+++
UNCENSORED VERSION
Please follow us at Rumble (below) for plant-medicine topics or explicit drug use stories. Go there to find the full, uncensored experience.
[Transcript Below]Common fears in early sobriety: fear of long-term sobriety, the idea of forever. Yeah, that’s the idea of forever. I remember that was frightening. That was a big thing for me in the beginning. How can I do this forever? I would go to meetings, and I would hear “one day at a time,” watching movies, TV shows, these funny scenes where people are in a basement, in a circle. And you’d hear that. They always make these scenes so cheesy looking. It’s beyond me.
“My name is Ned.”
“Hello, Ned!”
“It’s been 4,000 days since my last drink. It was my first and last Blackberry Schnapps.”
They’re not that bad. Actually, some of them are great, but I’ve personally never attended a meeting that looks like that.
Yeah, one day at a time. I would hear that. It seems so simple and basic. I would think of myself as this intellectual powerhouse, and “one day at a time” for me didn’t feel like it had any significance, like real significance behind it. I thought “one day at a time” just sounds like something you tell dumbass people, if I’m being honest with you. I mean, that was one of my biggest faults in recovery at the beginning for sure. I thought I was too smart for this thing. I thought I was too smart.
So these sayings I would hear, I would dismiss, and they would annoy me. I would kind of roll my eyes and all that. As time went on, the wisdom would sink in. I would encourage anyone to look for the cliché sayings in recovery. Look for those. That’s what you want to anchor yourself to. They’ve been around for a while. And just know up front, some of them are gonna sound silly and, like, it’s been 4,000 days since my last drink. Fear of slow progress. Fear of slow change.
My first three and a half years of trying to get sober, I would relapse about every month, every other month. It was bad. My first sponsor, he would talk about how I loved to rally. My relapses were ugly and brutal. You know, I’d wind up in the hospital many times. And when I was really taking sobriety seriously, I was in college. So I’d miss a bunch of classes. I’d miss two weeks of class because I’d go on these binges.
When I would revive myself from the relapse and start cleaning up the mess that I made, I had all this energy, this fire in my belly, like, okay, I’m gonna make things right. I’m gonna do it different. I had all these big goals for my life. In recovery, my sponsors, my mentors, the wise people around me in recovery, they would always tell me to slow down. There’s two kinds of fear related to this. There’s the fear where, if they don’t let me go at the pace I want to go at, I’m going to fall behind. So on one hand, I had my mentors and my sponsor telling me to just slow down, take it easy, one day at a time. And then on the other hand, a preconceived notion I had about recovery was, this just looks like a boring life, and nothing’s going to change fast. I would go into meetings and see people who had been there for 10 years, 20 years, and their life didn’t change much at all. And I’m an ambitious person.
But there are examples of people who absolutely experience revolutionary change. You’ll see everything if you’re around this long enough.
Fear of people not understanding. So, my parents 100% supported me getting sober in my recovery, but they didn’t understand all the nuances of changing my lifestyle. I was three and a half years sober, and my mom was sick and dying. I moved from California to Michigan.
My mom was excited because she thought, well, great, he’s going to move into our house, and I get to spend a lot of time with him. The truth is, in order to protect my sobriety, because that was really hard on me emotionally, I knew I had to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is where I found AA while I was in college. It was about an hour and a 20-minute train ride. But I knew I had to do that to surround myself with the support I needed to get through that. And it broke her heart. My dad didn’t completely understand, and they were just offended by it. It overshadowed the fact that I completely dropped everything I was doing in my life in California, put my life on hold, and moved to Michigan to be with my mom during this time. I knew I was doing the right thing. I knew I had to because I was working a pretty active program in California at the time. Again, I had three and a half years of sobriety. I never had that amount of time in my life.
That was a difficult thing. I don’t regret it to this day. It’s something, on a soul level, I’m sure my mom understands. So that’s just one example. I don’t know if that makes sense.
The other thing about having a fear of being judged. My experience has been, when I go out into the world and it naturally comes up that I’m in recovery—because I wear it like a well-tailored suit—I’m not announcing it, I’m not trying to make it something to get attention. But if it naturally comes up, I say it quite proudly that I’m in recovery because I am proud of it. I’m proud of what we do in recovery, and I’m proud of the man I’m slowly becoming every day, every month, and every year. Very proud of that. So that comes through in the way that if I’m asked about it, the way I talk about it.
I can’t think of a time when I told someone I’m in recovery or I’m a recovered alcoholic where someone looked at me funny or made me feel weird about it or like I felt judgment. If anything, it’s the opposite. People respect the hell out of it. And certainly, good people, good people really respect it. The fear of being judged, I get where that comes from because if you go on social media or whatever, like the zeitgeist or the sort of mainstream, you can find people that are just jerks. You can find people that are jerks who’ll talk bad about anything, you know. But I think in real life—social media isn’t real life—I wouldn’t worry about it. If anything, recovery is a badge of honor in my opinion.
