This is getting old.

Around this time every year for the last 13 years, I’ve come up with some new way to announce my gain of another year sober. I don’t refer to being clean much anymore because unless you’re clean from the use of drugs, alcohol, or whatever addictive nouns once possessed you, you’re not sober. And to me, sobriety is the bigger gain.

Now while I thank God for the gift of another year and hope to continue the trend until I’m fresh out of years, celebrating birthdays becomes a lot more insignificant whether it’s a year spent on this earth or another spent back in your right mind.

There’s a nuance.

Clean generally refers to the physical aspect of recovery, meaning free from substance use. Sober often encompasses a broader scope, including the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of recovery. It implies a deeper transformation, a new way of living and thinking not just in the absence of a substance but in the presence of life overall.

At Celebrate Recovery meetings, I’m asked what has helped me accrue so many years off Meth and a half-dozen other substances who’d become my best friends for nearly 10 years. The older I get, the more my story changes.

Getting clean and staying clean is entirely dependent on the discovery of something that gets you higher.

For me, it was my three kids and the sudden September 4^th, 2011 acknowledgment of a once promising life going nowhere in accord with my faith and values. It took seven felonies and handcuffs but the light came on and sobriety became the engine that promised to lead me on the track where I’d been a mere caboose for so long.

A burning desire to write came next, and I started my LifeMeansSoMuch.com website which is now the repository of over 350 stories about life, living and my philosophical pursuit of real happiness in my faith.

So, 13 years are just around the corner and I expect a bunch of folks will wish me congratulations, all of which have become a little less important and a little more impotent with each passing September. No offense, just the honest truth.

And truth is healthy sobriety.