Sober Life Is Not No Life

Give this second to start. Hey guys, it's Chris from cadre. I was driving home to have a Zoom with my cadre peeps and I was thinking about something somebody said to me yesterday about recovery, that your life is somewhat over or you now live in some marginalized version of society and that, you know, it's not fun anymore and you got to live this other kind of life that has a lot less of whatever in it that you were drawn to in your addiction life and I started having this conversation with somebody about it and the themes that came up from my experience 24 years over is that yeah, I did think I was going to have a different, I thought I was going to have a different kind of a life and I thought it was going to be I'm a musician and a creator and I was like this, all that's going to get sucked out of my life and I'm going to have this really, I don't know, beige sort of, you know, boring life with no color and the reality of it is that and it takes a minute because you have to develop the relationships differently in recovery than you did in the using life and I think if you're drinking a lot or using a lot or living and there's variations in that like you could be a street drunk or you could be a heroin addict like I was shooting up in bathrooms all over town, you think you have this social life, you really don't, you could be just drinking at home and you're online and you think you have this life or you're a very functional alcoholic and you have people in your life but you're drunk all the time, what happens is the perspective and the perception of what really is going on in your life and the relationships that you have with people are shallow, the clandestine version of life where you hide what's really going on keeps you in shallow relationships, you can't have deep relationships and not be a transparent person.

You only have so deep of relationships with everything, everything in your life is just on the surface. When you get clean and sober and you start to really take a look at who you are , what kind of life you want, what kind of person you want to be, this all changes, the relationships are no longer that sort of hiding and deceiving and I'm not going to really talk about what's going on in my life, I'm just going to stay on the surface, they get deeper and what comes from that is a whole different perspective on, hey I'm somebody who is transparent and I put myself out there in the world and the feedback I'm getting back is real because they really know who I am, it's not this high buy, there's no real conversation of depth about anything with your drug dealer or the clerk at the liquor store, so these relationships you build in recovery, that's where the difference is if you have a fear about losing the context of your life in recovery that it's not going to be fun anymore, it's not going to be as exciting, it's not going to be as deep, that's all bullshit, that is one of the biggest lies in recovery and I think it's, sometimes you hear in treatment and in AA you hear things about well you can still have fun in recovery, it's deeper than that, it's much deeper than just having fun but you have to put the effort in to develop those relationships and you have to do it in a transparent way, it has to be the opposite of the using world, everything's the opposite, everything that was lied about is truth, everything that was hidden is open, everything that you thought about people and you didn't really know you have to actually know things about people before you comment about them, you can't run around the community saying so and so is an asshole when you don't really know that person, you have to have some integrity in your relationships because everything is relationships, even with the person at the gas station where you get your gas, there's a relationship there and if you perform in a way that is not clandestine and not hiding and not so fear-based, here I am, I'm open, it doesn't mean you're having a in-depth discussion about your childhood with everyone you meet, it's just a level of transparency, what come, what you get from that investment is what is going to tell you there's actually a real life here in recovery and it's actually deeper and it's actually better and I was wrong about feeling like, oh I'm not going to have any fun anymore, I can't go to the bars, that's all crap, that's all, that's all the disease talking to you telling you shit that ain't true and I was having this conversation with this guy who just got out of treatment, he's convinced his life, fun life is over and I said what fun life man, you know you were in a Walmart parking lot with cocaine in your pocket, you know a month ago, what life is that, you want to go back to that?

So think about it in those terms of how does that lifestyle really change and how does it feel like it really changes by being transparent and investing in relationships that are good for you, invest in people that are really cheerleaders for your life and stay close to them, that is magic, that is one of the biggest pieces of magic in recovery and you won't know it until you try it, good luck everybody.