Journal entry—sobriety priority

By សតិវ​ អតុ

I went to my weekly NA meeting for unity. I have been thinking about what some of the people said there.

“Your sobriety must by your highest priority.”

I’m having a hard time to understand this absolute need for absolute sobriety. Getting sober is a high priority for me, but it is not the highest priority. I remember when I was in middle school and they asked us to prioritize what we thought was the most important and I remember there was religion, society, family and some other choices. Back then I put religion first because I didn’t want to go to hell. Now I put family because I live in this world and I feel like family has the ties you can trust as compared to society at large, many of its people whom will stab you in the back for a dollar. I can trust those in my family and I consider them more important than the yahoos that make up the communities we live in now. And since I traded my god based spirituality for a humanist and nature based spirituality, I can put it in a more natural place where it is important, but not THAT important.

I talked to a woman there and she was talking about a relative who died and she was real happy to find that she wasn’t using when she died. Why is that so important? She isn’t any less dead because she wasn’t using. Maybe she needed a good buzz before she checked out (I shouldn’t really say checked out because she didn’t kill herself.).