I just recently turned 44. I am no kid and like any other over-40 person, I’ve been through quiet a lot in my life – some of my friends say that the pile of experiences I’ve been through in the past decade is sufficient to fill a lifetime story. Overall, I consider myself a very lucky and privileged guy. I grew up in a warm and loving family, your middle-class kind of family – never had anything missing, went on some family vacations, surrounded by lots of friends. My adult life, professionally, started off with a very promising career path in tech, where I grew, matured, evolved, founded 2 start-ups, exited the first and had to leave the second (that’s definitely a subject for a separate dedicated post) and recently found a very senior position in a well-established tech company.
Personally, I’ve found the love of my life, and now the super proud father of 3 beautiful, healthy and very loud and happy kids. Oh, and there’s Tokyo, my 4-year-old Cane Corso – my best friend on this planet, whom I love and miss so much.
But it was not all honey and roses. In the past decade I lost 4 very close friends, I went through 2 very intense and severe depression periods in my life, and the highlight of the lows was my father’s sudden terrible suicide almost 8 years ago. Ya, I must write about that one day.
Through all the above, since the age of 20 or so, alcohol was my chaperon, close buddy, discrete friend who was always there for me. There were drugs too, and when go at it – I would go at it full blow – but it never took over my life like alcohol did.
But ever since I stopped drinking, and not only stopping – but actually putting all of my focus on it, working at not drinking – I started feeling some changes.
Listen, I won’t pretend I am an expert on sobriety, I am practically taking my baby steps here, yet again and I been as cautious as I can when writing any post or making any observations.
But even with such short milage in this endless challenging journey I am starting to encounter feelings and habits I don’t recall having before – and being grateful is one of them.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate – ever since about the time I became a father I tell my wife every night before we go to sleep – “I am the richest man on the planet”, feeling so very super fucking lucky to going to sleep with a woman I truly love, in a warm house, with my precious kids with us.
But recently I noticed this feeling has changed, deepened, became sharper, clearer - more real. Seems that this is how it feels to actually feel things, when you’re not spending a significant amount of time being either drunk or hung over – your mind is free to feel things.
Simply putting it – I feel I was saved.
Look, I haven’t started to scratch the surface sharing my drunk history, compiled with tens of events that each of them could easily have ended with serious injuries, physical and emotional, or even death. If you’re in recovery, I am sure you are not surprised and feel the same. And the fact that I am here now, sitting in a beautiful café in central London, out on a sunny day, writing about my positive experiences – is not something I should take for granted – and I don’t.
I am not a religious guy, but I do believe that there’s some force that drives this universe. Other than mother nature, which is the ultimate force that makes the world go round, there is something else to drives our human lives. It’s that something that drives the journey of your life, putting you in the places it puts you, for you to meet the people you meet, which creates the relationships that dictates the story of your life. Its that force that sometimes watches over you, and sometimes causes terrible stuff to happen to you.
For me – it’s the force that kept me alive, healthy and not in jail – because of my awful drinking habit.
For that, I can’t explain how grateful I am – and I hope that it will give me the power I need to keep walking down the sobriety path – which at the time of writing these lines, seems like the best path I ever walked through.
ODAAT people.
コメント