14 Years

Today, I celebrated 14 years of continuous sobriety.

It feels good. It always feels good.

It’s not like celebrating your birthday, because your birthday get less and less important as time goes on. As time passes, my anniversary date becomes more important. The further away I get from the last time I used, the easier it is to forget how awful it was.

It’s critical that I never forgot

Drugs have different personalities.

Drunks can be drunks for a long time. Alcohol is insidious in that way, where you can be an alcoholic for decades and still somehow manage to get by.

But opiates are different. There’s no such thing as a life long opiate addict. When you dive into that world, you dive in head first. It’s dark, dirty, and gross. Too much alcohol will make you throw up and kill you slowly. Too much dope will kill you in an instant.

I’m grateful to be alive. I’m grateful for Bobby and Phil for taking me under their wings and showing me how to live sober and deal with life on life’s terms.

I’ll never be able to repay them. Instead, I pay it forward.

Most nights when I lie in bed, I get flashbacks of some of the terrible things I did. Sometimes it feels like another dimension, a different portal of reality where I acted in a way that wasn’t in alignment with my true self.

I become filled with shame, because I know those things happened. It was real. I did them.

What’s strange, is that I wouldn’t delete those memories if I could. If you gave me a magic wand and gave me the ability to wipe my memories clean of all the shame, I wouldn’t do it. That shame is a fresh reminder. It’s a daily check to how far down I can fall.

I’m not impervious. All it takes is one bad decision, one moment of weakness, or one split second where I become disconnected.

If that happens, if I were to ever relapse, I don’t think it would take long for me to fall right back to the bottom.

I have too much to lose now. I have everything I’ve ever wanted, and then some.

Today was my 14 year anniversary. It’s a good feeling.

I’ll stay sober tomorrow too. I’ll shoot for midnight.