I am still on the same topic I wrote about earlier today. I am disturbed by my friend's approach to getting sober. He is sober 90 days - which is wonderful - but instead of hanging around with others who are sober 90 days, 60 days, 30 days, 1 year, etc.... he is hanging around with folks with 20+ years of sobriety.
I am so so so so fortunate that when I got sober, my homegroup was based at a club. It was a club with a terrible reputation. The people with one or two years of sobriety were the senior statesmen. We were all new and we were all crazy. We were all in the same boat. On the occassion when someone with more than a couple of years came to a meeting there, we listened with all the earnestness we could muster, but we still hung out with each other.
This group had a terrible reputation because there was no "good" sobriety there. There was no "long term" sobriety there. We were all newcomers and our behavior was not always (always? ha! it was virtually NEVER) exemplary!
But I must say, that these days when I get across town to the current incarnation of my old home group, those same people are sitting there. They have gray hair and wrinkles, they are talking about their grandchildren and their retirement accounts. Most of them have stayed sober since those crazy days in the 80s when we were all getting sober together. In the same boat. The Blind Leading the Blind... appropriately.
Those oldsters I later came to know and love are now mostly all dead. Thank God I have some peers to still hang out with.
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