I Have Now Been Clean for Over a Billion!! Seconds!

And it tells you almost nothing about my recovery!

We love numbers in recovery
30 days
90 days
1 year
10 years
20 years

Eventually, apparently, 1,009,497,600 seconds. 😂

And yes, stopping mattered enormously in my life

But somewhere along the way I confused the length of time since I last used drugs with evidence of how free I was

They aren’t the same thing

I could tell you exactly how long I had been clean

But the number couldn’t tell you:
How frightened I was
How much of my identity was organised around recovery
How compulsive I could still become around relationships, food, money, sex or work
How much I needed certainty
How much of myself I still didn’t understand
How much of my life was still being organised by things I couldn’t see

None of that reset my clean date

And that’s interesting

Because if our primary measure of recovery keeps increasing automatically with the passage of time, what exactly is it measuring?

Abstinence?
Absolutely.
Freedom?

I don’t think a calendar can tell us that

Perhaps we have become incredibly good at measuring the easiest thing to count

And then mistaken it for the thing that matters most

I am grateful for every one of those billion seconds

But today I’m far more interested in something I can’t put on a medallion:
Am I free?
Am I alive?
and am I able to respond to life rather than compulsively repeat myself?

Can I meet another human being without needing my story to become theirs?

Maybe the most important parts of recovery were never countable in the first place.

Although I have to admit…
“1, 009, 497, 600 seconds clean” looks brilliant on a T-shirt. 😂