I love this time of year! College football, fall festivals, the random assortment of pumpkins in the unlikeliest of places. The Halloween decorations (yes even the excessive amounts of The Spooky Tool kit spooky faux cobwebs and fake spiders), crunchy leaves on the ground, and the coziness of hot tea in the evening as the chilly air settles in. I love it all! I’ll be honest with you though, between Stan and I, he’s the eternal optimist, so the fact that I don’t find fall depressing with the season being full of darkness, death, and decay beats the hell out of me. But hey, life doesn’t always make sense, so when it comes to fall, I’m here for it 100%! This time of year isn’t for everyone though. Navigating the autumnal change and the signaling of the impending holiday season can be a lot to handle especially for newly sober folks. I’m here to tell you though: Don’t sweat the Fall stuff. If you look for it, there is always the Unexpected Joy of Missing Out (UEJOMO).
Okay, I’ll admit the acronym “UEJOMO” isn’t exactly as catchy as I had hoped, it’s a little kitschy even, but they can’t all be winners. Alas, I’ll even shoot it to you straight and share that this concept is not one that I can even take credit for. The Joy of Missing Out (#JOMO), is one that has been floating around social media for a couple of years at least. There are plenty of self-help books, biographical interviews, and cutesy Instagram posts that inspired the idea for this post. Regardless, it occurs to me that there exists quite a few of us in the sober community who are glad to be sober, but still experiencing the more notorious Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). I can’t, in good conscience, let that slide without adding my two cents to the conversation.
Perhaps one of the most common complaints of our kind is that once we manage to get chemical-free, the fear (real or perceived) that life is or will be boring in sobriety. Now I wasn’t exactly the house party, bar hopping, rowdy in-a-crowd type of drinker, but there was a point in time that being insanely drunk seemed to make the mundane nature of day-to-day life more exciting. Add that to the fact that I was 20 years old and a sophomore in college when I got sober, it goes without saying that I felt my drinking career had been cut entirely too short. I mean honestly, who the hell wants to be young and sober in this day and time… (HA!)
To shoot it straight to ya, I hadn’t given much thought to what the implications of getting sober at 20 years old would mean. Luckily (I guess), I was surrounded by, let’s call them “experienced,” sober folks who were more than willing to point out how difficult the struggle would be and just how much I would “miss out” on if I were to stay sober.
Looking back, I know that they were well-intentioned. In their defense, what seemed like admonitions, were more or less words of caution and warnings against reservations in sobriety… but it did feel like a slap in the face at the time. It really got me thinking about all of the things I would miss out on by being sober; champagne toasts at weddings, bachelorette parties, candlelight dinners paired with glasses of wine, fruity cocktails at the beach, impromptu drinks with strangers at the airport bar, coolers of beer at a tailgate party… You know, all the cool scenes depicted by Hollywood stars on the big screen.
I wanted all that! It’s a rite of passage, the perk of being an adult, with adult friends, and doing adult things, and as true as that may or may not be, getting sober would mean giving all that up. I would be missing out on everything!
So, despite the fact that initially none of that had crossed my mind, it became a fleeting but reoccurring thought throughout my first year in sobriety. I decided to stay sober anyway, and I kept plugging along and doing the sober thing. As it turns out, I discovered that while I may have been “missing out” on certain things due to the fact that I was sober, sobriety wasn’t so much of a sad consequence, rather it became a joyful choice.
In time, I realized that I no longer had the fear of missing out. Instead, I was experiencing the joy of missing out. The most shocking part of it all was when I realized that yeah, for the sake of my sobriety, I don’t go to bars, drink at tailgates, or get blasted at my own wedding but more importantly because of my sobriety I didn’t want to do those things anyway!
I mean sure being the sober alcoholic who walks into an Irish pub wasn’t how I thought my first trip abroad would be but get this…. I remember every moment of the trip! Sure, I didn’t get the traditional champagne toast at my wedding reception, but good golly Miss Molly at the money we saved not having an open bar! Yeah, I will never get the ice-cold beer on the beach as the waves crash, but I also won’t ever have to worry about getting so smashed that I wind up blistered by the sun. These are small examples sure, but the joys of “missing out” on all the chaos, trouble, danger, and drama that alcohol produced, far outweighed any benefit I ever received from the stuff.
More importantly, the things that I “miss out” on though, are all the things that I get to do because I’m sober. Think about it, the quality time I get to spend with loved ones, the meaningful connections I get to make with strangers, the intentionality behind each decision I get to make, and the mental clarity I get to have are astounding on this side of the bottle. I can honestly say there isn’t a single that I have (reasonably) wanted to do, have, get, or experience that I haven’t had the opportunity to do it sober. In fact, more often than not, I only get the opportunity to do many of those things because I am sober.
To bring it full circle here, I’d like to thank whoever coined the phrase #JOMO, because the joy of missing out has been a wonderful experience and the perfect way to articulate how truly astonishing living life sober can be.
The Joy of Missing out, as astutely explained by the myriad of Instagram posts I’ve seen, is the feeling of contentment of staying in [sobriety] and disconnecting from [the chaos of addiction] as a form of self-care. So, as the sun sets earlier in the days to come, the smell of pumpkin spice lattes fills the air, and the stores fill with Christmas decorations way before Halloween has even passed; remember to buy all the pumpkins, light all the candles, watch your plot-less horror films, and find your sober safe haven with those who get it. Don’t sweat the fall stuff and perhaps you too will find the unexpected joy of missing out.
