I remember watching my brother free fall alongside me, feeling a sense of comfort and connection with him.
We both knew we were living aimless, empty lives, but we felt better about it knowing that we were in it together.
We were both hurting deeply in ways we couldn’t process. There were things that we had buried and long since forgotten.
We drifted through our teenage years into our young adult lives wasting away, killing one brain cell and one painful memory at a time.
We connected to each other in a unique way and shut off to the rest of the world.
I found solace in our comradery. We had a mutual hatred for the cards we were dealt, and for us, that is all the justification we needed to live our lives avoiding reality.
There was turmoil churning inside of our hearts.
But at a certain point, I wanted to live. I wanted to breathe. I wanted to feel something.
So I chose life.
And at first, I felt guilty for choosing me.
That meant abandoning him.
I am proud of my twelve years of recovery and continuous sobriety. I am proud that I have been brave enough to face my own thoughts, my reflection in the mirror, my past, and my buried pain. I am thankful that I am alive.
But you know what I have never stopped long enough to consider?
How do I make my brother feel when we are together?
Is my continuous sobriety something that makes him feel bad?
My hope is to inspire him through my story of restoration, but I think I have been missing the mark– big time.
Until recently it never occurred to me that I could have been doing more harm than good over the last decade.
I focused on the rules of the enabler. I fixated on not becoming part of the problem. I worried too much about my codependent nature. All good things for me and my own sobriety and recovery.
But I also tried to be an example. I tried to inspire and ignite hope in him. I truly believed that by sharing my sobriety time or my victories, that could somehow spark a fire. For some it does, but not when you are talking to someone drowning in toxic shame.
How did I miss this? Especially when I am still peeling back my own layers of shame.
My only true motive has always been to ignite and inspire, but maybe I have been invalidating and hindering and harming instead?
What if sharing my victories with him felt like a spit in the face?
That telling him how long I have been completely sober made him feel like total shit for quitting a hard thing to do a less hard thing?
It isn’t that I have been wrong for having boundaries in our relationship or expectations of him.
But it has been wrong of me to be clueless and insensitive to how I might have been making him feel about himself all these years without realizing it.
I will always always always be a live-out-loud breed of sober warrior. Always. There is not a bone in my body that believes in silence in the name of peace and I will rock the boat I am riding in until we flip, if that is what it takes for people to begin to believe that God loves them and they are worthy of love, kindness, and freedom.
Right now I am reminded that I am always learning and understanding familiar things in new ways, and it’s okay to make mistakes.
I owe my brother an sincere apology.
From now on I will do a better job at handling my words with more intention and care.
I am going to be mindful that my recovery might mean one-hundred-percent abstinence, but it doesn’t mean that another person isn’t really sober if that is not what recovery looks like for them.
I will make sure that I am respectful of all avenues of recovery from this point forward.
Guys, just when you think you have things figured out, life reminds us just how little you know. We have to be willing to admit that, and adjust as we grow and change each season.