[If there’s one thing addicts do well, it’s telling stories. But after 13 years clean, they’re usually not lies since the onset of sobriety.]
Someone asked me recently how I did it. How I got off drugs, meth of all things. Undoubtedly tonight at my meeting I’ll be asked once again as is the tradition for anyone getting another annual chip. My baker’s dozen.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the question. Less to the mechanics of my leap into sobriety, but more about which of my words might just trigger another addict in attendance to turn on that light upstairs, illuminating them to the possibility that they, too, despite their past, deserve a future.
You see, it’s not so much the quitting of drugs that’s important. Equally necessary is the installation of hope and belief that you are worth far more in this world than the lonely company of any chemical or its cohorts. It’s about having been utterly blinded by the stupor of a drug and its false promise of contentment that blocks out hope or vision that there’s really anything more to life.
To that end, we are all addicts. We all have something we’ve allowed to remain which blocks our hope and blurs our vision. Something to which we reluctantly remain bound.
“Clean and sober.” It’s almost cliché these days.
The distinction between the two, however, is perhaps the most important thing I learned in my years of recovery so far. I got clean once, but I get more sober with each passing day.
The truly recovered are not recovered at all. They are recovering. And the truly recovering ones can instinctively tell the difference.
A recovering person hasn’t simply stopped using, they have started living. It’s evident that a clarity of mind, purpose and a place for God was birthed at some moment, and rarely is that moment a single epiphany, but the convergence of many lifelong epiphanies which, strung together, create the continuity of recovering.
It’s the high I get from the ongoing little epiphanies of life these days. They continue to escort me down a much more beautiful path. And when you find yourself in a much better place, hope is much easier to find. In fact, it seems to find you.
And isn’t that really the definition of God?
So for the addicts in all of us, I say to you, we are here in this world for one reason only: Be that hope for someone today. Be clean. Be sober. And most of all, live like you deserve to.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.