Sunday, August 21, 2011

“Sobriety Birthday Blog”

Today I celebrated three years of living clean and sober. I’d considered rounding some friends up to go shoot pool or something, but finally decided an easy day around home was what I really needed. That’s kind of how it goes, being an introvert.

I do have a sobriety-birthday routine of a sort, though. I once heard someone share about making a phone call to her sponsor, complaining that she hadn’t called to wish her a happy birthday. Her sponsor replied that she had been taught that, on your birthday, you should be the one to call your sponsor and thank them for helping you to stay sober. And any sponsees, too, if you have them. It’s a good story about showing gratitude, and one I’ve taken to heart. My sponsor--by no small coincidence--has the same policy.

I called my sponsor earlier today. He only had a quick minute to talk because he was sitting down with another sponsee, just starting the Big Book. I called both my sponsees as well. Birthday milestones are huge, and can be rough patches. I haven’t been too nutty this year, and I’m hoping that’s a testament to my continuing to work a strong program.

One of my sponsees recently made a request for a blog topic, actually. He was wondering what the difference is between calling a spade a spade and not being judgmental. The question reminds me of how we’re not supposed to take others’ inventories, and yet always end up doing so anyway. So dude, this one’s for you.

I guess I’d start with the reminder that our perceptions aren’t always accurate. There’s a compassion angle in there, too. We don’t always know the full story behind someone else’s behavior or the words they say. There’s boundaries stuff here as well. It’s not up to us to decide what’s right or wrong for someone else, only ourselves.

I have a little problem with the terms themselves, now that I think about it. So many people say they’re ‘just telling it like it is’ or ‘calling a spade a spade’ when what they’re really doing IS being judgmental. Pick your favorite stereotype about a stereotyped group. “They’re just like that.” As if all people in the category weren’t individuals with their own individual traits and characteristics.

So often, people claim a judgmental remark as the ‘truth’, and they somehow think because they’re speaking the truth, it’s not judgmental or that it’s okay to be so because it’s true and something everybody supposedly knows. Shall I make a list of all the things that humanity has thought were ‘true’ over the years? The earth is flat. Humans will never fly. Native peoples are savages. I’ll go ahead and stop there.

We need to be careful about certainty. We need to be wary of thinking we know ‘the truth’. Even the AA Big Book cautions us against this, saying that we have not found ‘The’ way, merely ‘a’ way to live without getting intoxicated. Never forget: even the things we think we do know for certain, we just might be wrong about.

As for what counts as being judgmental, well I don’t know any other way to say it than to say it’s when we pass judgment--we decide something is good or bad, or right or wrong. We don’t get to decide those things for other people, only ourselves. If we don’t like how other people live, we get to choose to not live that way. If we discover another person isn’t trustworthy, or is someone we don’t want to be around, we get to choose to not place our trust in them or to not have them in our life. What we don’t get to do is label them.

Recovery is about changing ourselves, learning to let go of the things we can’t control--and other people is one of those that takes a lot of work to learn how to let go. And that’s okay; it’s a process, not an event.

The best thing we can do is to strive for a Zen-like state, where we’re at peace with ourselves and with the world around us. We see what goes on around us, and we think “hmm.. interesting.” We can see the world, accept it for what it is, and not pass judgment on it. We can save our emotional investments and use them to work on making our selves healthier.

Passing judgment is a reaction, and part of the work of Recovery is transforming ourselves from people who merely react into people of action.

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