Promise #2: We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness
Once, at a Fourth of July concert, the singer asked if anyone in the crowd knew freedom and how valuable it truly is. My first reaction was that I didn’t. Then, I realized I did have an appreciation of freedom – because I knew the bondage having been chained to my addiction. As I thought about it more, it wasn’t just the freedom that sobriety from alcohol and other drugs offers. It was the freedom I find in knowing that I can actually choose how to live my life. I can choose each action I take and I can be responsible for every action and its consequence. I am free to live my life the way I see fit and I do not have to let others or society – even my recovery community – tell me what that has to be. And because of that freedom I am able to be a part of the human community in a way that I never thought possible. And that freedom is one of the keys to finding happiness.
Few people today seem to know what happiness is. We feel a fleeting rush and confuse that with happiness. We give others the power to make us happy – and therefore also the power to make us miserable. We believe that satisfying the bottomless desires within us will bring us happiness. We think happiness is something we should just expect and are disappointed, and even resentful, when it does not come to us as a gift from the Heavens. “After all,” we say “I am sober…don’t I deserve happiness?”
What has been most difficult has been admitting when I was not happy. It almost feels there is this unspoken obligation to be happy in recovery – paint on a happy face. I see it all of the time – as if having problems or being unhappy somehow means you are not doing your recovery “right.” Painting on that happy face gets me drunk. In my tenth year of sobriety I admitted I was not very happy in most of the areas of my life. As a result I was exposed to the possibility of true happiness. I gave myself permission to stop pretending. Today, I do know happiness, and that it comes through the “right living” laid out in the Twelve Steps – and that happiness is not an end in itself.
