Hi,
My name is Pamela.
I'm a certified recovery coach and the founder of the I Do Not Drink Movement.
I believe sobriety is the biggest gift that came into my life.
And today I want to tell you a little story of what that means and what that can mean for you.
When you say sobriety,
You think,
Oh.
Punishment.
I can no longer do this.
I can no longer drink if I'm sober.
I can no longer use this if I'm sober.
And then come a thousand stories with that.
Because we have spent so many years using either alcohol or drugs as our source of connecting and belonging to the world.
The minute that we think about sobriety,
We start to think about the idea of not being able to Have fun!
Belong.
Relax.
Many people think I'm not going to be able to sleep.
To come down from my day to celebrate with my friends,
To be with the world,
To be in social engagement.
To be in work engagements.
Does that feel like maybe something you have felt?
Well,
I did too for a really long time.
My first sobriety really at the beginning felt exactly about that,
What I could no longer do.
And how I couldn't belong to the world,
How I was not going to be invited,
How I was not going to be excited about things.
Because I had confused my drinking with my personality.
And so sobriety was a heavy duty order.
And for the first five years of my sobriety,
Which started in 2009,
My whole life felt very little.
Even though.
My life was better.
My sobriety felt.
Small?
And shame me?
And silent.
It wasn't a source of pride.
I thought sobriety was behavior management.
And I thought,
It was well.
It's something that I had to just carry the rest of my life as something heavy.
And I now know that it isn't like that,
Because here's what happens.
That kind of sobriety isn't easy to have.
It feels almost as heavy as the drinking,
Right?
For me,
That sobriety really very much was about self-surviving.
I call that sobriety the sober survivorship,
And that's exactly what it was.
And so after five years of that,
I ended up drinking again.
And when I drank again,
It wasn't pretty.
It was not a polite kind of drinking and it wasn't short.
I relapsed.
For a full 700 days,
Two years,
Two years of having all the information of knowing what worked for me,
But also of knowing that the sobriety that I had lived was so very heavy and so very small and so very limiting that it also felt like something that I did not want to go back to.
So I was stuck in between a rock and a hard place because,
Well,
I didn't want to drink.
I hated who I was when I drank and I hated what it did to my life and the life of those around me.
But I also had a really hard time thinking that I was going to go back to that version of sobriety,
The small,
Shamey,
Silent one,
That little box that sobriety was.
And so I had to really,
Really,
Really redefine what sobriety was for me if I was going to get to,
Well,
To live,
You know?
And so in 2017,
I started a new sobriety.
This sobriety was not defined.
By what I could no longer do.
This sobriety was defined by who I was now going to be.
As a human who chose to stay in her life,
Instead of escaping it.
As a human who got once more.
To take control of who she could be in the world,
Now that she wasn't constantly fighting herself.
In this war against the drink.
And I know that.
The shift feels like a lot of words salad and maybe it's a little bit like,
Well,
That's great,
But what does that look like?
And how did you start?
And salt.
I want to say that at the beginning.
All that I was trying to do was.
.
.
Learn who I was.
Because the truth is when sobriety begins,
For many of us,
We have been so tapped out of our own life.
With the drinking that.
Question of who am I?
What do I like?
What do I like to do?
What do I not like?
Who can I be in the world now that I'm not you know,
Just mildly to wildly drunk or seeking to get that state all the time.
That is the invitation,
And it can be a little daunting.
I'm not saying that it is always easy,
But it is in fact an invitation.
So when you get invited to discover who you can be,
Now that you're not worried about all the drinking,
Now that you're not spending all of your energy fighting yourself,
Then many,
Many beautiful doors open.
So instead of fighting the drink,
And fighting my addiction and fighting my stories and fighting my past and fighting,
Fighting,
Fighting against.
I shifted.
And I started fighting for.
My transformation,
For the discovery of who I could be,
For my evolution.
For learning who I could be as a human who chose to stay in her world.
In a world that has conditioned everybody.
To tap out.
Of their own life.
How do you learn to be a human who doesn't drink in a world who drinks?
And this is why I always say sobriety is not abstinence.
Sobriety is authorship.
Because as the tale goes,
This new sobriety,
The old sobriety was about abstinence,
This new sobriety was sobriety.
About that.
Daily.
Daily questions.
How can I show up to my life differently?
And I'm not gonna sugarcoat it,
Some days it is hard.
Some days it is hard.
To continue to discover who you are.
When the world keeps asking you the question,
Why don't you drink?
The world keeps challenging that belief,
But that is why this invitation is so uniquely powerful.
Because the minute that you make that inner decision.
To start authoring your life,
Scripting your life,
Reacting differently to a world that is the same.
Just because you make this choice for your life doesn't mean that the world shifts,
But it means that you get to shift how you react to the world.
Sobriety gives you the unique.
Ownership of your thought life.
And when you control your thought life,
And when you are able to rewrite the thoughts that were so limiting.
To thoughts that now you get to open up into abundance.
Then everything changes.
That identity shift that is the invitation of this new sobriety,
The identity shift of knowing.
That you get.
To stay in your life.
That you get to be present for all of it.
The good and the bad.
Some days are hard.
Yes,
They are.
But you get to learn to stay.
You get to go through it.
And you know what you also get?
You get the results.
The human that comes out on the other side is a human that you can feel proud of.
It's a human that is resilient.
It's a human that gets to evolve constantly instead of just tap out.
And so in this new sobriety,
You truly get invited to evolve every day.
And that is why I tell you that sobriety has nothing to do.
With the drink that you put down.
And it has everything to do with your life.
And the person that you get to pick up.
And that is you.
And I'm so passionate about it.
And I'm so grateful that you're here.
And I will continue to invite you to explore all of the subjects that have to do with addiction,
With recovery,
With sobriety,
And with who you get to be in the world.
As a sober human.
By design.
I'll see you soon.
