You know, weekends are easy for me. I hang out at home with Charlie, together we give the house its weekly cleaning, the two of us socialize a little with friends or do some relaxed shopping or maybe have a Sunday lunch date, I do my own writing and play with the cats. If there’s any stress involved, it comes only from my own propensity to manufacture it. And I’ve been sober long enough to recognize manufactured stress for what it is and give it the boot.

The problem with weekends is that they end. Now I love my job–really. I would almost pay to do the broadcast journalism I have the luxury of getting paid to do. But my job’s stresses are real, and they hit me the minute I hit the office. I have to work to keep my head from become dysfunctionally buzzy–and any person in recovery knows exactly what I mean by that!

Now this anti-buzzy-head work is, to me, different from any other kind of work I do. All the rest of my work requires effort–I have to do things to get it done. Anti-buzzy-head work simply requires me to relax in Alice’s company (Alice being the affectionate name of my partner in life, God). My partnership with Alice–formed over years of sobriety–allows me to get through days in functional emotional ways that I never could manage on my own. And keeping an un-buzzy head in the face of journalism’s deadlines is certainly one of those functional emotional ways.

Sobriety, in my opinion, rocks!