Transcript

Living It · Sober Readings

Scott Hayes: Hey, welcome back to Sober Readings, everyone. My name is Scott. I am your host. Today is Saturday, the first day of August. Let's get started today with the Serenity Prayer. God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Today's reading from Daily Reflections Living It. The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it. And that's on page eighty three of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. When new in the program, I couldn't comprehend living the spiritual aspect of the program. But now that I'm sober, I can't comprehend living without it. Spirituality was what I had been seeking. God, as I understand him, has given me answers to the whys that kept me drinking for twenty years. By living a spiritual life, by asking God for help, I have learned to love, care for, and feel compassion for all my fellow men. And to feel joy in a world where before I felt only fear. From twenty four hours August one AA thought for the day. The Alcoholics Anonymous Program has borrowed from medicine, psychiatry, and religion. It has taken from these what it wanted and combined them into the program which it considers best suited to the alcoholic mind and which will best help the alcoholic to recover. The results have been very satisfactory. We do not try to improve on the AA program. Its value has been proved by the success it has had in helping thousands of alcoholics to recover. It has everything we alcoholics need to arrest our illness. And the question of the day is do I try to follow the AA program just as it is? The meditation for the day. You should strive for a union between your purpose in life and the purposes of the divine principle directing the universe. There is no bond of union on earth to compare with the union between a human soul and God. Priceless beyond all earth's rewards is that union. In merging your heart and mind with the heart and mind of the higher power, a oneness of purpose results, which only those who experience it can even dimly realize. That oneness of purpose puts you in harmony with God and with all others who are trying to do his will. And today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may become attuned to the will of God. I pray that I may be in harmony with the music of the spheres. And today's meditation from Touchstone. The great artist is the simplifier. And that's a quote from Vincent Van Gogh. Just as an artist creates through simplification, so a man's recovery process grows and deepens as he simplifies his life. This isn't easy to do in our fast-paced and high-powered world. We have often complicated a problem by our way of thinking. Sometimes we take pride in how complex we can make something seem. We look for hidden meetings when the truth is on the surface. We give long explanations for our actions. when none is called for. We suspect a person's motives when nothing is lost by taking that person at face value. We take on a battle when we could just as well let it pass. Most of us don't think ourselves as artists, yet we are each given a profound, creative opportunity to fashion a meaningful and worthwhile pattern in our lives. As we seek to do the will of God today, it is as if we were taking a lump of clay And creating an image from it. As I go about today's activities, may I find ways to make it a simple and creative expression. And for today's final reading, I'm gonna read a section out of a book called The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, and it's written by a woman named Katherine Gray. I'm gonna read a section from chapter 5, which is titled Socializing Sober, and this section is titled Telling. I vividly recall my addiction counselor saying to me when I was around two months sober that I seemed very concerned as to how other people would react to my non drinking. And I was. I was fixated, in fact. What would people think? People, what about the people? Their opinion was gigantically important to me. I orbited their opinions slavishly, because I had no self esteem center of my own. I was planet Earth to their sun, constantly looking to them to shine on me. Their opinions had the power to light me up or plunge me into darkness. I would say that the fear of what people will think keeps millions of us drinking. Whenever you don't smoke, drink tea, or eat Doritos, somebody gives a damn. Nobody asks you why not? Huffily as if they have a right to know. Saying no thanks to drinking often invites questions, lots of them. Particularly in Boo's obsessed Britain. You often need to justify your decision not to imbibe. A dear friend of mine is eight months pregnant, and she's finding that she's having to defend her decision to drink zero. She went to a party ladden with prosecco and ended up holding a glass of prosecco and secretly ditching it, since her prosecco less presence was making people jittery. Despite the NHS now saying you really shouldn't drink at all during pregnancy, nope, not a drop, I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist. My pregnant friend says that people seem to be affronted by her decision not to drink. However, things have improved somewhat. My mom told me that when she was pregnant with me in 1979, she drank throughout. When she asked her Irish doctor if it was okay to drink, he said, ⁓ jeepers, creepers, absolutely. People only say that you shouldn't drink in case you fall over. The soft drink request. Everybody in recovery will remember with pin perfect clarity the first time they had to ask for a soft drink in front of a crowd, table, kitchen full, at a party. It's heart stopping. For me, it was at a gig at two weeks sober. David half shouts across our dozen strong group. What are you drinking, Catherine? Me. I'll have an OJ, please. David. A what? An OJ? Me, turning scarlet. Yes, please. In my head, this is what happened. Several people swiveled to stare at me. They could barely contain their gasps. Like that moment when an out-of-towner swings open the door of the western saloon. The piano plinks to a stop, poker play ceases, and everyone about turns in hostility. What actually happened? David didn't hear me properly. Nobody cared much. Sometimes we do conjure the sober social awkwardness out of our own heads. Other times it's very real. Why don't you drink? The almost inevitable why answering that question is probably the scariest thing about sober socializing. Saying no thanks to a drink and being confronted with a why in response is Is like having to turn yourself inside out and let the crowd have a look at your soft secrets. It's so much easier to say yes. Saying no is crazy hard, socially, because of the questions. Which is why droves of trying to be sober people wind up making up excuses about taking antibiotics, being on fitness, or diet missions, driving, and so on. I totally understand why they do it. I did it too. It's thick with irony. Our self-consciousness around not drinking. I was more than happy to get so lashed that I was unable to stand, unable to get food successfully into my mouth, unable to say intelligible words, unable to remember my address, unable to undress myself for bed. But when we're drunk, we're socially anesthesized. We don't feel the social disgrace of these things. However, when we're sober, we feel every awkward silence of Acutely, and that takes a lot of getting used to. What I said to people. I went through several stages. The first was the I'm training for a triathlon stage. This was indeed true. I did a triathlon. I came 144th out of 160 competitors. Yeehaw. I kept that excuse up after the triathlon was over, too. The problem with my triathlon excuse was that it was all too easy to lob out of the window. People tried to persuade me to drink, and I let them. Repeatedly. Because triathlon thrust me into a sucky spiral whereby I kept bouncing off the wagon and clambering back on a few days later, tattered, battered, and bruised. It didn't work. For me, I had to be way more honest than that, and stop cowering behind health reasons. Just me. Others are different, in fact, please read everything in this book with a just me disclaimer. I also went through a stage of pretending I was drinking when I wasn't, asking for an elderflower presse to be put into a wine glass with ice so it would resemble a white wine spritzer, or saying, ⁓ there's vodka in it, if I was challenged by somebody for drinking cola. I remember going to one party in the very early days where I was the only person who knew I wasn't drinking. I soon realized after a very real white wine spritzer was plonked in front of me by someone buying around, that it would be a very short segue from pretend drinking to real drinking. I misplaced that drink. But what would I do with the next one? I had to look the fear of the questions dead in the eye if I wanted to stay sober. I had to tell the truth. I had to shuffle off the shame. I wasn't drinking. And that was a section out of the book The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Katherine Gray. It is hilarious. It's a great book. I highly recommend getting that and reading through it. She's a British author, and she's not only very funny, but she makes some really valid points in this book. So I would definitely recommend reading that book to anyone that's interested in sobriety. And that's gonna do it for today's episode of Sober Readings. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to be a guest reader on the show, I'd love to have you. Just send me an email at soberreadingswithscott at gmail.com. If you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket, just go to my website, soberreadings.com and click the donate button. So thank you so much for listening today. Stay sober, keep reading, and I'll catch you in the next episode. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other. And remember, just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day everyone and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.