Day 112: The Trap
The Hardest Day Yet
On my 112th day of sobriety, I had a difficult day.
For absolutely no reason that I could identify, I woke up in a terrible headspace. And I mean terrible. I was angry, anxious, frustrated, and spiraling into a deep depression. I had no idea why I felt the way I did.
I had woken up early, around 3:50 a.m., for no particular reason. I went for a two-mile walk, but I simply couldn’t shake my thought patterns. I tried my old habit of forcing myself to think about other things, but to no avail. I felt trapped inside my own head.
On the drive to work, I only became more frustrated.
Later that day, I heard some terrible news about someone I know. It was the kind of news that changes and destroys lives permanently. I was overtaken by grief. And somewhere in that grief, I found something I had lost sight of all morning: gratitude. Sincere, honest gratitude for the many blessings in my life that I so frequently take for granted.
Later that evening, during a Zoom meeting, I heard a quadriplegic man speak about humility and gratitude. His words carried extraordinary power and weight. As I watched him speak, I could see myself on my screen. It was as though I were looking into a mirror of hard reality, one that reflected the extraordinary physical blessings I had been taking for granted.
As he spoke about humility and gratitude, shame began to take the place of self-pity in my soul. It was uncomfortable, but it was exactly what I needed. I was confronted with just how prideful I had been.
By that evening, any sense of self-pity, self-centeredness, and self-righteousness I had carried throughout the day had been shattered. Quite frankly, life and God had firmly planted me back in my rightful place.
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I was forced to confront how easily I had allowed my emotions to dominate my perspective. I had spent much of the day consumed by myself, my feelings, and my frustrations, while overlooking the tremendous blessings that surrounded me.
Years ago, a man in a bar said something to me that has always stuck:
He said: “There are 8 billion people on this planet, and I bet at least half of them would trade places with me.”
I’ve thought about that statement many times over the years. When I consider everything I’ve been given in life — my health, my children, my wife, my family, and my job security — I would dare say that number is closer to 7.5 billion for me personally.
We must remember that when things are easy, everything seems hard.
It’s remarkably easy to feel sorry for ourselves when we don’t have anything particularly terrible happening in our lives. We become so consumed by our temporary frustrations that we lose sight of the extraordinary things we have. We can allow relatively insignificant struggles to overshadow lives filled with blessings.
That is the trap I fell into on Day 112.
I don’t think gratitude means we won’t have bad days, or that we should dismiss our struggles because someone else has it worse. But I do think humility requires us to recognize that our feelings aren’t always an accurate reflection of our circumstances.
I don’t want to spend my life taking my blessings for granted while finding reasons to be unhappy.
Sobriety is teaching me that I have a responsibility to examine not only my actions, but also the way I think, the way I see the world, and the way I respond to my circumstances.
Gratitude is something I need to practice, especially on the days when I feel I have the least reason to be grateful. On the morning of Day 112, I was consumed by self-pity and could find little to be grateful for. By that evening, I had been reminded of just how wrong I was.
