The journey to sobriety – that is, long-term sobriety – can most definitely be a character sculpting experience. When someone struggles with the fight against addiction and then overcomes that challenge, they only do so by coming out the other end as an entirely different version of themselves. It’s not so much a total personality transformation as much as it simply is a journey to figuring out what you’re all about – what motivates you, what keeps you alive, what keeps you waking up each day to stay focused on life and find innovative ways to enjoy yourself without ever having to go back to those darker days.
Sobriety isn’t a singular goal, it’s a state that has be achieved and maintained. Staying clean – not taking anything that could intoxicate you, from anesthetics and heroin to alcohol and cigarettes – is a huge challenge at first, and will remain a commitment for the rest of your life. But staying sober – retaining the mental clarity to combat addiction and the chances of relapse – is challenging work, especially in the first few months. Many fail a few times until they achieve that final streak of sobriety, and relapses are more common that most would think.
Yet despite the challenge, it’s not meant to define you. Addiction can tear a person apart and destroy their life – but the fight against addiction isn’t meant to consume you in much the same way. It’s mean to free you, to give you the freedom and the opportunity to choose your way through life, forge your own fate, and finally decide for yourself what you want to do and know why you want to do it, without feeling overburdened under the yoke of addiction, without the power to go up against your problems with confidence. Making that distinction, and ensuring that your road to sobriety becomes the final arc of a chapter rather than the defining challenge of your entire life, is ironically important for you to maintain that sobriety.
Recovery & Sobriety
Recovery from addiction isn’t easy. An estimated ten percent of people who either are struggling or have struggled with addiction consider themselves free from it. However, that must be coupled with the fact that most Americans who consider themselves to struggle with addiction fail to seek treatment for it, for a variety of reasons.
It’s very much possible to recover from an addiction, and anyone can do it if they have a reason to. All it takes is the right approach, and a reason important enough to keep them sober. Some addictions are far harder to beat than others – but all journeys to recovery begin with the will, and a reason. That’s where accountability and responsibility play a part in recreating someone after addiction has run through them.
However, to convince someone of the importance of taking that responsibility, you must convince them that they have the power and the ability to see it through. Confidence, self-esteem, and the security of knowing you can be someone others rely on – these feelings of basic belonging and social significance are central to recovery, because they help you restore yourself into a circle of friends, a family, and society itself. Through a job, through hobbies, and through the passion that you love the most, a proper journey of recovery will teach you exactly how strong you are, and exactly why you never again need to turn towards the empty promises and useless pleasures of addiction.
Sobriety be a state of clarity achieved by realizing that drugs, and addiction, are ultimately meaningless in the face of how beautiful life can be, how great it feels to achieve the goals you’ve always set out to achieve, and how rewarding it is to spend your time and energy on the things that interest you and matter to you, rather than wasting life.
But that’s the thing. While sobriety helps you forge a stronger you, you must find ways to define yourself without the context of addiction – live a conscious, mindful life and maintain your sobriety alongside it.
There’s More to Life
Too many people begin their journey to recovery with the goal of conquering their addiction, and then they never really get past that. They’re too stubborn to relapse, but they don’t see past the early phase of recovery and don’t figure out what it is that would challenge them, make them happy, spurn them on to pursue something with gusto.
Dry drunks, as they’re called, lack that. They’re sober, but they’re still abusive, unhappy, unresolved. They carry a host of issues that need to be addressed, problems they harbor against themselves, against the world, and against life. These problems need to come out and breathe in some much-needed air if they’re ever going to see closure, either through self-help or therapy.
Once you make it past the idea that just being sober is your primary goal, you can begin to live your life again, and make more out of it than it ever was.
Staying Sober
That’s the simple necessary ingredient to staying sober – realizing that life is about finding new goals, rather than dwelling on them. You don’t just tell yourself that you’re going to go to the gym for a month, and then drop it. You set new goals, raise the bar, up the stakes, and figure out new challenges. You improve your performance at work, finish your education or specialize in a new industry, nail a new job, and blast past every obstacle with solutions instead of excuses and problems.
If you let the failure eat away at you, you’ll never actually taste the success, and achieve that blissful happiness everyone loves talking about. Sobriety begins to crumble in the face of doubt and insecurity, fear and worry, and the anxieties of cascading failure. Stay optimistic, stay hungry, and set new goals for yourself until you feel that joy to live again – and if you chase it, with the help of those around you, you’ll never need your old habits and their destructive ways.