My Sobriety Story with Steve

“Freedom from unfounded fear has been the biggest gift.”

This series showcases personal stories of addiction recovery and sobriety. Today’s edition features Steve Munro 🇨🇦, sober for more than three decades and based in rural Thailand. In his newsletter Seventy-Life, he writes about what allows recovery to endure. He works with people in later-stage sobriety—when life grows more complex, the slogans fall flat, and the old map no longer matches the terrain.

When and how did you get sober?

On March 28, 1993, I chose to live a sober life on my terms.

I’d been through two 28-day rehabs and in and out of AA for three years, so I knew what I had to do. I reached out for help, put what little stuff I had left into storage, and broke my lease. Then I checked into a long-term residential recovery home, which gave me the time and support I needed to get serious about doing the work.

I did all of this on automatic—like I was in a dream.

I knew I needed a level of sobriety that didn’t require meetings, an AA job, an AA wife, and AA friends to sustain it. I also knew that the key to achieving that goal would be a rigorous, full-time commitment to doing the 12 Steps.

So, within the routines of the recovery home and the two meetings per day, I skipped the step discussions and analysis, adopted the preamble of each step as my instructions, and got to work.

It took nine months to thoroughly and completely do the 12 Steps. In the process, I had to establish a belief in a higher power (mine came via Stephen Hawking). I also had to understand who I had become, how I had become that person, and who would be left to pick up the pieces.

I emerged from the process a more spiritual, pragmatic, and loving person, who was bound to sobriety by a belief that one drink would certainly be my demise. My moral compass had been recalibrated, and I was at peace with the man I’d become. The world I was about to reenter scared me, but the potential excited me.

What was the turning point in your decision to get sober?

I was physically addicted to alcohol. I drank only to hold off the delirium tremens—hallucinations, tremors, and seizures. My daily mission was to obtain the alcohol required for the next 24 hours, and maybe eat and shower. My time spent drinking was lost to blackouts.

One day, after 26 ounces of cheap vodka, I woke up on the floor mid-seizure. Alone.

I had a binary choice: get sober or die.

Although I’d lost my wife, my job, my health, my house, and the majority of my possessions, the will to live won out over despair.

It had taken 25 years of numbing myself to a life that never quite felt right to reach that binary choice.

What surprised you about getting sober?

I was amazed that the 12-Step process had worked and that this entirely new guy emerged from the darkness. I was fit, clear-headed, and wide open to life.

And by how much I’d missed by being unavailable to the opportunities that life is constantly offering.

It took a while, but it was surprisingly easy to find a gig with a struggling startup that was prepared to overlook the gap in my CV, thanks to the experience I brought to the table. I was able to share a heritage townhouse with a gay philosophy professor who threw outrageous dinner parties and a slightly high-strung, French-Canadian software engineer.

I felt remarkably secure and normal in my dynamic and somewhat abnormal environments.

I’ve experienced life somewhat on the edge because I’ve dared to dream large. But I experienced all of it fully—the good and the bad.

Even 33 years, a couple of jobs, businesses, failed relationships, and personal and health crises later, I continue to be astonished by the life I lead. I live in Thailand now—go figure.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered on your alcohol-free journey?

The first real challenge came in my third year of sobriety.

I came into my new life with a strong sense of morality and a sound self-care routine, but I had experienced such a messed-up life that I was still very light on normal, balanced work and relationship experience.

On the surface, everything looked great. I was a VP at a growing startup, living with a great woman and her 15-year-old son, racing a vintage Ducati, traveling.

Underneath, I was winging all of it.

Even before Jo’s son, Drew, had invited me to parent him, I knew that whatever I did or didn’t do was being watched and learned.

The rapid growth of the company that I now owned equity in stressed me beyond belief. I was building a sales organization while selling, running marketing, and participating in the design of the next generation of our software.

I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the end of each day. My life had expanded beyond the tools I had at hand.

It didn’t matter how many times I said the Serenity Prayer, I kept slipping under water. In the interest of balance and sobriety, I considered walking away from either the job or my relationships.

I didn’t want to make that choice.

While this was going on, I learned a bunch of stuff that made me incredibly comfortable and very competitive as a vintage motorcycle racer. So much so that I began to apply what I learned about fear and attention management on the track to the chaos and pressure that defined my personal and professional lives.

Within a couple of months, I had an operating framework—a map and a suite of tools that provided the headroom I needed to thrive while being challenged.

What are the biggest benefits or gifts of sobriety?

Freedom from unfounded fear has been the biggest gift. It changed the level at which I experience life.

I’ve loved and been loved. I’ve built and raced exotic vintage motorcycles at a competitive level. I’ve traveled way off the beaten path, learned to live in the moment, and, at various times in my life, lived my dreams.

I’ve felt, seen, and experienced things that I never thought possible. I don’t feel like a late-stage chronic alcoholic.

What words of advice would you give someone who’s considering sobriety or newly sober?

Believe in the unbelievable.

If you haven’t yet progressed to the physical addiction state, then you likely still see alcohol as an enabler. If you have, then you know that it’s not, but you can’t imagine a way out of the cycle. In either case, true sobriety will free you to accomplish and experience things you can’t currently imagine.

Do the hard work—the really hard stuff. You’ll need to dismantle the worst of you to free the best of you.

Be kind to your current self—you’re a work in progress.

Please say hello in the comments, and consider sharing your sobriety story.

Thank you for sharing, Steve! We look forward to connecting with you in the comments.