My name is Richard, and I’m grateful to be sober and in recovery from alcoholism today. I took my last drink on July 15, 2019.

Before that, I was a perfectly ordinary drunk. My story isn’t all that different from many you might hear at a recovery meeting. I never had what you’d call a healthy relationship with alcohol. Even as a teenager, I was fascinated by the idea of drinking and would sneak chances to do so, but I didn’t see myself as a regular drinker or drug user. In high school I wasn’t a particularly good student, but I wasn’t a full-time partier either. College was only marginally worse. I didn’t drink all the time, but when I did, I drank far too much.

Life moved on. College, law school, a first marriage, a first child, and a failed attempt at a law practice. Through all of it, my drinking remained in the background. Not constant, but never healthy. My first marriage failed, and I suddenly found myself alone. No legal community, no extended family nearby. A close friend offered me a piece of advice that felt harmless at the time. “Just go sit down on a barstool, order a beer, and you’ll have new friends in no time.” They were right. And I kept taking that advice. Fifteen years later, I was still sitting on those barstools.

By then, my life had changed in all sorts of ways. I had remarried, divorced again, remarried yet again. I had two more children. I moved a thousand miles away for a new job. But through it all, I still spent my spare time drinking. Alcohol is a poison, and alcoholism is a progressive disease. After 15 years of living that way, it finally caught up with me. I decided one day that I needed to stop drinking. To my surprise, I couldn’t.

For several years I tried and failed to quit on my own. Sometimes I could string together a week, sometimes a month, but I never managed to stop and stay stopped. Then came Monday, July 15, 2019. Like many other Mondays, I found myself asking my boss if I could work from home because I “didn’t feel well.” My boss, to his credit, recognized what was going on. He asked if I had been drinking that morning. I hadn’t. I felt so sick because I had stopped drinking the day before. The truth was that my body needed a drink.

He took a deep breath, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Don’t you want this to stop?” With tears in my eyes, I told him I wanted it to stop more than anything. What he said next changed my life forever: “I want you to get out of here. There are people who do this for a living. I want you to find one of them, and I want you to do whatever they tell you to do.”

Once again, I took the advice of a friend, and I kept taking that advice.

I still live by those words today.

More than six years later, my recovery has evolved. Some faces have remained constant. Most have changed. Some practices from my early recovery are still with me. Others have fallen away. But a few core truths have stayed constant. There are certain things we must do to stay sober, and certain things we can never do again if lasting sobriety is our goal. Everyone’s recovery is different, but over time we all tend to organize our lives around these threads, these principles.

For me, one of those enduring practices is remaining open to the evolution of recovery itself. I hear new things from people all the time, whether they took their last drink yesterday or have 50 years of continuous sobriety. Sometimes I hear the same thing over and over again, but even that’s useful. Hearing it repeatedly reminds me that it works.

Just as I once returned to a barstool again and again, I now return to the practices that keep me sober. This is part of accepting the reality of the alcoholic mind — there are certain truths we have to embrace if we want to live.

One of the lenses through which I now view my life is the lens of recovery. Through this site, I’d like to share my perspective on life in sobriety: how it’s been, the lessons I’ve learned, and how my understanding has evolved since July 15, 2019.

And how it continues to evolve even now.

I hope you find something here that helps you. I hope you find it useful. And I hope we can be friends.

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