Within the recovery world, there’s a lot of talk about the power of positive thinking. We have to believe in our sobriety, trust the recovery process, and focus on what is going right in our lives. A positive mindset can help us through even the hardest days.
For the most part, I’ve found this approach helpful. But is positivity always best?
The truth is that on some of my hardest days, it hasn’t been positive thoughts that kept me going, but instead a single, very negative one:
I’m going to die someday.
It’s a dark thought to fixate on, but the truth is that this brutal reality has kept me sober through some of the toughest times.
I hate thinking about death. Before I even reached high school, I was already getting panic attacks. My whole life has felt haunted by existential dread.
I’m a theist—I believe in God—but I’ve never been sure what I think about the afterlife. Is there more after death? Or is this life all we have? I don’t know, and that uncertainty terrifies me.
Regardless, I know that I love being alive, and I’m sad that the human lifetime is, in the grand scheme of things, so painfully short.
The average life expectancy right now is about 73 years. Of course, that varies based on location, sex, and a thousand other factors. But, even in the best of circumstances, the vast majority of us aren’t going to live much past 80 or 90.
I’m 37, which is still on the young side of the recovery world, but I’m not exactly a kid anymore either. I’m well into my life, near the halfway point.
Again, this terrifies me.
It’s not a thought that I like to dwell on. I no longer get panic attacks, but I still don’t like the feeling of worrying about death.
So, why then, do I force myself to remember the inevitable end of my existence?
Because it helps me to make the most of the time that I have.
I spent over a decade as a drunk. That’s over ten years of my life getting drunk nearly every day.
Those years flew by. It’s not as if I accomplished nothing in that time, but the reality is that I did far less with those years than I could have.
Before I got sober, I spent hours every day just drinking and watching television or surfing the web. Those were hours that I could have spent doing things I enjoyed, helping others, or improving myself.
I hate knowing how much time I wasted with my alcoholism. However, now that I’m sober, that knowledge motivates me to keep going.
I know that if I were to go back to drinking, the years would start to fly by once again. I can easily imagine waking up one day and realizing that I was 47, 57, or 67, and had spent even more years just drinking and watching television.
That’s not the life that I want to live.
Sobriety is perhaps the greatest blessing of my life because it’s given me the chance to truly enjoy the time that I have.
I’m not expecting to die anytime soon, but I know that I’m not going to live forever either.
Whether I’m here for another decade or I live well past 100, I want to make sure that I’m enjoying all that life has to offer. I can’t do that if I go back to drinking.
I’ve managed to escape my addiction, and I owe it to myself to take full advantage of the opportunities that sobriety has given me.
Death has been on my mind a lot lately. As I mentioned in previous newsletters, my grandfather died last month. He was the last of my grandparents to go.
He had stopped drinking at a young age, and as far as I could tell, he lived a rich and fulfilling life.
I had another grandfather, who died about a decade ago, who didn’t manage to quit drinking until he was far older. For that second grandfather, his alcoholism ruined his life, left him estranged from his family, and kept me from ever meeting him.
When I compare these two grandfathers, I don’t have to think twice about which life I want to emulate.
I’m not going to pretend that since getting sober my life has been perfect. I don’t take advantage of every single minute of free time. I don’t spend all of my time having fun and helping the world. I still occasionally watch television and play video games.
However, the balance has shifted. Instead of spending the vast majority of my time mindlessly watching television and surfing the web, I now do it for just a couple of hours a week.
In place of that wasted time, I now spend most of my free time doing things I love. My life has completely transformed, and I’ve pursued opportunities that wouldn’t have been possible in a million years if I had kept drinking.
I wish that I had gotten sober even sooner. I hate that I wasted so much time for an entire decade.
But, these days I use that negativity to fuel my positive change. I remember that someday I will die and that I’ve already wasted far too much of my life.
Those thoughts motivate me to stay sober and live my life to the fullest.