On August 17, 1986, I stopped drinking.
Two days ago, I celebrated 40 years of continuous sobriety.
Even writing that feels a little strange. Forty years is such an enormous chunk of time that I don’t really know how to wrap my head around it. It’s longer than I drank. It’s longer than many of the relationships I’ve had in my life. There are adults with children of their own who weren’t alive when I had my last drink.
Forty years.
Or, because somebody had to do the math, 14,610 days.
Except that’s not really how I got here.
I got here through 14,610 one-days-at-a-time.
I Found Sobriety in AA
I’ve changed the way I talk about Alcoholics Anonymous in recent years. I used to say AA got me sober. These days, I find myself saying something slightly different.
I found sobriety in AA.
That distinction matters to me.
AA gave me a place to go when I didn’t know how to live without drinking. More importantly, it gave me people who understood. They had done what I was trying to do, and they showed me that another way of living was possible.
I am enormously grateful for those people. Some of the people who walked beside me in those early years are still part of my life today. A number of them are Facebook friends, and hearing from them on my sober birthday brought back memories of people, meetings and coffee shops from a very different time in my life.
But sobriety didn’t magically make me a saint. As we say in AA, we are not saints.
There have been plenty of mistakes over those 40 years. Relationships ended. People I loved died. I got angry. I hurt people. I was hurt by people. I discovered things about myself that I had spent years avoiding. Sometimes I handled life well. Sometimes I handled it spectacularly badly.
The difference was that I did it sober.
Sobriety gave me the opportunity to be present for my own life, including the parts I would rather have skipped.
Fellowship Changes
I don’t attend AA meetings regularly anymore.
That’s something I probably wouldn’t have imagined saying during my early years of sobriety. For a long time, AA wasn’t simply somewhere I went. It was my community. It was where many of my friendships lived and where I learned an enormous amount about myself.
But lives change. Needs change. I changed.
My gratitude for AA hasn’t disappeared because I’m no longer sitting in meetings seven nights a week and twice on Sundays. I found something there that changed the course of my life.
What I didn’t find there was all of my healing.
That came later.
Another Room
My journey as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse eventually brought me through the doors of The Gatehouse.
Once again, I found myself sitting in a room with people who understood something about me because they had lived it too.
There was something familiar about that.
Over time, my relationship with The Gatehouse changed. I wasn’t only there for my own healing anymore. I began facilitating groups. I volunteered. I joined the board. I started sitting across from other men as they found words for things they may have carried silently for decades.
Somewhere along the way, without really noticing when it happened, The Gatehouse became my new fellowship.
It’s where my heart is these days.
And that made the timing of my 40th sober birthday particularly meaningful.
The night of my anniversary happened to be Male Volunteer Appreciation Night at The Gatehouse. I walked into a room filled with men I’ve come to know through this strange, difficult and sometimes wonderful healing journey.
And they had cupcakes for my sober birthday.
Because apparently even profound personal milestones are improved by icing.
We Don’t Do This Alone
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the number 40.
Forty years sounds like endurance. It sounds like determination and discipline. Maybe there’s some of that in there.
But when I look back, what stands out much more clearly are the people.
The people who were there when I was newly sober and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The people who shared their stories. The people who listened to mine. The people who challenged me, pissed me off, made me laugh, loved me and occasionally carried me when I couldn’t do much carrying myself.
And now there are different rooms and different people.
Forty years ago, I needed a fellowship that could help me learn how to live without drinking.
Today, I’ve found a fellowship that helps me continue learning how to live.
Maybe that’s one of the things I’ve learned after 14,610 one-days-at-a-time.
We heal in different ways. We find what we need in different places. Sometimes the fellowship that saves us isn’t the same fellowship that carries us through the next chapter.
But I’m increasingly convinced of one thing.
Very few of us heal entirely by ourselves.
I’m grateful for the fellowship where I found sobriety.
I’m grateful for the fellowship where I’ve found another kind of healing.
And I’m particularly grateful that, after forty years, I’m still finding reasons to keep showing up.
One day at a time.