Soberer

I get this feedback all the time. Sometimes it is polite but dismissive, like this: “I have trouble paying attention to the opinion of someone with just four years of sobriety. Talk to me in a decade or so.” Other times, it is downright mean: “Shut up and get to a meeting, asshole!” Everyone’s entitled to his or her opinion, but some people really should consider a little less caffeine or maybe doing something about the constipation that’s putting built up pressure on the old kindness gland.

I’m sober. I’m fully and completely sober. I feel like I need the coroner of the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz to declare about my active alcoholism, “She’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.” (Now you’ve got that voice and that song stuck in your head, don’t you. Go ahead and Google that scene and watch it on YouTube — I did.)

The point is, one of the things most broken about our alcoholism recovery system that allows over 15 million alcoholics to fester in misery in this country (more than suffer from cancer) is that we look at time in sobriety like some kind of ranking system or certificate of intelligence. If it takes a person seven years to get an undergraduate bachelor’s degree, we don’t think of them as extra smart for the extended time they spent in college. Life-long racists commit a lot of years to demoralizing and denigrating people of color, and years of ignorance doesn’t make…