class, but I didn’t understand that.

Years later, I still struggled with this. On the night that I met my wife, I was so convinced that she wouldn’t want to see me again that I struggled to ask for her phone number — after talking to her for nearly two and half hours at a bar in DC. Finally, in desperation she pulled out her card and said, “Call me” before leaving for the night. See, my feelings of unworthiness were so strong, perhaps only outweighed by my fear of rejection, that I’d never asked for a girl’s phone number in a bar. I was 31 years old and couldn’t work up the nerve to ask for her number.

At times, those feelings are still strong in my recovery.

Thanksgiving, My Gratitude List

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 12:23:43 -0500

Today marks one year and two months since I put down the drink and started to rebuild my life. Of course it wasn’t planned, but it seems fitting that today is also Thanksgiving in the US. I am grateful so much in my sobriety that it can be difficult to list them, but I’m going to give it a go anyway.

Find Your "Why"

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 09:37:05 -0400

He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how. — F. Nietzsche

Twenty-eight years ago, I was attending high school at a small Catholic school in a small town in Pennsylvania and we had daily religion class. Religion class was something I’d always dreaded from the time I started attending Catholic school in the fourth grade up until 1988, when religion class suddenly wasn’t about “religion.”

In the final two years of high school, the religion class curricula focused on real issues rather than ancient biblical text and stories of some rabble-rouser preacher who claimed to be the son of God. In 11th grade the main topic was that of finding meaning in life as related by two Holocaust survivors. In 12th grade, the topics were to social justice and a study of marriage and vocations.

The text for our 11th grade religion class consisted of Night by Elle Wiesel and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Both books detail the experiences of young Jewish men who were taken captive by the Nazi’s and who survived the concentration camps. Night was short and we read it first. To be honest, I don’t recall much of the book because it was over-shadowed by our study of Frankl’s book, which we studied from approximately October to May of the year.

The ferry that wasn't a ferry.

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 19:20:11 -0400

“Hi, welcome to Seastreak. Do you have a reservation?”

“Yes, we’re on the 2 PM to Martha’s Vineyard.”

“Okay, parking is down the street for $13 a day, or we can valet it for $25 a day.”