Thirteen years ago today I started my sober journey. I've written online about shipping products and arguing with data; but this one is closer to home, and it's going up on the internet because being loud about sobriety is part of how I maintain it.
If you're reading this on day one, or year one: keep going. Here's what I've learned.
Habits do the work, not willpower
- Staying sober stopped being a fight once my day was already built around something better. Building towards habit stacking beats white knuckling a whole day sober
- The sober version of me becomes the default version, not the one I have to defend
- For example, I have a book on every surface (next to my bed, in my office, on the sofa, on the dining room table), so it's trivial to reach for it
The people you keep are so important
- There was a stretch where the people around me were a slow leak; enabling, minimising, making "one won't hurt" sound reasonable. I wouldn't have stayed sober with those people around me
- Now I have groups of people who are a compounding positive influence; my wonderful wife, friends, a new family I'm so thankful for, board game friends, gym friends, and walking by the sea friends
- The lesson generalises past sobriety; you are, unhelpfully, quite close to the average of the people you're around which sounds rough, but you get to choose your average
Gamification runs its course
- I used to count everything; hours, then days, then weeks, then months. And now, thirteen years in, I nearly forgot it was today
- It's a slightly awkward thing to admit, given I killed streaks in Scroll Books because they nagged people too much, but the metric that helped me start is not the metric that keeps me going
Saying it out loud
- Being loud and proud reinforces it for me in a way quiet discipline never did
- It also gives other people the space they need; when I talk about my sobriety openly, people ask for help, or tell me about their own day one, or their own year three, and I'm so thankful being unapologetically sober has allowed me to help others through their own journey
I still have an addict's brain
- Sobriety didn't remove the wiring in my brain. The same pattern still finds new things; dopamine games, doomscrolling, the little hit I get from a number going up
- The addiction loops are a similar shape in my brain, they're just not as harmful
- What protects me now isn't my willpower, it's systems and people in my life who notice a new loop before it gets out of hand
- Screentime blockers have been an amazing help, so has putting my phone in the hallway when I get home
If you're on day one
- Thirteen years of sobriety started by grinding through an hour, then a day, learning to say 'no' and building towards a life I'm proud of.