28 Years of Sobriety, One Day at a Time! #sobriety #alcoholicsanonymous #12Steps

I remember this day 28 years ago like it was yesterday. I had a few drinks, a few other things, and was looking to get more. And I couldn’t. So I gave up, I surrendered. And I found out that by surrendering I didn’t lose, Instead I was able to make it to the winning side!

I had been going to meetings since July of 1989, and learned a lot about denial regarding the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. I needed the five months of auditing the program to make sure it was right for me. Meaning, I had to make sure I was miserable enough and didn’t need to make my bottom any deeper. And by miserable, I mean I had nothing in my life because I could not show up for anything or anyone, especially myself.

Life didn’t change. Things did not get better. But I did stop drinking. Eventually the days added up and I got to 90 days! I was in Orlando at the time visiting a high school friend. It was suggested I not travel so soon in sobriety, but I did not take that suggestion. What I did do was go to meetings in Orlando every day. I was committed. And of course met someone from a group I attended in NYC!

Later that year my family went to Hawaii for my cousins wedding. I had under a year of sobriety. My sponsor suggested I get a meeting schedule sent to me for Oahu, and I did. This was pre-Internet! And I went to meetings in Hawaii almost every day! There I also met someone from NY, someone who was thrilled that a familiar face was in Hawaii to greet him as he had just moved and was nervous about this life change. It was pretty amazing for me to learn that just by showing up I could be helping someone else.

My self-esteem started to increase as I found myself doing more esteemable things! I started learning about the 12 steps of AA, and started to incorporate them into my life. For those of you not knowledgeable about the 12 steps of AA and many other 12 step fellowships, it is a very basic guide to living a good life:

The following are the original twelve steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. 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.

And here’s the trick for you – you can substitute alcohol and drinking for anything! You might be powerless over, over-eating, as an example.

And the biggest loophole of all, you do not have to believe in God. I say Higher Power who I have nicknamed God. I had a sponsee who used to substitute “goodness.” The Universe is a power greater than ourselves, this is not a religious based program in any way, this is about attaining some level of spirituality.

Is my life better? Not always. Am I happy? More than I used to be! I got sober, I didn’t get perfect, and neither did my life. I simply learned how to show up for myself, how to sabotage myself less frequently, and how to live without a drink or a drug, one day at a time.

Please note that if someone who is publicly sober, then does pick up and lose their sobriety, that is not a reflection on the program. If I give up my sobriety someday in the future (God willing I won’t), then it is because I started doing less of the suggested work of AA, not because the program doesn’t work. The program has about a 100% success rate when you do all the work suggested.

In sobriety I learned how to show up for Mitch. I learned to take the next step in front of me. I put an ad in the paper and found the man I would marry. We started building a life together and started taking the steps to adopt a child. That was an impossible task, a huge mountain to scale, so again, we just took it one step at a time and did not focus on the outcome. And guess what? Now we have a 14 1/2 year old pain-in-the-ass teenager! Dreams do come true!