How to Stay Sober for Nine Whole Years
Thanks for letting me share.
Hi. Good morning. It’s a short one today and is free for everyone.
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Last Tuesday, July 15, was my sobriety birthday. Nine years ago, on that day, I walked into a small AA meeting in Jupiter, Fla., called the Triangle Club, which was sparsely attended, and raised my hand to declare it was “My first day back.” Everyone clapped a little louder than normal for me because that’s what happens when you’re a new person who’s experienced a temporary setback. I’d been to that meeting several times over that initial run in an attempt at long-term sobriety, but I’d always slipped up somewhere along the way. Even when I was enrolled in an outpatient program nearby, I was never clean. (The counselor wryly broke the news to me that my drinking cough syrup recreationally, sneaking the occasional benzo, and poppers were automatic disqualifiers if I was trying to stay abstinent.) But on July 15, I decided I wasn’t fucking around anymore.
Although I didn’t stop fucking around. You see, I had no spiritual practice. No God in my life. And AA’s program was nudging me to start that spiritual practice. And I found God there, but I was skeptical of the religion connected to God, a religion that turned me off. However, the most important and useful discovery was that the only requirement to bring God into my life was to understand that God was not me. Huh – easier said than done, it turned out, because I had to confront these two questions:
What if I’m not the most important person to ever exist?
What if all my intuitions and opinions are incorrect?
Life on those terms was challenging, and to be consistent with it, I had to learn how to become “emotionally sober,” which has its own book and is defined as “comfortable being present with all of your feelings without any one of them defining or controlling you.”
I didn’t come close to being emotionally sober at all that first year back. If I were to pick a date when I became emotionally sober it would be about January 2017. It was soon after an Esquire story about me dropped. I quickly realized that if I was going to participate in those interviews and make my sobriety and my mental health public, I couldn’t be upset if a writer questioned my motives or made me feel terrible about myself. Emotional sobriety required that I no longer outsource my self-esteem to any other people, even the ones I love, but especially to magazine writers. Or documentary filmmakers for that matter. Or podcast hosts. You get the idea.
At LA meetings, they give you a cake and even sing Happy Birthday to you. I haven't taken a cake yet — that will be next Sunday at my home group, since I’m in New York City today. I flew out here for a friend’s birthday party this weekend (happy birthday, Dommmmmm!) and got to see some people, feel the vibrations, and enjoy the ghosts of this place that kept me here for almost 15 years. I’m headed back to LA tonight, but this morning I will go to my favorite meeting here, the one on Perry Street. It’s a hallowed spot for me. I began attending meetings there soon after I got out of rehab in early December of 2015. I was always raising my hand as a newcomer, sometimes lying about my day count, and I don’t think I shared once. I used to hit this Thursday night speaker meeting there, and it was 90 minutes with a smoke break in between. I'd never stay for the full meeting, and I’d always leave after the smoke break, which seems unfathomable to me now.
It’ll be good to be back, raise my hand, and announce to a roomful of (mostly) strangers that I’m no longer a lying newcomer and that I’m now miraculously nine years sober. Maybe I’ll get a chip, or maybe I won’t, but they’ll clap loudly for me. It’ll be a great morning.
To wrap up, I’m going to share my favorite poem from this week, which is from the Poetry Is Not a Luxury collection, an excellent book, and one you should buy.
How to Not Be a Perfectionist
By Molly Brodak
People are vivid
and small
and don’t live
very long—
I finally dug into The Fifth Agreement this week but it’s not blowing my mind. The fifth agreement is: “Be skeptical but listen.” Meh for now, but maybe it’ll make more sense later on. I also got this new Pema book – Start Where You Are – which is great as usual.
As for gratitude – well, my family, especially Julieanne. My kids, obvs. They don’t keep me sober, but they let me run out to meetings and meditate on cushions and do stepwork Zooms and therapy anytime I need it, no questions asked. Sometimes my daughter even meditates with me, which is a high achievement for a six-year-old.
Also I have big love for Edith, obv. Garrett. Miranda. Lauren. Swamp Dogg. They keep TSB alive.
And thank you to our readers. We’ve heard from so many of you that TSB is a part of your recovery, and that’s so incredibly kind and gratifying you can’t even imagine.
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Your recovery is important. Do it the way that works for you. Figure out whatever makes you feel less bad and do that. That’s recovery.
Thanks again for your continued support of The Small Bow.
On to the next year.
ajd
I used to live around the corner from Perry street, on Ludlow btw. 7th Ave and Hudson. This was years 1 and 2 of my sobriety (early 90s.) I was a regular. I learned to arrive early and drop my keys on a seat and then smoke outside. One time a drunk passed out on my shoulder. I let him. Another time cops busted in and arrested this guy. We all stood around afterwards looking stupid at each other like; what do we do now? Then this old timer, a toothless wizard of the street in a battered straw hat shouted, nothing stops an AA meeting! So we just got back to sharing. His name in the meeting was Stan the Hat.
That tiny stage with the little desk and chair where the chair/speaker sat was like an alter to me. I passed through some dark times in there, sitting through my ambivalence about AA, my writhing wounded ego, my horny obsession with any pretty girl who walked in, my agonizing contempt for speakers who drove me crazy.
Many years later, around my 30th anniversary, I went back and was amazed to see the place looked exactly the same. They needed a speaker so I spoke, and shared about how meaningful the place was to me. I shared bits and pieces of my story, and tried to and on an uplifting note. No one raised their hand to share for a bit and I had that familiar “they know I’m a big phony” thought flit through my mind. And then they did. And it was the same jazz set of awkward revelation it always is.
Congratulations on another year of freedom from the substances that bind us to misery!
As far as God goes, I have always believed but there were times in my life when I didn’t follow. On one of my anniversary's of being clean and sober, I looked back on my life and wrote about how often I survived when I should not have. I firmly believe it was the hand of God that saved me. Even in sobriety, I have had many occasions when I believe God was in charge, not me, the most recent when a series of coincidences placed me right behind a head on collision where I held a bleeding woman’s hand and prayed with her while awaiting EMT.
Have a great and blessed day!
If you are interested, the essay I wrote can be found here ➡️ https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewdevlin/p/is-there-a-god-updated?r=ugzy3&utm_medium=ios