Day 37

A picture of the people I spend most of my time with:

Why, you're right!  There are no people in this picture, how astute!

 I feel really hinky about violating folks' anonymity in my blog.  I mean, there are all sorts of pictures on my Facebook profile of us doing sober things, but there are also all sorts of pictures on my FB of me doing drunk things with people in years past, and it's been my experience that most can't tell the difference without seeing the drugs being consumed.  When I start writing about what's actually going on, though, I need to take a visual step back.  So here's the unit patch of Alcoholics Anonymous.  (Symbolizing, if you were curious, Unity of purpose on the left, Service to other alcoholics on the right, and Recovery from addiction as the foundation.)

I spend most of my time alone; days can go by without me seeing the other members of my household.  This is a function of many things, and I can finally honestly say my proclivity for isolation is at the bottom of the list.  I'm plenty willing to get off my ass and go do something with other people anytime there's something to do and they tell me about it - I even occasionally invite myself places.  I'm just not the one coming up with the ideas.

But over the course of any given week of my life these days, during this Boring Phase, the people I see most often are recovering alcoholics - specifically, those at my Friday night meeting.  This has not been true throughout the course of my sobriety.  In the first months, maybe even the first year, I wasn't at all comfortable hanging out with other alcoholics.  They inspired me; they helped me; they gave me my laugh back.  But socially, when we weren't actively sharing the skills necessary to stay sober, I didn't know how to act around them. In many cases, our addiction and the personality traits attendant thereto are the only things we have in common.  My sponsor is an older, ex-military, Republican, office guy.  It should come as no surprise that, at least initially, I was somewhat more comfortable with the Vassar crowd - despite the drinking.  (It's a little harder to be around for the pot-smoking - their drinking, after all, won't get me drunk.)

Sometime in February of 2007, when I'd been sober for nine months and change, one of the old-timers (referring to length of sobriety, not life, y'understand) at the Friday night meeting asked if I was coming to dinner after, or what.  "You think you're too cooool to hang out with us, is that it?"  Which was funny because the answer was the precise opposite and I'm fairly certain she knew th answer was the precise opposite. I went to dinner that night; eventually, it became a habit

I've fallen out of the habit, quite a bit, but these are still my people.