When I was six months sober, I dreamed of skipping straight to eight years. This may sound strange, I know. Let me explain.
Early recovery kind of sucks. It can be refreshing initially. The perks—no hangovers, fewer conflicts with loved ones or work—start to fade, leaving behind the raw emotions we’ve long avoided.
There’s an old saying in the 12-step world - You feel better when you get sober. You feel pain better, loss better, sadness better, you feel it all better than you did before. And like most cliches of recovery, this one has a strong hint of truth to it.
Having dulled our emotional abilities by being drunk and high, most of us lost the capacity to fully experience and process the normal emotions of life. We tried to avoid the very natural and normal states that come from living a life on life’s terms.
So there I am, less than a year sober, and I am experiencing all the feelings that I’ve been trying to avoid for the previous twelve years. Not to mention, I’m facing some legal consequences for my drinking. So, of course, I wanted eight years and not the six months that I had. In those early weeks and months of sobriety, my life had objectively gotten 1000% better, and yet I wanted something different. I wanted something better.
When I mentioned my desire to bypass the pains of early sobriety and skip ahead to eight years, my sponsor laughed and told me something that helped.
“You can’t handle eight years.”
At first, this sounded utterly ridiculous. Of course I could handle less emotional strife, better relationships with friends and family, and I could definitely handle not having to go to jail and losing my driver’s license for two years.
What he meant, though, was that at eight years of sobriety, my life would be so full and rich that I couldn’t handle it with my current emotional maturity and ability to work the 12 steps.
He was saying I didn’t have the tools to deal with a life that good! Hard to imagine, right?
But we see it all the time. People whose lives go from zero to sixty in three seconds flat, and the wheels come off. Professional athletes who have never had money get their first $10 million dollar paycheck. Poor people who win the lottery but have never managed even a meager budget. Hollywood celebrities who go from total obscurity to being on the front page of every newspaper and magazine in the world.
It’s often too much to handle. We hear too many stories of falling into addiction, scandal, bankruptcy, and suicide. Most of us aren’t geared to handle that kind of rapid acceleration. We need tools and we need time to practice using those tools to help us build a solid foundation that can sustain us through incredible growth periods.
When I look back over the last twenty years of my life, I can have moments when I wish I had been further ahead. I wish I had more money in savings, a bigger house, or more travel planned. I might wish I had already published a couple of books and was an established writer.
But like someone winning the lottery without budgeting skills, we often want a better life before we’ve built the capacity to sustain it.
Upon reflection, I can also see that every good thing I have in my life came over a long period of time. I recovered from alcoholism slowly. My career grew slowly. My mindfulness practice grew slowly. My relationships with my wife and my friends and family…they all grew slowly. And because they grew slowly, they are all built on bedrock. They are stable and can withstand an incredible season of growth, OR a season of tragedy and loss.
My sponsor was right. There is no way I could have handled the life I have now when I was six months sober. I couldn’t have handled my marriage, my finances, my work, or any of the other responsibilities I have. This life took years to build.
Today I’m incredibly grateful for the time I’ve put in all these areas of my life. The mostly unsexy work of recovery, sitting in meditation, going to couples therapy, and of course, writing.
Back then, at six months sober, I couldn’t handle eight years. Today, I see that the slow, steady work—recovery meetings, meditation, workouts, writing, even the unglamorous grind—wasn’t just preparing me for a better life. It was the better life, unfolding in real-time.
And if you’re feeling stuck, frustrated, or behind, remember this: progress isn’t always shiny or quick, but it’s real. Trust that you’re laying the foundation for something meaningful, something that will last.
You’re right where you’re supposed to be.