One thing often leads to another just like one drink leads to another and another. Pretty soon the day is gone and the night is gone and we haven’t accomplished a thing. Of course when you finally put down the drink there are plenty of other things that we can occupy our time with besides going to meetings, picking up the phone and talking to our sponsor. That is one thing that I found out early in my days in AA. There are just so many hours in the day you can be sitting in a church basement. When I quit at least several hours a day opened in my window of opportunity and somehow I had to figure out how to stay sober in this new allotment of time I never knew existed. What exactly that was took me a long time but little by slowly my Higher Power that I choose to call God put people, places and things in my path and so 22 ½ years later I can still call myself a sober man. I have made a ton of mistakes in my new life but now I remember what they were. I wouldn’t trade this new life for anything in the world. So many people need to anesthetize themselves just to navigate through the day. We do it stone cold sober.
It also made me realize that there was a whole new world that had gone on while I was three sheets to the wind. And a lot of things had changed when I stopped drinking. First off there were my relationships with my friends and relatives that I had ignored and in most cases abused. Then there was my vocation that I had failed to give my level best to. Fortunately for me I worked for myself so the main harm I had done was to hurt my earning power. Reconfiguring how I was going to get back in the game took an incredible amount of patience and persistence two things that I didn’t have two cents worth while I was under the lash. The real work began when it came to my relationships and there were many I simply left behind without a word because they were my drinking buddies but when it came to the people that cared about me well that was something else again. More about this next post.
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JB, You have once again reached another level of recovery. The fact that you have many close friends that you have "let in" is a big step for you, whether you realize it or not. Furthermore, we (your friends) see you strive for healthy relationships. I hope you continue to strive for me "healthy" relationships...although you have let more people into your inner circle, that doesn't mean that they are all "healthy". We earthlings have to continually scour our friends and pull those "weeds" or "unhealthy" relationships. I suspect it is more difficult for addicts because the affinity still exists to attract weeds.
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