Episode 27: 10 Years Sober

Episode Summary

Every year around my sobriety birthday, feelings show up on schedule. This year, after a busy season and an adventure with Francisco, they arrived when I finally slowed down. I’m sharing what it felt like to sit with grief, gratitude, doubt, and the weight of ten years sober alongside ten years of Julian Leaver Events. We talk about therapy, meetings, and the conversation with my sponsor that helped me recognize what was happening. Just like wedding-day emotions, these feelings can’t be planned away. Sometimes you have to give yourself room to feel them.

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julianleaver.com | @julianleaver

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello, friends, and welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony. We're so glad you're here. And we've been talking a lot about. We've been talking about wedding things. I feel like we've been talking a lot about wedding.

So we need a good mind episode. And this is the doozy. My friends, how to explain this one? I've been like turning this over in my head about how to. Have a conversation about about feelings, right?

It's funny because. As a kid. One of my parents would always talk about feelings. And. What's interesting about that is that. We would talk about feelings and then they would basically be used against you.

And so growing up, I realized that you can feel the feelings and you can process the feelings and you can work through that a lot on the inside. But you really don't talk about them on the outside. And so I think that through a series of a lot of events, I had to unwind a lot of that, right?

I went to a lot of therapy as a kid and I've done a lot of therapy as an adult to be able to talk about my feelings and to let them out. And we've talked here about my sobriety and 10 years of Julian Leaver Events and 10 years of sobriety and and what that looks like. But we haven't really talked about what it looks like from a mind perspective

and about how it actually feels and what you do with those feelings when they come up and recognizing them. Because what I'll tell you is in 10 years of sobriety, every single year without fail, right around my sobriety birthday, which is June 1st. There's feelings and it's like the most intense feelings of the year for sure.

And they kind of hit you out of nowhere and you're like walking along one day and like they just smack you upside the head. Oh, we're here. It's time, right? And every single year, like the first year, my therapist really said,

watch out for this. When people experience like a year of sobriety, there's like all these feelings about like what was and what could have been and the road that you didn't choose to take. And those kind of start to come up.

And so it was great. It's like a great warning sign, like warning, right? You enter this period and these feelings are going to come up. And what are those feelings? Right. There's feelings of like.

Self-loathing, there's feelings of there's feelings of gratitude. There's feelings of thankfulness. And there's feelings of sadness, of of what was lost, of what could have been, of what should have been, of so many different pieces of life that are affected by alcohol and by addiction.

And it's in every it creeps into kind of every facet of your life. Right. It creeps into your family relationships. It creeps into your professional relationships. It creeps into everything it really does. It's all there. It's permeating.

It's like all within you. And it's in the very beginning. It's that's really a lot to feel. Right. Because also, friends, you've been numbing the fucking feelings. OK, so I don't know how many years, but like a lot of years of numbness.

Right. To not feel those things and to then all of a sudden feel them. Is pretty, pretty wild. And. So that happens every year. And around the same time, and you deal with them in certain ways. And my my fix for that has always been, OK, I need to talk to my sponsor more.

I need to say these things out loud to my therapist. I need to go to more meetings. I need to do whatever it is in my routine in that year. That is helpful to me to get through those feelings and to say them out loud and to process them and to sit and to cry and to do the stuff to get them out

and feel them like you got to feel them all the way through your body. Feel them. And. This year was a little bit different. This year in May. From a work standpoint, we were just running at breakneck speed. It was the busiest month of the whole year, and it was a great month. We got a lot done.

We did some incredible events and but we were running, right? Like running, everything was running. And then I know a couple weeks ago, I talked about the gift of being able to go on vacation and we were able to go on vacation, right? And so we literally stopped running and then jumped right into vacation mode.

OK, now we're on like vacation. And what was interesting about that for me is that sometimes when I stop like working so hard, I like turn off a switch, right? Like I turn off the like I need to be on switch and I go into like hibernation mode in some ways of OK, shutting down, powering down.

I'm going to sit here on the couch and read a book or catch up on a show or primarily those are the two things that I do, right? Or play Wordle. But this year, I didn't do that. And then I also didn't I didn't go on vacation just with my husband. I went on vacation with a lot of people, a lot of people for a very long time

and lots of different people in very stimulating environments, right? So I wouldn't really call it vacation. It's more like I went on an adventure, right? It's an adventure. Okay, we're jumping in and I moved right past that date, right?

I literally got on a plane on my sobriety day and off we go, right? I went to Italy. I went to India. I went to Hong Kong, hustle, bustle, planes, trains, another plane, another car. What's going on?

There's a cow in the road, right? It was insane and it was amazing. It was like exactly what I needed. I needed a big adventure. I needed to be able to go away with Francisco and just personally reconnect

and just the summer is when we get that time to look at each other and be like, okay, we're doing this still, right? You're good. I'm good. Okay, great.

Let's go. And so we did that, but we just did it with a lot of people. And so we went on this vacation. It was amazing. It was a high.

We were still on that same high level, right? I kind of didn't think anything of not being hit by the feeling smack, right? So I go on this vacation and then I come home and boy, there she was, right? All those feelings just came cascading back and it's like the switch

turned off and all of a sudden we were home and it was quiet and I just felt lethargic and I felt irritated by everything and just annoyed and like, what am I doing? And I was weepy. I was even so weepy that my mom after two weeks in a row of talking

to her on the phone, she was literally texting me and she's like, you've cried both times that I've talked to, which is more times than you've cried in the last year. So what is wrong? And I have been reading this book that's called My Friends,

which if you have never read this book, friends, you need to run and buy it because it is actually maybe one of the best novels that I've ever read. And this book is about a bunch of children who are kind of misfits.

They don't exactly fit. There's an artist, there's a bully, there's a nerd, there's a girl who doesn't fit the model of a typical young girl and they find each other and they form this little clique. That's just amazing and it's this microcosm of them living

through this summer. And but they all bring this different types of trauma with them and it's an amazing book. I honestly, I just finished it last night because I've had to start it and stop it and start it and stop it and start

it and stop it 20 times because you start crying through it. So I'm weeping because of this book and I'm like, maybe I'm weeping because of this book, right? It's bringing up whatever from my past and and all these things and then finally, I woke up and I realized, oh my

God, it's about your birthday. You idiot and it's about the fact that these feelings come every single year. They come every single year just like clockwork and guess what?

You don't get to avoid them. You cannot. I always say in wedding planning, you cannot plan your way out of the emotion. It's coming for you no matter what, right?

This is the exact thing that happened to me in planning my own wedding. I thought I could easily plan my way out of the emotion. I could check all the boxes. I could tick all the things.

I know all of the things that we need to do, but you can't undo that. You can't unplan the emotion or you can't plan your way out of the emotion. You have to feel it.

And so if you don't stop and you don't listen to your body and hear what it's telling you, then, then, right? If you don't listen to it, then it will take over. It will start to show up in other ways. It will say all those bad things that you could say

to yourself. It'll say you're not good enough. It'll say I can't do this. It'll say why am I doing this? It'll say you're going to fail at this or your dreams

are not valid or I don't know any number of things, right? Whatever is in your head. It's saying those things to you. I think we all experience that as humans.

We experience moments of doubt. We experience moments of personal just self-loathing in some ways. And then you use the tools in your toolkit. And so I felt all those feelings like really honestly

for the last four weeks, I've been feeling those feelings and I hadn't been able to place them and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. And then honestly, I went to have coffee with my sponsor. And a sponsor is something you get in AA and it's like

kind of your guide who leads you through AA to get you to the other side. And you're responsible for picking your own sponsor because you find someone who has something, whether it's a life or an attitude or a way of living

or a perspective that you want. And then they are going to take you through the steps in the way that they've been taught how to go through the steps. So we're sitting and we're chatting and the wisdom

that this man has is unbelievable because really truly he just lets me have a stream of consciousness conversation with myself and sits across the table from me and just nods right and like sips his coffee and eats his bacon and eggs and off we go.

But he just lets me process it. He lets me get it all out. He lets me figure out what it is and usually come to my own conclusion. And that's the conclusion that I came to was that

I hadn't stopped. I hadn't turned the switch off. I hadn't taken the minute to work through my own stuff. And I think that happens to all of us. It doesn't matter if you grew up in the most perfect

family or not the most perfect family if you own a business or you don't own a business. We're all humans and we're basically just bumping into each other here on the planet. And so if we don't address these things that fuck

with our mindset then we cannot move forward. So what do I do? I start going to more meetings. I start talking to my sponsor more. I'm not missing my therapy appointment.

I'm talking it out loud. I'm finishing this book and little by little I've started to feel myself again and this one lasted a lot longer than any of the ones ever have. I think partly because of the gravity of 10 years.

It's so interesting because I also just had my big 10-year anniversary party for Julian Leaver Events. And so it's 10 in 10, right? These two are inextricably linked and I think the thing that's wild is that you can never divorce them from

each other, right? The start of this business is never divorced from the sobriety, which is never divorced from the childhood trauma. So it's this nice little arc that always goes

back and plays around with your emotions and kind of fucks with you, but in a lot of ways in the best possible way because if there wasn't something like this in my life, motivating me because I can't go back and change all of that.

All I can do is harness it and use it to move forward. And so that's maybe the lesson today is just sometimes you got to sit in it. Sometimes you got to just sit in it and you got to feel all the feelings and you have to just be

okay with feeling those feelings until it's time to get up and put your pants on and get out the door. So it's a mind episode friends. It's never a clean bow as Persephone likes to say, but I'm glad you're here and don't forget

however you're feeling tomorrow is a different day. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next week.

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