My XX – Twenty Years of Sobriety

5/14/2004 – 5/14/2024

“Congratulating an alcoholic for not drinking is like congratulating a cowboy with hemorrhoids for not riding his horse.”

Author Unknown

Twenty years sober!  -Which means…even if all you’ve had is a Thanksgiving glass of wine or that complimentary cocktail at that one corporate convention where you finally let your hair down, then, at least since May 14^th, 2004, whatever the amount might have been, it was that much more than I’ve had.  I know I am probably pointing out the obvious given the point of the article, but I just wanted to take a moment to emphasize that when it comes to marking my sobriety, my ‘zero‘ really is a zero.  -And if you are at all like I was when I began “doing the deal” as Marc Maron calls it, you might wonder how a person can ‘do that’ especially in the context of getting through bad days which no twenty year period is without.  It was also very ‘me‘ in the beginning that, if I could, I would have taken any pill you could have given me that would somehow magically fast-forward me ten years.  I somehow intuitively knew, even with my muddled head, though not knowing completely how or in what ways, that my life would be better if only for a new personal history absent of new messes I was then so frequently creating.

To some degree the recovery community expects me to say something at the twenty year mark though I am a little inclined on this anniversary to fly under the radar keeping my thoughts to myself or contained to this lightly read blog of which most of them are unaware.  Statistics around sobriety are poorly kept either because the community does not wish to be studied or, in the case of rehab centers, there is a bias toward inflating success.  Even inflated, some of these numbers are discouragingly low.  One US government study I read years ago defined long term sobriety as that of five years of complete abstinence and estimates are that only fifteen to as little as five percent make it to this milestone once the journey is undertaken.  Once there the odds of relapse drop to twenty percent over the remaining life of the alcoholic, or ‘addict‘ if you prefer.  Mathematically it is not unlike a manufacturing time-to-failure study, and I’ve actually spent some free time stochastically modeling this programmatically, but then…I’m a nerd, and the point is not to lose my readers here.  Let’s move on.  Yes, I’ve witnessed a lot of early-on relapse related churn to support a very low success rate, and while twenty years does not make me a unicorn, it is, somewhat coldly statistically speaking, not the average outcome for someone who feels they need to get sober.  To those people scared and new to sobriety I emphasize, “There is no reason this can’t be 100% you!”  How strange it is though that human beings for all their claims of individuality still in the aggregate behave like a herd.     

I have nothing against drinking itself.  My wife, Theresa, still drinks (normally), and the running joke is that sometimes things don’t get interesting until she does (lots of winks here).  Helping her select a cocktail on date night is among my favorite past times.  We have a fully stocked liquor cabinet that would have never survived me twenty-five years ago that offers no temptation to me now.  I would sooner eat my sweaty judogi than dip into it.  I’ve hosted poker parties with lots of drinking while I was sober.  I’ve attended bachelor parties, dance clubs, and weddings all completely sober.  I’ve even had designated drivers arranged for me at parties because the host, convinced by the lively and wild fun I was having, thought I must be too drunk to drive.  Life did not get dull in sobriety, -quite the opposite.  My children, who are now in their twenties, regularly visit the house for dinner and enjoy a drink during our after-dinner board game and conversation.  That they can do that and do it so regularly and comfortably is one of my favorite things in life.  -But when it comes to me…drinking only gets me in my own way.  I can’t think of a single aspect of my life that did not eventually grow to be better lived or experienced absent booze being poured on top of it.

My sober heroes are the ones who wear sobriety like a loose shirt, those who, having shed the self-imposed drag chute, take sobriety out for its full spin, live authentically, and make a habit of showing kindness where reflexive retribution might seem understandable if not conventional.  ‘Sturdy‘ might be the best word.  The people who lead off their personal stories with sobriety as their identity just as they might have at one time led off with drinking, and there are plenty of this sort in recovery circles, strike me as being one-dimensional in a way that does not interest me.  I was always much more than the one thing whether it be in full check or raging uncontrollably.  David Sedaris, Anthony Hopkins, and Robert Downey Jr., -all sober, and all are doing far more with their lives than living on a DEFCON 2 high alert for the next drink.  Nothing confers more upon a movement or viewpoint the moniker of ‘cultish freak-show’ than the rabid rants and declarations of the pseudo certain shaky zealot who has found ONE answer to everything.  To me nothing screams ‘shaky‘ like the desperation of being explained by one oversimplified label when it seems far more compelling to live a life as if explained without explaining.

Jungian spiritual ideas are the foundation of the recovery circles in which I traveled which wasn’t always an easy proposition to accept given interpretations have tended to have a Protestant Christian tone and tenor.  This kind of thinking can be possessive and jealous despite claims to be otherwise.  It’s sometimes hard not to see traces of the ‘prosperity gospel’ bleeding through which to me is simply self-centeredness practiced under the cover of spirituality, but hey…not my circus and not my monkeys.  Since you asked (but you didn’t), I can probably best explain my working beliefs by explaining the practice if not the principles of the person I get along with best, my wife Theresa.  Theresa was raised a Buddhist and no, that does not mean she thinks she is returning in another life as a butterfly though we do share a lot of what-if-scenario jokes about reincarnation much like someone might do if they dreamed of winning the billion-dollar Powerball. 

I don’t think Theresa looks to God to solve her problems, fix people or events in her life to hers or other people’s benefit, or scoop her up to some celestial deferred benefit package when her time on earth is up.  She does not set out to prove to herself, me, or others that her operational philosophy is correct.  She seems wholly absent of any fear that she might have ‘it’ wrong nor is there any arrogance in a belief that she has ‘it’ right.  She practices acceptance and honesty without ever looking for a reward for doing so, rather the benefits of being this way bear out naturally in their own time in her relationships and a stable existence.  She is seemingly instinctually kind without any discernable evidence that it’s a burden to be so.  ‘Stuff’ never sustains her and never rises above ‘life seasoning’, neither anchors her nor clutters her thinking on how to live the next hour.  Her empathy, gratitude, compassion, and willingness to understand another person far outstrips my very deliberate and sometimes challenging efforts to possess the same virtues.  Whereas I have been known to slip into ugliness that I’ve had to later atone for, she simply does not seem to see it as an option.  That I had to compete against high quality men for her attention when we met makes complete and total sense to me now because even without the overlay of any sort of religiosity, in an ‘a priori’ sense, ‘good’ is still good and easily recognizable when it is true.  To all the belief systems out there that might imply or even demand that righteousness can only be had inside the exclusivity of their frameworks, I give you my wife, Theresa.  Whichever system, and I doubt there is any one, that might be responsible for making her who she is, it succeeded, in my experience, in turning out a better product.      

Sensational benefits to my sobriety are innumerable.  These are the brags I made a point of pushing deeper into this article.  As fifty-four, nearly fifty-five, year old men go, apart from some annoying joint issues, I am in excellent health and very active.  At the risk of sounding a little cocky, I would even say that I enjoy ‘enviable’ health.  I simply don’t see most of my contemporaries doing the sorts of things I do.  My twenty-year-old pivot allows me this.  Some years ago, I picked up cycling and have since logged more than 48,000 miles, sometimes crossing entire states, and enough to encircle the globe twice.  In recent years I competed in national judo tournaments and finally got my judo black belt.  A few years into sobriety I returned to big-game hunting and fishing, neither of which I could have pulled off when weekends were lost to hangovers.  It is a rich experience filled with music, literature, and recreations of the mind.  In my forties, at an age when many are beginning to say professionally, ‘it is what it is’, I taught myself four programming languages.  -Amazing what one can do when one cleans the lenses, and if I may be so bold as to think some of my readers might think that at least some part of this article is well written, what can I tell you?  -Sober.  

Only one of Webster’s Dictionary’s six definitions for ‘sober’ specifically mentions the issue of intoxication. The immediate physical, mental, and spiritual consequences of drinking far behind me, I strive for some of those higher tiered definitions.  #2: “marked by sedate or gravely or earnestly thoughtful character or demeanor”.  -Or…even better than that, #6: “showing no excessive or extreme qualities of fancy, emotion, or prejudice”.  That last one is hard because I am by nature a passionate hot-head.  I work with a lot of smart, young people.  Many are doing so much better at living their lives than I was at their age.  It is fun to meet new people and begin new friendships with people who have no memory and no imagination of the Matthew that existed prior to 2004.  In many ways he would be a stranger to them.  I’d like to think I am now more a force of attraction rather than repulsion.  I hope that is generally so.

A final word about my boogeyman, that inner voice that lives inside all of us, and, for me, tended to come out at night in quiet, lonely hours when I had little choice but to think about the day I just had.  My boogeyman loved Wednesdays, the middle of the week, when enough of the week had passed that I had something to be upset about, and enough of it lay in front me that I had something to be worried or anxious about.  Sleep was an elusive thing thanks to my boogeyman, and I lived a long time that I would have argued that just about anything other than my drinking was feeding my beast.  Like a child’s swing where every successive touch meant to steady it succeeds only in disturbing it further, drinking which I relied on to ‘make my way’ only made things worse, awakening the boogeyman and pushing peace further and further from my reach.  There are many catch phrases, platitudes, and bromides offered up to help the sober noob understand this and that their old approach and efforts to dial down that inner dialogue might not be working for them, -phrases like ‘turn it over’ or ‘surrender to win’. There’s wisdom in these phrases which are nothing more than a call for acceptance, to take things as they are, though they still sometimes frustrate me for their imprecision and over-simplification.  It’s not my call to say who needs sobriety, and I am not a big one for investing a lot of time in someone who is busy convincing themselves by trying to convince me that, ‘things aren’t that bad’.  All I can say is, I GET TO not drink, and because ‘I GET TO’, I’ve gotten a lot of other stuff.  I don’t miss it one bit, and it is a nice thing when your own life is the one you want to live.