Five Years Sober, Five Things I’ve Learned

Today marks five years since I’ve used alcohol or drugs. I am forever grateful to my wife and two boys.

Here are five things I’ve learned so far.

1. I will never be a drinker or drug user again. 

It’s over. I’m good with it.

I bring this up because many people I talk to who are wrestling with alcohol have a hard time saying to themselves, “it’s over for good.”

They’re still hedging. They’re still bargaining.

They are conditioned to believe that they need it to enjoy life or cope with anxiety/stress or fit in socially, or something else, and they can’t quite process Letting Go forever.

I know this feeling exactly. I bargained like crazy!

If it’s any help for anyone in this situation now, for me, it just took time not drinking to let the finality set in and to be good with it. So it was,

Behavior + Time.

2. When you stop, it is only the beginning.

I went through this sobriety honeymoon where I thought since I wasn’t drinking for a couple months that I was all healed and everything was fine.

It wasn’t until a couple years in at least that I realized that the journey was just beginning and there was much work to be done.

I still needed to grow up and figure out who I was.

3. Never give up.

I quit drinking 20 times and failed 19 before it stuck. 

So if you’ve been trying and failing, keep at it because you only have to stick the landing one time.

Plus, each time you fail, you learn a little bit more about how not to do it.

4. Nothing is more important than what you put into your body.

If you put garbage into your body, your body becomes garbage. Your mind becomes garbage. You get sick physically and mentally. 

This is big, because you only get one body and when it is all used up your life is over.

I put garbage into my body daily for 35 years and I did a lot of damage.

Luckily, we are adaptive animals and we heal with time as we learn how to care for the only body we are ever issued.

5. Letting things go is a superpower.

We live in a culture where people are having a hard time letting go of things like rage and fear. We hold onto these negative emotions with a heart like a clenched stone fist. We stay mad and we stay scared which is is poisonous. 

We let it eat at us from the inside out until we are stiff and hollow like death.

When we begin letting things go, we become flexible and resilient and joyful, like the great Simone Biles, who came back to win three golds in Paris after dropping out of the Olympics in Tokyo three years ago.