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I want to try something a little different over the next week or so. I’m going to write a three-part series about what I have been battling over the last eight months: Stage 4 cancer, while trying to stay sober.

Part 1 is going to be about finding out I have cancer, and then figuring out how to juggle treatment with an active sobriety program. Part 2 will be about the massive surgery I had this fall. And Part 3 will be about where I’m at today. Trust me when I say that this story has a scary beginning but a happy ending.

In March, I went in for my yearly physical. The verdict was tremendous—I was in the best shape of my adult life, and by every metric, it looked like my overall health had improved greatly over the previous five years. I was going to more 12-step meetings than ever, and I had started therapy and gotten my mental health to a really good place. At the end of the appointment, I mentioned to my doctor that I had seen some blood in the toilet a few times. He said it was probably a polyp of some kind, and recommended that I get the colonoscopy he told me to get at the previous year’s physical. I swear I listen better than ever to advice… but I do usually need to be told twice before it gets through the brain barricades I have built.

So I had a colonoscopy in late March, and within five minutes of me waking up, the doctor walked in and said, “I’m sorry. You have cancer, and it’s bad.” It was quite jarring to have a doctor make such a bold declaration. Usually they him-haw and say maybe it’s this thing, or maybe this other thing, and we’ll have to do some testing to figure out what’s going on. Not this time.

I was in shock walking to the car with my wife. But I didn’t feel scared. I don’t know if it was still the anesthesia tamping down my emotions, but I didn’t start catastrophizing.

But later that afternoon, I did start to ponder my own mortality, and I felt a little sorry for myself. I didn’t get to a meeting that night because I wanted to sulk. Looking back, I think the problem had a little to do with me being shallow. I kept thinking of all the cancers, I get rectal cancer? Couldn’t it have been a cooler cancer, like a brain tumor or lung cancer? Nope, I was going to die from my ass falling off, and I was embarrassed about that.

The good news is, I can feel right away now when I am starting to sink into that warm bath we call self pity, and I know the repercussions… and they’re not good. So the next night I made sure to hit a meeting, and I also told a few close friends. I felt like even though it was early in the process, I wanted to stay current with my connections in my inner circle.

I ended up having some more scans and finding out that the cancer had spread from my rectal area to my liver. So it counted as Stage 4 cancer, and at my first appointment with my oncologist, he said somebody in my situation typically has a 40 percent survival rate. I gulped a little bit at my chances, but I still felt good.

I started chemotherapy in April, and I made a key decision: I had to keep my spirit up. I could tell right away that the medication they were putting into me was a huge part of this fight, but my attitude was very, very important to whether I survived this thing or not. I had to cultivate that, so I pushed myself on three important things.

One was that I was going to continue going to the gym every day, even if I felt terrible. I had to keep that as a daily habit. I’ve found that there is a direct connection in my brain between physical activity and optimism—I’m moving forward and not letting physical stuff keep me stationary, and that impacts my overall sense of moving forward with everything else in my life. Move a muscle, change a thought, as the old sober saying goes.

The second decision was to get to as many meetings as possible. It got a little dicey being able to drive myself to meetings, but I had friends who offered rides and I often took them up on those offers. Meetings are spiritual places, and you can’t spell spiritual without the word “spirit.” I felt an injection of hope and fight every time I went to a meeting.

And the third was that I would continue to push myself at work—it gave me purpose and I like what I do for a living, so I kept plowing forward.

So that’s what I did. I had six rounds of chemo in late spring and early summer. I’d go in on a Wednesday for about six hours of a very high dose of chemotherapy drugs, then I would wear a pump for the next 42 hours. I experienced many of the common symptoms—nausea, headaches, neuropathy in my hands and feet—but they weren’t overwhelming at first. For those first few months, the chemo felt pretty manageable.

But down the home stretch, the doctors had warned me that the side effects would start to ramp up because chemo drugs are cumulative. I started to feel it heavier and heavier, and one of the big things that ended up happening was my ability to leave the house and be around people. You know how your old phone had a battery that was at 100 percent, then you’d take a call for 16 minutes and it suddenly had dropped to 67 percent? That was me. I kept going to meetings, but an hour around people was about my limit. I would start to get really bad headaches, nausea and extremely tired. I was that old phone.

Eventually I got through the six rounds of chemo and had a few weeks off before surgery. But the closer we got to the surgery, the scarier it got. My doctors said they rarely do this kind of procedure because it is fairly dangerous—they were going to cut 20 percent of my liver out with one surgeon, then another surgeon was going to cut out the rectal tumor and reroute my whole digestive tract through a colostamy bag. The whole thing would last about seven hours of me with my body sliced in half.

I also had to meet with a nurse who specializes in colostamy bags and it really derailed me. The one thing I didn’t want was a colostamy bag. For whatever reason, it was just the one thing that made me feel like the cancer was winning. I couldn’t get my head around being a guy with a bag of crap on his hip at all times for three months.

In my other appointments before the surgery, everybody laid out what they were going to do, and things got really real. The idea of a 7-hour surgery finally hit me. When they said they were going to need 50-100 staples down my chest to my groin to seal me up, it hit me that how significant that is. And when they mentioned they might get in there and have to pull back if anything goes sideways, I realized this was a surgery that I could conceivably not wake up from.

But I hit a meeting every night for a week before the surgery, and I got myself to a good place. Cancer is one day at a time—you cannot think about two months down the road or a year down the road. You have to be in today, and things are usually fine. Guess where I learned that from, guys!

So on the morning of the surgery, I went with my wife at 5 am to the hospital. I hadn’t eaten or drank anything in two days, and they had given me all the colon blaster drinks a fella could ever hope for, so my body was empty… but my heart was full. I had my family, my friends and my 12-step superstars all in my corner.

And I was going to need them.

Tune in for part 2 next Tuesday.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

A little prayer:

“Dear Lord, so far today I’ve done all right. I haven’t gossiped, haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent. I’m really glad about that.

“But in a few minutes, God, I’m going to get out of bed, and from then on, I’m probably going to need a lot more help.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, Jan. 2000, “Ham on Wry,” by Anonymous)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

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I’ve been thinking about amends quite a bit lately, because I have been having to say sorry more than I would like. The main issue is that I have been snappy, so I’ve had a sharp tongue with some people lately where I need to apologize for being a little too spiky with my reactions.

But one of the issues I catch when I say sorry is that I notice I am thinking, “I’m sorry for overreacting earlier… but you were kinda being an a*****e.” That’s not really an amends. That’s a fishing expedition for an apology to be sent back my way. So that made me think about how important it is that the Fourth Step comes before the Ninth Step. I need to clear out resentments before I say sorry. Otherwise, I am not doing it right.

It reminded me of an amends I had to make 10 years ago. I’m going to change some details of this story just to be on the safe side. A new neighbor moved in beside me, and I liked him right away. But then I noticed lots of other people liked him, too, and that people were talking about how smart and funny and interesting he was. Well, I’m supposed to be the smart and funny and interesting one, so I immediately felt some jealousy.

I also became aware that he had had a car accident and suffered a significant concussion, so he had memory issues and some other things that impacted his life. To be honest, because I was harboring a resentment against the guy and have had concussions myself, I thought he was being a little full of s**t and overly dramatic.

Well, one day he and I got into a heated argument about, of all things, how good LeBron James is at basketball. Yes, I repeat, I had a heated argument as a late 30s adult man about how good an NBA player was. Looking back, it was a ridiculous argument that was fueled by me just having an axe to grind with this poor guy.

So we argued back and forth. It actually got quite heated, and I walked away from him in a huff. I think I thought about that argument for about eight hours, all the things I could have said, what a moron this guy was, what I’d say to him next time… it was pretty pathetic, in retrospect.

By the end of the day, I was in enough pain that I connected with a sober friend and told him what happened. At that point, I knew I needed to apologize. But my friend said he thought I needed to do a fourth step first, and explained that I needed to clear out the underlying anger toward this guy before I could legitimately say sorry.

So I did that, and I found what I said earlier: jealousy, insecurity, pettiness. I felt immediate relief that I was able to name the issues, and I felt my resentment toward this guy subside quite a bit—enough to make an amends the next day.

So the next morning, I approached my neighbor and said I was sorry about yesterday, that I got way too heated, that I liked him too much to bombard him about an NBA player, and that it would never happen again.

He said he appreciated that… but he had no idea what I was talking about. He explained that he had memory issues because of the concussion and had no recollection of the argument I was discussing.

I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, and feel empathy toward him. The concussion issues he was experiencing were real and he deserved to be treated with respect by me. I found my resentments against him were completely gone, and I felt clean in my soul because my side of the street was taken care of.

I won’t lie, though: A part of me thought, Damn, this dude basically has amnesia about yesterday, so I could have avoided the amends!

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Sponsee: “When will I get a good job?”

Sponsor: “When you’re ready.”

Sponsee: “How will I know I’m ready?”

Sponsor: “When you have a good job.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, Jan. 2000, “Ham on Wry,” by Anonymous)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

A friend shared a really provocative quote to me the other day. He said he used to subscribe to the idea of doing the next right thing, and he still does. But he altered the quote a little bit, to “Do the next thing right.”

It really got me overanalyzing that phrase, which is essential to my recovery. I just need to always do the next right thing, and I need to have a good recovery program to know what the next right thing is. On my own, with only my voice in my head, sometimes the next right thing becomes what the next best thing for me will be.

But what about doing the next thing right? I was intrigued by that, because it’s certainly true. I’ve done the next right thing but not done it well, so I get the difference between those two quotes. And in those cases, I can often be a little righteous when things don’t work out well, because I can fall back on something being the right decision. But my friend’s quote made me think about how part 2 is actually doing it right.

I’ll give you one example. I’ve routinely had instances where I need to reprimand one of my kids for a bad behavior, and I’ve consulted with sober friends and they agreed with me. But then sometimes I would reprimand my kid from a much angrier head space than I would have wanted, or gotten into a big argument with a kid who lashes out when you take their car keys from them. That’s not really spiritual, even though the decision might have been the right one.

So I ended up thinking both of those thoughts—do the next right thing, and do the next thing right—because they both have their merits. And I ultimately landed on a melding of the two quotes. How about, “Do the next right thing right”?

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

A woman approached her sponsor and asked, “What do I do when I finish with the Steps?”

And the sponsor said, “Lie very, very still—because you’re dead.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, Jan. 2000, “Ham on Wry,” by Jim G.)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

Let me set the scene for you.

Yesterday morning, the day after Christmas, I had to go on a work trip to Detroit. The plane left at 5:20 am, which was maybe the dumbest idea I have ever had for booking work travel.

But I got up at 3 am, drove to the airport, parked and walked into the airport. Before I even got in the doors, I saw massive lines and chaos all over the place, and realized this might be one of those days where my spiritual meter might dip a little.

It wasn’t so bad, though. I got my tickets in a reasonable amount of time, then got in line for the TSA conveyor belts. Again, not too bad. When I got to the bins to put my stuff on, though, that’s when the fireworks began.

As I waited to start loading my stuff, an older guy, maybe 70-75 years old, came back and stood beside me. He’d clearly been ahead of me and gotten sent back by the TSA crew to put something through again. Happens to the best of us, and it ain’t fun—this dude was standing there hoping some grumpy traveller would let him squeeze back in.

I was that grumpy traveler. I told him to go ahead, and he said thank you in a very kind voice… then he let loose. In a series of f-bombs that was quite impressive for an older gentleman such as him, this guy started railing on TSA for busting his chops about his shoes. I didn’t even catch what the issue was, but apparently the shoes might have had metal in them and needed to be scanned.

He was loud enough that a flight attendant and pilot standing behind me whispered, “Geez, they probably didn’t need to send him back through for that.” He must have heard, because that only empowered him. He put his shoes on the belt and said to a random TSA worker who had thus far not been involved, “This is ridiculous. You guys are ridiculous.”

Whoa. That one felt out of bounds for me. Grumbling about TSA is one thing, even if the volume is a little loud. But it felt very insulting to the people there on Dec. 26 at 3:45 am to call their jobs ridiculous, and that is exactly how everybody received those words from him. Even the flight crew behind me turned on the guy.

So of course the dude goes through the full body scanner again and is told that he needs to go back and put his shoes through again. I didn’t catch the reason, and neither did he because he was absolutely boiling. He kept calling everybody and everything ridiculous, and I saw TSA agents all gathering around and giving each other looks like, “OK, fine, you want it to be ridiculous, it’s gonna be ridiculous times 10.”

So they dogged this guy. Sent him back and forth another time or two. The guy was losing his mind, and he had his whole family waiting on the other side. They were standing there silent, just letting him vent, and I got a bit of a sad feeling at that point because this dude was soooooo mad. Not mad. Big mad. The kind of mad that isn’t really about sending your shoes through the x-ray machine an extra time or two.

Eventually the dude got through, but they put him through the wringer, and it was purposeful. They might have been a little bit nagging initially, but then he got pissed and they responded with pissyness, too, and the whole thing just was ugly.

I’m writing about this on a recovery newsletter because it was a vivid window into what it looks like when there is disagreement and people dig in. I am certainly capable of that and always have been. I tend to get into an argument and switch to trying to win the argument, versus having a conversation about something we might not agree on. I have to win, and when somebody is doing that, there is no win. If I happen to crush the other person in an argument, I doubt that relationship improved from my glorious win.

That’s a recovery thing. When you talk to people with good sobriety, you’ll notice that there isn’t a lot of airing of grievances. Good sobriety usually means that when you hit a pothole, you move on, rather than launch a full investigation into who put the pothole there, why wasn’t it fixed, etc. I was thinking of all the people in my life whose sobriety I respect, and I couldn't come up with a single one who would have had that ugly argument with TSA. There might have been heavy helpings of quiet sarcasm and character assassination, which I am here for usually, but I can’t imagine them wanting to engage in an unwinnable argument with people who can decide whether you go to jail or not over scanning your shoes.

I saw the guy later in the airport, and he seemed to have cooled down. He had his terrifying, dangerous shoes back on and was getting a drink from the water fountain. He seemed a little more tired than he had before, like maybe the weight of exploding at people was heavy on him. Or maybe he was just an old dude hunched over at a water fountain. Either way, I couldn’t help but think the whole damn thing was exactly what he called it: ridiculous.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Before a meeting was about to start, the young chairperson asked the older newcomer to read, “How It Works,” giving him a photocopied sheet from Chapter Five of the Big Book. A few minutes later, the newcomer politely handed the sheet back to the chairperson.

“You’re supposed to read this,” explained the chair.

“I just did,” said the elderly beginner.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, Jan. 2000, by Ernie S. and Doug R., New York, NY)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I was at a meeting the other night when we read from page 66 of the Big Book, where deep resentments are addressed. It’s remarkable how aggressive the language is in that section. We’re told that deep resentments lead us to drink, and to drink is to die. We’re told deep resentments are poison that cause us to waste years of our lives.

It’s a big contrast with other sections of sober literature, which I have found to be quite gentle in discussing character defects and other bad behaviors. Our sober founding fathers and mothers were aggressive in telling us that we absolutely cannot afford resentments.

But I was struck by the specific use of the phrase “deep resentment.” To me, deep resentments are absolutely poison, and are probably reserved for some of the more serious people, places and things in our lives. In my head, deep resentments refer to ex-wives and ex-husbands, moms and dads, etc. I don’t consider someone who took your parking spot at the grocery store or didn’t email you back fast enough to qualify as a deep resentment.

However, I must say that I also realized something else. It’s certainly bad to have one deep resentment devouring you. But I also think that 10 small resentments equal or surpass one deep resentment. And I would argue a bunch of small resentments might be more dangerous because we often underestimate small, petty annoyances.

Think about it this way. What’s riskier, a deep resentment against a former boyfriend or girlfriend who dumped you? Or being mad yesterday at a driver who cut you off, at your kid for getting an F on a big test, at your neighbor for having loud construction done, at the garbage crew for knocking your can over, at your mail guy for letting a package get wet, at a coworker for calling you out at a meeting, at the local weather person for being way off on their forecast… you probably see where this is going.

I think all of those little brushfires add up to at least as much as one big fire. I have days where I am not irate and don’t yell at anybody, but I am constantly annoyed, constantly balling up my fists and cursing somebody out in my brain. I usually think about each one of these little skirmishes as too small to bring up with a sponsor or at a meeting. But the reality is, I am boiling hot for long stretches of the day about stuff that I deemed petty. That may not be a deep resentment, but it’s a terrible headspace to be in. It’s just one long stretch of being aggravated and not present in life.

The answer is probably to make sure I am doing daily maintenance things. So many of these little brushfires are better prevented preemptively rather than after you scream at the old guy at the grocery store who didn’t return his shopping cart. When I am spiritually fit and serene, I’m not doing that.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Welcome to AA

I was in a meeting when I was new and a fellow was being disruptive. Several AAs asked him to leave and walked him out, saying, "Keep coming back!" I asked why they said that after making him leave. They said, "When he comes back, we want him to feel welcome."

(Credit: Grapevine, by Kay K. of Redondo Beach, California, September 2009)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

At a meeting the other day, a guy mentioned that by the end of his drinking, he was DoorDashing food and alcohol to his door every single day. He said he thinks he barely left his apartment for six months or so, and that his interpersonal skills had basically disappeared. He was a recluse.

Then he talked about how he realized he had to get sober, and that meant he had to leave the house. So he started taking baby steps and going to meetings, where he said he was uncomfortable at first. But meetings force you to up your game—there are hugs, inquiries about how you’re doing, exchange of phone numbers, and public speaking.

As he was talking, I flashed back to my early days at rehab and then meetings. It was awkward for me, too. Very awkward. Start with the public speaking, which is a very human struggle—there aren’t many people who easily do public speaking and like it. But in rehab and meetings, public speaking also involves some very raw stuff that is hard to say out loud, especially in a crowd. That makes it twice as hard.

But I also thought back to some of the more nuanced tough things after I finally left the house and tried to get sober. My people skills had completely vanished. I’d always been a pretty jovial, comfortable guy around people. But I suddenly was sober and realized that I didn’t really remember how to make eye contact, give a firm handshake and a bunch of other stuff that normal people do every day. I hadn’t been doing it—I’d been locked in my guest bedroom for months, and those skills had definitely atrophied.

I remember some work meetings where I would get a little flustered and not know what to do with my hands, and I specifically recall having a hard time with my mouth. I would find my lips getting jumpy and my hands getting shaky during conversations that weren’t very confrontational. I just hadn’t been speaking to someone in lightly stressful situations in a long, long time, so it was awkward and weird. I bet people on the other side of things probably thought I was about to fall apart.

But I didn’t fall apart, and meetings are why. I forget sometimes that meetings were my re-acclimation to the world. I learned to talk to people, hug again, express love and accept it and the biggest of all, to talk in front of people.

I still think I am awkward sometimes in sobriety, because it’s hard to not be awkward in this world sometimes. But man, I can’t even imagine what a jerky-jerky dork I’d be without meetings as a place to practice being human again.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

"You guys wouldn't let me do it cold turkey. You slopped on the gravy, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, too!"

(Credit: Grapevine, April 2009, by Ed L. of Wrightwood, California)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I recently met up with a friend I haven’t seen in awhile, and before we got together, he sent me a text where he said, “I can’t wait to see you! I’m about to provide you with a hell of a hangover.”

I of course responded and said, “Hey, I appreciate the sentiment but I am 16 years sober and do not have any interest in a hangover.”

He apologized and said it slipped his mind, and that he was instead going to help me get a food hangover from all the crap we were going to consume when we hang out. I laughed and said to count me in.

But I had a moment where I felt a little irritated. Like, come on, dude, respect my sobriety, okay? I worked really hard to get sober and I work really hard to stay sober. Please understand that.

Except… being offended by that means I have a pretty high expectation of people knowing about my sobriety. And on some level, it means I might be looking for outside validation of my sobriety when all I really need is internal satisfaction that I am doing the right things.

When we got together, he apologized for bringing up drinking, and I said no big deal. I actually meant it then… now, if he had stood in front of me right after he said it, I may have had some more irritation in my voice. But I needed to right-size myself and not pin my own self-esteem about recovery on somebody else.

I also caught my back going up for a millisecond recently when I celebrated 16 years sober at some meetings. I had some very good friends jokingly say, “Holy s**t, I never would have guessed you’d have 16 years of sobriety.” They were purely joking, and I laughed, and they laughed. But I did have a mopey moment or two where I reflected back and thought, “Was he really trying to say I used to be a mess? Was I? Even if I was, what a rude thing to say!”

That was a bunch of nonsense, too. I think if you can’t laugh about the mis-steps of the past, you’re in trouble. Joy and laughter are the main reasons I do this podcast and newsletter—it helped me when people laughed at meetings and could poke fun at themselves without blowing a gasket. I needed to know that recovery wasn’t drudgery, that it was happy, joyous and free. So that’s where I ended up landing this week. I need to respect my own sobriety enough to not get disrespected by an offhand comment (or three!).

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

"I was always the black sheep of the family. Then I joined AA and found the rest of the herd."

(Credit: Grapevine, March 2009, by C.W.)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I was thinking the other day about how messy my life was when I got sober. My kids were 3 years old and 6 months old. I had just bought a house. I was scuffling to figure out a career. And I was only 31 years old, which means I could have kept digging my bottom for another five or 10 or 20 years.

That got me contemplating how lucky I am to have gotten out then, rather than continuing till the pain got even greater than it already was. And it made me ponder a difficult question: When is the easiest age to get sober? And conversely, what is the toughest age to get sober?

From first-hand experience, I can tell you that early 30s with young kids is no picnic. Early sobriety was obviously quite difficult, and then once I got my feet under me, I had tremendous family obligations that caused me to often break out the dreaded phrase, “I’m too busy to get to a meeting this weekend.”

So let’s keep 30s as an age group that might be the toughest.

But what about younger? In my own experience, I would definitely say it is tough to stop drinking and drugging in your 20s. I just hadn’t accumulated enough bad moments yet to make me believe I truly had a problem. In my sobriety, I’ve definitely seen younger people struggle for that reason, plus the fact that almost all of their peer group is still meeting and partying at bars. It can be tough to have a social life that doesn’t involve lots of temptation.

That brings us to 40s and 50s… first of all, I can’t imagine having my addiction issues and living until age 40. It wasn’t going to happen on the trajectory that I was on in my 30s. I had maybe another year or two before something really bad happened.

But I guess there could have been a version of my life where I got sober for a few years, relapsed, got sober again, and kept hanging on into my 40s and maybe even 50s. But geez, by then, I think it would have been damn near impossible to get sober. That is a longgg time of active addiction without much of a solution working out.

All right, that brings us to 60s, and I’ll throw in 70s, 80s and 90s because you can probably guess where this is going. I can’t imagine having been an active alcoholic from ages 20 through 60 and then going to rehab. I would have been dead or stuck in that life. So that wouldn’t have been an easy age to get sober, and nothing over the age of 60 would have been easy, either.

I swear I didn’t set out on this newsletter entry to land where I am going to land… but I think the easiest age to stop drinking and drugging is none of them, and the toughest age to get sober is all of them. Which means the answer is that you get out as soon as possible, and you stay out. The older I get, the more I realize that addiction takes no prisoners and spares no age group, gender or anything else. And as hard as it might be to get sober, it’s harder to not get sober.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

An alcoholic who had abused his family, imposed on his few friends and generally been a public nuisance, finally died. At the funeral service, the preacher asked, "Does anyone wish to say some kind words about the departed?"

There was a dead silence. The minister repeated the question. Finally, a man stood up and said grudgingly, "His brother was worse."

(Credit: Grapevine, March 2009, by Anonymous)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

Think about this question for 10 seconds before answering: Do you get annoyed a lot?

Some examples to consider: Do you get aggravated by other drivers? Or your neighbor having noisy construction on their house? Or the guy who talks too loud in the cubicle next to yours? Or the person who shares the same thing at every meeting?

I’m not proud to say that I am constantly annoyed. I don’t get angry very often. But I do get annoyed on a regular basis. And to be honest, I don’t always mind. It’s funny to rail on somebody for some minor transgression. I also won’t b******t and say I don’t feel a little better when I put someone else down—I do! But it’s a short-term shot of dopamine, and then I just feel bad a half hour later because I just s**t-talked someone.

But I read a great section in Step Six in the 12 and 12 about being annoyed, and I have been thinking about it ever since. Step Six obviously deals with working on character defects, and the literature makes the case that being annoyed is often a sign of us looking for superiority over others. It also says pretty bluntly that we are not people who can afford to be annoyed all the time.

The more I thought about it, the more it resonated. Looking back, I often times didn’t drink because some horrible, traumatic thing happened. I drank because someone said something shitty to me at work, or I was in an argument with my spouse, or a friend was mad at me. I drank and did drugs at people, places and things.

Now I don’t drink and do drugs, but I still do stuff at people. Gossip, bad-mouthing, character assassination inside my own head… and it usually does end up revolving around superiority. I’m looking to build myself up. But instead of working on myself, I get annoyed at others and hope that by putting them down in my head, I will feel better about myself.

Here’s the thing: It doesn’t really work. Maybe for 20 minutes or an hour. But mostly, I end up feeling bad about it and regret doing it. So it is ultimately a boomerang effect on myself.

I can’t say I haven’t gotten annoyed since that meeting when we read Step Six. But I am more aware of my annoyances right now, and that has helped. Awareness is always the first step for me in rooting out an issue, so hopefully that is the case here. Until then, I will probably still be getting annoyed a lot!

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

IN THE BEGINNING…

A gardener and an architect are discussing which of their vocations is the most ancient, while a drunk is listening nearby.

The gardener comments, "My vocation goes back to the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam to tend the garden."

The architect comments, "My vocation goes back to the creation, when God created the world itself from primordial chaos."

They both look curiously at the drunk, who asks, "And who do you think created the primordial chaos?"

(Credit: Grapevine, March 2009, by Ronald H.)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

On a regular basis, I spend time thinking about how to connect with other alcoholics and drug addicts, especially newcomers. And one night I was thinking about that when a speaker was introduced for the meeting I was at, and the chairperson said the phrase we all know and love: “She’s here to share her experience, strength and hope.”

Those three words lingered in the air for me. Experience. Strength. Hope.

Let’s start with hope. I do think the best speakers lay out why sober life is better than active addiction, providing optimism for everybody in the room. So I love hearing some hope.

Then there is strength. I love that, too. If you’re an alcoholic or drug addict and you have been sober for any length of time, there has to be strength in there somewhere. And it’s always interesting to hear the contrast of the weakness of active addiction with the strength of active sobriety. I think you almost can’t have one without the other. If I had a lot of strength when I was drinking and drugging, I probably never would have stopped!

Last but not least, experience. It’s essential in my opinion to have the speaker lay out what their life was like and then how it changed in sobriety. You want to establish the basic facts of the change in their life and how they ended up in recovery. I think without that, our stories probably feel a little hollow.

So that got me thinking about the words that aren’t included in that statement. What about honesty? Sense of humor? Hard work? And especially knowledge… isn’t knowledge critical?

I ended up feeling like experience, strength and hope probably includes all of those things on some level. Most stories I’ve heard included some levity, and acknowledgement of being absolutely true to thine own self.

The biggest one that got me thinking was knowledge. I feel like the things I’ve learned in the program are so, so valuable to me, and some of the emotional sobriety stuff I have picked up over the years includes tools and insights that I’d never spent time with before. That information is indeed valuable.

But then I started thinking about what moved me as a newcomer. It wasn’t information. If meetings felt like lectures or college classes, I might have struggled. And if people told their stories with learning as the backbone, I don’t know that I would have connected with so many people over the years. When I hear a good speaker, it’s usually that their experiences make me identify with them and nod my head at the similarities. Often times, I’ll hear someone describe the pain they were in and feel like there is no way I could drink today after hearing it. When I hear someone explain the traditions of 12-step recovery, or a passage from the Big Book related to making amends, it’s certainly worthwhile… but it doesn’t usually move the emotional needle in the same way.

So I guess the entire point of this exercise is that there’s nothing to see here. Experience, strength and hope is the perfect description of the best way to have an impact!

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Working with newcomers is a little like working with cement… it’s usually better when it’s still wet. Otherwise, you’re going to need a jackhammer.

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe