In my first handful of days in sobriety, when I was in A.A. rooms and I’d come across any normal-seeming human with double-digit sobriety time, I would marvel at their achievement, wondering what sort of secrets of the universe they’d been granted. Even a year ago, when I got nine years, and I’ll be honest—nine years felt like a largely insignificant amount of time. No different than year 4, or 7, or 8—years come and go quickly, but the days are long; every phase of sobriety is either too soon to claim wisdom or came too late in life, depending on who you’re asking.

And even though I knew better, I still assumed there would be some shining, glorious hallway to enter once I’d had a decade’s worth of brain-healing.

I guess we’ll find out soon enough, because as of today, July 15th, 2026*, I have officially reached ten years of sobriety.

As far as the sobriety I’m counting here—well, it’s the A.A. kind. Even though I attempted to get sober many times over 20 years, it is only the last 10 in a row that have stuck. July 15, 2016, wasn’t the date of my last drink—that was October 16, 2015. I had one lonely Budweiser bottle I did not finish; I simply left it on my friend Lockhart’s big countertop.

Last drug? Poppers, for sure. Or maybe it was cough syrup. It doesn’t matter. Either way, it was some real junior varsity shit ingested or inhaled somewhere around July 2016.

July 15, 2016, was simply the day I decided to stop resisting and give up the warped idea that I could do my own modified version of sobriety, something akin to what I liked to call “advanced moderation.”

And A.A. has delivered on its promises, especially when it comes to its storied, freaky fellowship. I’ve relied on people from those rooms, and several of those people have become friends I’ve been searching for my entire life. You know the type: the ones who believe in you, buoy you, remind you that self-implosion is no longer a viable survival mechanism. “There are others to think of now,” they’ll remind you.

Plus, A.A. truly appreciates the underdog. You can pick up a 30-day chip, then the next day slam 18 Peach White Claws and drive an electric scooter into the Griffith Park Bear statue, but as long as you come back into the room the next day, everyone will clap and scream wildly as if you were Jeff Hiller winning the Emmy. Keep coming back, they’ll say. Keep coming back.

So I did.

Over the past ten years, I’ve adopted many different types of sober personalities: I have dyed my hair platinum blonde, and I’ve got more than a dozen tattoos, even though I don’t consider myself a tattoo person. I tried boxing, karate, yoga, and ran several Turkey Trots. Tennis was big for me in 2017 and then again in 2021. I worked out with sandbags, kettlebells, and weighted vests.

I went through a brief vinyl phase (jazz, obviously), bought old baseball cards, bought a glass table to showcase those old baseball cards, and spent hundreds of dollars per month on houseplants. I tried to learn Portuguese on Duolingo. Bought a kintsugu kit.

I tried to be vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, and then tried to ease into some half-keto thing where I could eat fruit. Would like to go back to vegetarianism, to be honest.

Let’s see what else? Oh yeah—I read Moby Dick. (Loved it.)

Some of these whims stuck: meditation is a wonderful daily ritual. BJJ is still pretty great. Poems. Pema. Stoicism.

And one of the most important discoveries happened for me just a few months ago. It was an incredible description of how to legitimately practice gratitude that I pulled from the book The Spirituality of Imperfection. Check it:

“Gratitude is not a feeling but an ongoing vision of thankfulness that recognizes the gifts constantly being received. A feeling is fleeting, an emotion for the moment; gratitude is a mindset, a way of seeing and thinking that is rooted in a remembrance—the remembrance of the time being without the gift.”

Ten years ago, there wasn’t much happening in my life—nothing good, I thought. But over time, and today in particular, I’m choosing to remember the public humiliations and self-implosions that happened to me between 2015 and 2016, ones that felt like they’d follow me forever, as the time being Without The Gift—before my ability to receive love from people, to love through fear, to be vigilantly patient and okay with myself for my mistakes, to be able to sit quietly in those early purple morning hours with hot coffee plotting my day, to re-parent myself, and to parent my children.

I mean—God, I have children now. I have a perfect wife and three children who all came within the past ten years. (And two happy dogs came along, too.)

And I also have you, readers of The Small Bow. Thank you for bringing me here.

If you don't feel comfortable calling yourself an “alcoholic,” that’s fine. If you have issues with sex, food, drugs, codependency, love, loneliness, and/or depression, come on in. Newcomers are especially welcome.

Format: crosstalk, topic meeting

We’re there for an hour, sometimes more. We'd love to have you.

Meeting ID: 874 2568 6609
Password To ZOOM: nickfoles

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