Today I was legally given full custody of my daughter.
During every single day over the past 13+ years I’ve thought about this moment. In a system that treats families like they are simply case numbers devoid of circumstances, I cannot tell you how many times things felt hopeless. Yet I never gave up and always made sure my daughter knew that she was loved. Kids are more resilient and capable than we give them credit for, even during these abnormal times. Let them know you are always there to listen to them if they need to voice their feelings! Don’t ever, ever give up even if it takes over a decade because one day your child will need you more than ever and everything will finally change.

today, I have been sober for 5 years

Over the past 365 days, since the last time I wrote one of these reflections, I’ve had a lot of changes occur in my life. I’ve moved twice, traveled frequently for my job, and haven’t been able to really settle into a routine. It’s been tiring, but there were always goals and milestones to keep pressing on towards, so it didn’t seem so bad. The first 4 years of being sober prepared me for being able to adapt and process the upheaval I’ve dealt with for this 5^th year. When I was drinking, this type of upheaval was an everyday occurrence in the form of drama and chaos. I was never in control of my surroundings. And any traveling I did back then just felt like I was running away from my problems, even though they were always there in the back of my mind ready to haunt me when I got drunk. I used to think I was a shark, an unstoppable machine constantly moving. In reality I was just a ghost, drifting through the dark. I’m traveling for work today, so this will be the first time I haven’t been at my AA home group meeting for this anniversary date of sobriety. It would have been the first time I’d had another year marked off without my friend Bob being at the meeting, he passed away last summer. So, in a way, I’m glad I will be changing my routine for today, my sobriety goes beyond certain dates, certain buildings, and being around certain people. I want to be flexible enough to roll through the inevitable peaks and valleys that everyone must go through in their lives. Reaching another February 2^nd is an accomplishment I’ll probably acknowledge each year, but it’s the other days, weeks, and months of the year that have to serve as the constant reminder of why I made the decision to get sober. There are still plenty of the tough days where I feel overwhelmed, and don’t understand why. The past month was the most intense of the entire year, by far. But I never feel like those kinds of moments are the type of drama-filled disasters I used to be engrossed in prior to 5 years ago. Back then, it seemed to me that the sky was always falling, and the deck was stacked against me. Since I got sober, I can say that those feelings don’t occur during even when I’m placed in stressful or intense situations. Life isn’t a dream or fantasy no matter what, but it doesn’t have to be a nightmare, either.

Christopher

nolecore.com

I’ve been going to AA meetings since I was almost 3 months sober. I’ve never had a sponsor. I haven’t done a single one of the “12 steps”, at least not intentionally. I’ve never uttered the serenity prayer, nor do I know the words to it. I do not speak at all during any of the traditional readings that are recited at various points of each meeting. Despite my lack of participation, I am very much in tune with the people that are in that room and what they have to say. I treat Alcoholics Anonymous like a safe haven when I begin to feel unsteady, anxious, or needing to remind myself of where I come from. Almost 4 and a half years into sobriety, and I still stand by my biggest discovery: the hardest thing for a human being to do is change. To utterly and absolutely change.

The person that I am closest to in my AA home group is Bob. He has been there since the first time I walked into the dingy, poorly lit room of the Alano Club. I think his sobriety year is 2011. Bob always makes it a point to say hello to me when I walk in. Even if I come late and try to slide into the room without making too much noise (an impossibility with the scuffed tiled floor and beat up metal-legged chairs), he makes eye contact with me and nods his head to acknowledge that we’ve met again. I have never seen Bob outside of AA, but he is the person that I’ve spoken with the most at our meetings. On each of my annual sobriety dates, Bob has been the person that has presented me with the coin with my total years sober engraved on it. This past Friday, I found out that Bob had died.

I have been very conscious of consequences since I have been sober. All of my responsibilities and obligations were waiting for me when I found stability, and if anything, I was forced to reconcile with the fact that I had been reckless with so many situations that were going to have an impact on my life going forward. I am extremely afraid of failing. I try not to look at things through a narrow lens and say something to the effect of “I used to be a self-destructive alcoholic, so anything that happens now is OK because at least it is better than that”. I think that would be doing a disservice to myself. I am not mired in what happened the past decade of my life, I am working every day to make the time I have left on Earth to be journey worth taking. Even those first few months of sobriety wandering through a confusing hellscape of sensory overload, I forcefully repeated to myself, “this is not how things are going to be forever”. There are more than plenty of important things in the present to occupy myself with to keep me from dwelling on what has already happened. I acknowledge it, I certainly will not ever forget it, but it was not the final version of myself.

While I tried in vain to process the news of Bob passing away, a regular attendee of our AA group asked me a few questions regarding my sobriety. When he found out I had no sponsor, and had not done the 12 steps, he was aghast. “There’s only two reasons you haven’t done the steps…pride, and fear.”

I have been asked about how I got sober by those trying to do the same. I don’t think any of the people I have spoken about it with in those terms have achieved sobriety for very long. What worked for me probably is not going to work for you the way you are expecting it to. The scars on my soul are permanent and the self-aware nightmare from my rock bottom is final. The moment when it is time for you to change might not be a conscious decision, but a metamorphosis that occurs when you have accepted that you cannot exist the same way anymore. It washes over you.

I haven’t yet processed the fact that I will never see Bob again.

today, I have been sober for 4 years

I feel like I have grown more the past year than any years prior in my life. During the last 365 days, I have found a better understanding of what is important to me in my life and what isn’t. The first three years of sobriety were an eye opening experience as I tried to find a new way of existing in a world without alcohol. What changed this past year was that I finally felt ready to make some decisions about my future, I could see beyond the next day and it felt like I needed to figure things out. I took 14 months off from serious running, traveled through a big chunk of the country with my wife and daughter, and found a ton of clarity as to what I am alive for. I needed that.

That isn’t to say there hasn’t been some dark days as well. What I am trying to tell you is that the dark days are always going to be there occasionally. The importance of recognizing it and dealing with it is what sets apart then and now. There are days when I am driving around this winding road to work and I just feel numb. I feel empty. I actually asked myself out loud, “I have been sober for a few years now…why do I still feel like this some days?”. That has been my cue to get out of my own head and either get to an AA meeting, find someone who is saying something worthwhile, and just listen. Don’t just do nothing, because you will just sink deeper and deeper into your own bullshit. Doing the same, passionless routine will kill your soul. It might happen slowly, and you’ll think about other things and try and forget about it, but man it is going to be there like another person in the room, waiting to remind you of its crushing existence. I call it the Grind. What makes me capable of getting through the Grind, is that I have built a new life in which its easier to face my problems without alcohol.
I’ve met some amazing folks the past year, and just getting to have some social communication occur a few times every week has been a motivating and uplifting factor in my well being. I think that’s important. Connect with others. That truly is a most powerful way to stave off the cycle of addiction.
Christopher
nolecore.com

today, I have been sober for 3 years

February 2nd, 2015. That was the day, that my life started.
I’ve had people ask me how I got sober or how I stopped doing destructive things to my life, and up to this point, it’s kind of made me uncomfortable. Having to explain that sometimes, changes are impossible to make until your soul hits rock bottom isn’t the positive story people are looking for in their quest to feel better. In fact, I’ll go ahead and say for the most part, those first few months or so contained nothing “positive” in the sense of feeling better. I’m wary of anyone with the rah-rah, pep talk sort of approach to starting a journey towards sobriety. That’s not to say those types of people aren’t doing the right thing, I’m just saying we’re not all the wired the same way. I would encourage anyone getting sober, to attempt to get out of their own head and say their story out loud. Counseling, AA, rehab, all of those things provided an outlet to what I was working through and after a while I started believing my own words and all of this finally seemed feasible.
My addiction wasn’t me. And the further I get from February 2nd, 2015, the closer I get to being comfortable….being just “me”. I don’t have anything masking the real me. It’s been liberating in a lot of ways, to not be totally absorbed in things I used to take to the extreme. I don’t have to run this many miles. I don’t have to be here, and then there, or any of the other labels I feel like I’d constructed for myself, to go along with the so-called alcoholic ultra person I pretended to be. Now, I just wake up and start anew each day and I’m OK with that. Being content with trying to be a better person today than I was yesterday.
This is all still a work in progress, it’s a humbling reality catching yourself making mistakes even after years of sobriety, and realizing you could go back to the way you were if you fall. I hope anyone that needed to hear any of this, finds themselves digging out of their darkness however it needs to come about. I want to make an impact. Thanks for your time, these were just some thoughts I had while reflecting back on the past three years.
Christopher
nolecore.com

“Life is really great now”.

The sunlight was flitting through gaps in the cloud filled sky, creating a constantly changing backdrop above the water. There was barely even a breeze, and the calm, mint green gulf of Mexico sprawled outward from the beach like a gigantic lake. I immediately thought it was odd to vocalize anything about the state of my life in such a positive manner. I couldn’t remember doing so before. Yet as I grinned and began to run again, there was a certainty about that statement now; life was indeed great. Greater than it ever had been.
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Today I am 2 years sober. I got here. That far flung date that at one point, seemed like an alternate reality, is finally here. I remember reading the article like it was a prison sentence: “Post-acute withdrawal usually lasts for 2 years”. I’m about 10 pounds lighter than I was two years ago, and I have been at this weight for most of the past year. My body feels significantly better than I can remember it being as an adult, and I credit a lot of that to doing yoga. I’ve been going every Wednesday and sometimes Monday for quite some time now.

I’ve spoken to some other people that are going through battles with addiction recently. Some sought me out, others were just seemingly by chance.

I’ve been going back to Alcoholics Anonymous when I can make it. There are still some of the same regulars to the group, although almost all of them are older and well into their sobriety. The younger attendees are still a revolving bunch, it seems it varies by the week. The last meeting I went to, the opening reading referenced reminders, as in things that may occur to stop us from relapsing back into our past habits. It called these as metaphorically “burning your hands on the stove”. I have had a few of these, and while I am confident in my path of sobriety, at no point will I ever be ready to say “I have beaten this to the point where I don’t have to be aware of it anymore”. So when these reminders occur, I take full note of them. Back in October, I had a very vivid dream in which I had gotten drunk. There have been a few other times that I have dreamt about drinking, but this was the most intense. I woke up fully believing that I had relapsed and was ready to wake up my wife to shakily admit what had happened. That same month, I saw someone that I had been in rehab with while I was out one night. They were having a drink. We didn’t make eye contact, and I didn’t really know what to say or if it was even appropriate to approach someone in public after only being acquainted with them through a treatment program. 3 months later, on Christmas Eve, I saw their face in a mugshot. They had been arrested that day on several substance related charges and were now spending the holiday in jail.

A few months ago, someone from a rehab facility in south Florida reached out to me and asked me to look over some literature on recovery. I appreciate any group willing to open its doors to try and help those trying to find sobriety and recovery. This site has a lot of knowledge and explains some of the biological and mental factors behind addiction and recovery. I always found peace of mind from learning concrete factual explanations for what was happening inside my body and my mind, I guess it made me feel a bit of relief. http://www.lumierehealingcenters.com/what-is-addiction/

There is a distinct lack of frustration. I think that is the biggest difference between now and then. Coping with things is a whole lot easier than it ever was back then. Problems are no longer an all encompassing part of my existence. This is wonderful. Every day I wake up and enjoy my day, no matter what occurs during it. My wife is an absolute joy to be around, we definitely cherish time spent with one another, and I don’t think it would be possible to laugh any more than I seem to find myself doing when we are together. The amount of support she has shown me while being a positive influence has been an incredible impact on my life. There are no mundane days. This is living well. I never, ever, want to go back to a place where that life, and her, could be jeopardized. I’m glad my wife never saw me drunk. As for my 9, going on way too old, little daughter…I know there will be a day when she learns about what “being drunk” entails, and I wonder if there will be any recollection of her father having a drink. Regardless, I accept that this may be something I pass down to her, and I will be as honest as I can be about what my mistakes and experiences entailed. I don’t want her to go through what I went through.

Here is where I am going to leave off and say goodbye to you. Whoever “you” are…I’m not going to tell you there is a rainbow that leads from the origin of a troubled life to any sort of peace and tranquility. There isn’t one. That isn’t how this is going to work. There will be days spent fumbling around through the fog choked muck, barely able to see in front of your own two hands. Some days you will be lost in this entirely. Once you finally develop a pattern of consistency, and can piece together some learned behaviors, and string multiple days together while using those behaviors, the fog will ever so lightly begin to lift. The rotten mask you were wearing will begin to wither and fall apart, and all that will be left is your true self. That is the only self capable of finding the path through the abyss. Others may try and help you, and you may try and use others as a source of hope and motivation, but in the end it can only be you alone that makes the several choices necessary to change.

thank you for being my rock and helping me weather the storms