25 years sober, dry as a bone

Today I have been sober for 25 years. At my first AA meetings, the old men would look me up and down and dismissively grumble “little girl, I spilled more than you ever drank.” It took a while, but I finally learned to respond “well if you hadn’t spilled so much, you might have got here sooner.” At 23 when I hit the doors of AA I was a complete mess. At 25, having tried my version of the steps for two years, I was worse.

Alcoholics Anonymous. It saved my life. I learned how to live again, relearned all of the lessons I was taught as a child but abandoned in those hazy years of excess. Thirteen years of drugs, alcohol, men, crime. That kind of messy, dangerous, ugly living wrecks the conscience and the soul and the body. The happy thing about getting sober is that I’ve been able to live three lives in one: my life before chemicals, the addiction years, and then the gift of living sober.

I have been in the rooms long enough to see people come in and out and in and out and then go to their funerals. I have tried to pass on this amazing gift to folks who ultimately killed themselves. The disease of alcoholism and its near constant companion, drug addiction, kills. It’s easy to forget that with twenty five clean years behind me, when the memory of my own efforts to die seem vague, as if belonging to someone else.

On the beach in Mexico, Mike asked me if I ever think about drinking. I do, of course. I don’t know that any drunk never thinks about it. But it’s the same way I think about going to Iceland or drilling for oil in my back garden. Passing thoughts, not going to happen. He thinks about it too, at 16 years of sobriety, just wondering what it would be like now, if it could be different this time.

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