The Pain in the Ass Thing About Being Sober

The pain in the ass thing about being sober is that it’s all on you now. It’s your fault, no matter what manner of insensitive stupidity you engage in. Your ability to play the wasted card has been revoked. You don’t have anymore excuses for the crappy, immature way that you are accustomed to behaving. It becomes, almost overnight a lot harder to forgive your trespasses.

If you are mean to someone you’re not some drunk asshole, your just an asshole. If you can’t remember someone’s name it isn’t because you met them while you were wasted, it’s because you can’t be bothered to give enough of a crap about them to commit it to memory. When you make an ass out of yourself, you’re not hammered, you’re just an idiot. If you spend all day in bed you’re not passed out, you’re a lazy SOB.

Being sober forces you to to face yourself, who you are, what your short comings might be, why you do things. You are left to take sole responsibility and blame for every action that you take. You  start to have to think about who you want to be remembered as. You begin to think about things in terms of whether it might be a good idea, and whether or not you are going to have to apologize for it later.

Suddenly you become acutely aware of the things that come out of your mouth. How insensitive, bitter, and unenlightened the words that you say might be. Now you have to make conscious decisions to be constructive, compassionate, and insightful. Quite frankly, that is going to be a serious bitch.

Without your standard excuses it becomes time to address the real problem. You become very familiar with regret and think of all the ways in which you have let your life and ambitions just slip through your fingers. Thinking of all the things you’ve always wanted to do and be. You start ticking off missed opportunities, and come up with ways to revive your dreams.

You probably start a blog and write boring, rambling posts about sobriety. You write other things too; things you find interesting, but for some unshakable reason your thoughts keep coming back to being sober. You sit everyday anyway and start to write because you always thought you could be really good at it if you just practiced more. You probably feel very self-conscious about all this, but your going to do it anyway; because this is the only way you will ever know for sure.