Drinking, Drugs, Health / Wellness

Embracing Middle Age Sober

A wonderful lifetime in long term-sobriety awaits. Embrace middle age sober. It’s a wonderful place to be.

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mystery-womanI don’t know if it originated with my father, but growing up in Pittsburgh, he used to regularly say to my older brother, Mark, my younger brother, Jeff, and me, “Today is the youngest you will ever be, live like it.”

I thought about what he said the other day as I talked to a woman who I will call Sarah. Sarah is early in sobriety. She is also going through a tough divorce. She was lamenting the fact that she was in her late 40s and just now getting sober. Starting over.

We spoke of her feeling of intense loneliness. She was frightened of the loss of a way of life and the uncertainty of a future free of the bonds of booze, and of course, the loss of a marriage. She asked me if she would ever find love again. The fear of a “wasted life” with probably more years behind than in front.

I totally got it. Getting sober at any age is difficult. Getting sober at any age often involves some sort of loss. Loss of family. The loss of self-respect and the breaking down of self to ground zero before the slow re-build begins. Sometimes the loss of freedom. When we enter sobriety at a later stage in life, there is a lot more room to engage in the looking back at all that loss. I certainly did that quite a bit in those early days of sobriety. Looking back at years I felt I had wasted and thinking I might as well have lit a match to them. I felt the shame, regret, and contemplated the uncertainty and fear of “middle age sober.” I had experienced every feeling she related. Many in recovery have.

I pointed out to her that I did not begin my long-term sobriety until I was 46 years old after over two decades of problem drinking and almost two decades of drug use. Prior to that, there were multiple “I will never drink or do blow again” relapses. There were three failed marriages. There were two trips to a psychiatric facility. We all have our stories.

Early in sobriety, I also obsessed over the fact that I had “wasted” so many years drinking and drugging. I had two successful brothers who I compared myself against and never came out feeling good about it. I engaged in the most self-destructive kind of reflection on the past. I call it “revisionist recovery.” Going over every moment in my past and wondering how things would be different if I had only not taken that drink or done that snort. Would I have been a better law student? A better lawyer? A better husband? A better son and brother?

I finally realized that this was not going to help my recovery because it boiled my life down to moments in time rather than viewing it as a fluid chain of events that make me the person I am today. Do I have regrets? Sure. I will always regret the collateral damage, but that is what making living amends are about for me. I can’t change the past, but I can control how I respond to it and do my best to stay in the present, trying to do the next right thing every day.

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I told Sarah that I no longer obsess about “wasted years.” How things could have been different or what I could have done in my life if I had gotten sober earlier. I embrace who I am today. I embrace middle age sober. Today is the youngest I will ever be, and I will live like it one day at a time in my recovery. That’s what I hope you will do, Sarah. A wonderful lifetime in long term-sobriety awaits. Embrace middle age sober. It’s a wonderful place to be.

  1. http://www.americanbar.org/groups/lawyer_assistance.html
  2. http://collegiaterecovery.org/programs/
  3. http://www.aa.org/
  4. http://www.smartrecovery.org/
  5. http://www.celebraterecovery.com/

BrianCubanBrian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

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