Comeback Kid, Chair from 1/28/19

So. Today. [Now yesterday, 1/28/2019]

I signed up to chair today several weeks ago. It was intended as a celebration of three years’ sobriety since this should have been exactly three years since my last drink. I knew it was risky betting on it, but whatever. I’d done it three years. I’d be fine.

Then a little over a month ago I found a bottle of one of my favorite bottles of wine squirreled away. That didn’t last long. Maybe forty-five minutes. Now I feel I can officially co-opt John Elway’s title as the Comeback Kid.

For those who aren’t familiar with my tale I’ll give you the cliffnotes. I drank to shut down for a lot of years. I drove drunk so stopped drinking (in a dry way not a sober way). I went to a meeting for a friend and walked away saying, “Oh my god. That’s my story.”

That night I went to a meeting and said my name is. That lasted a couple months then I went out. Then I came back. Now I’ve gone out and now I’ve come back again.

There are a lot of clichés that float around these rooms. Just don’t drink today, first things first, meeting makers make it, keep coming back. The most important (in my opinion) is keep coming back. I’m not the only one in this room who’s gone out and come back (repeatedly). People with greater time have done so, people with less time have done so. We’re all from different walks of life. We’re at different points in our life, in our sobriety, but as I had a friend remind me, “‘I’ get drunk, but ‘we’ stay sober.”

This process seems fucking impossible. You want me to do what where without alcohol? But that’s why we get sponsors. That’s why we befriend folks in the Program. That’s why when we need help we have myriad numbers to call for support.