A thousand days sober
and then some, but who's counting?
Things have been a bit stopped-up over here but not for lack of thoughts or lack of words. It’s good to be sharing again.
It’s been 1057 days sober, since the last sip around the fire with friends. That my last sip was within the most enjoyable context imaginable isn’t lost on me. In a way, I was raising my glass to the way I couldn’t ever master drinking, the “normal” way. My way was less cute.
“We admitted…that our lives had become unmanageable.”
I’m finishing a mini Diet Coke I started during my weekly homegroup on Zoom, the recovery meeting I’ve called my own for three years, since a couple months before deciding to quit. One benefit of Zoom meetings is if you’re still toeing the shallow end of the recovery pool, you can show up with an opaque cup filled with Guinness, or rum and a brown soda of your choice. Is it…Pibb Xtra? Dr Pepper? Dr. Thunder? Dr. Zevia? All in the name of gentle on-ramps, perhaps? Never mind why anyone would require a mega-pint of anything for only an hour.
The decision to quit came after dozens of mini-prompts over many years, Google quizzes (“am u ak akcolghic ??”), and seeing myself in others’ stories.
One story sticks out today, from a day I’d invited a speaker to come share at the women’s group I was helping lead at the time, and we knew sobriety was a part of her story. My face felt hot all morning. I put my hand on her as we prayed before her talk. Somehow I prayed true words, words I needed just as much. Thanks for being here with us. Prepare our hearts to receive from you, receive your peace. May her words be your words. Thank you that you are here with us. Help us breathe this morning. Help us receive your peace. Help us rest.
Help. Help. Help.
Our sober speaker takes the mic. She says the words addiction, drunk, sober, twelve steps, recovery—in church. She gets specific and honest—in church, a place where, for many, honesty comes to die. Not today. At a women’s group, at 10 in the morning, we’re barely on the dregs of our second cups of coffee and she’s telling us how she got free.
She details a certain kind of morning-after, the kind of morning she swore, she swore, she swore wouldn’t happen again. Her specificity sends a current through me and I realize this story is also mine. The story is about a baby boy who wakes to remember it’s his birthday, a mom who’s unable to lift her head from the pillow, the birthday boy first patting her head, then patting her leg down the hall as she prays into porcelain. Some kinds of stories we take to the grave—but for the prompting of the spirit that someone needs to hear them. I’m grateful she didn’t shy away.
Her words were the beginning of the answer to my prayer for Help.
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.” — Fred Rogers
Once, a fellow traveler told me she had thirty years, but she thanked me for being around, helping her “stay sober.” Yeah right. Fresh out of my toddler years in sobriety, I wanted to snip away her scarlet letter—go! be free! You did it! Box checked. You can stop counting now!
For the newly-free, numbering the days rightfully celebrates the distance from the last drink. And in the context of decades-old recovery, the number remains an Ebenezer stone, an anniversary of feeling around in the dark for the Hand of Help, ready when we were ready to try again.
We remember when this was us, and we remember this is us every day.