Entry Date: June 2009

A Challenge I Deal With In Recovery
Every since I got out of rehab life has improved tenfold. My third year being sober has been hands down the best of them all. I was recently engaged to be married, met my father in law to be, things have gotten even better with my family, and I've even picked up a few new toys. That being said not everything has been great, I still have challenges to deal with from day to day just like everybody else.

By far the biggest challenge I've had to overcome in recovery is the age barrier. There are a few people of similar age to myself in recovery but they are few and far between, at least people I choose to associate with. When I first got sober there was practically nobody my age in the city that runs around the same area as me.

Before I got into recovery I always hung out with people a few years older than myself but now the people I hang around with are at least ten to fifteen years older than me. It's not as if the people I hang around aren't good people or that I don't care about them. It's just that when I got sober I had nothing, no truck, no kids, no wife, no house and they all were well established with families, careers and kids. There was always plenty to relate to with regards to recovery but outside of that we never had much in common.

The first two years went on and I didn't feel like I fit in but with time as I progressed I started having more in common with everybody. For quite some time I wasn't terribly happy about all that but I stuck it out. During the past year and a half I've come to realize I've got real friends, even though some of them could my parents.

It took me awhile to realize that even though I'm in recovery, I'm not going to have everything go perfectly fine even though I'd hoped they would. I seem to have gotten over that hurtle with time going by but I'm positive it won't be the last challenge I have to overcome in recovery. I now know that things go wrong and that it's normal to have that happen.

Entry Date: November 2008

My Experiences in Rehab
During the drive on my way to rehab, I felt like I was going to be sick. Not from drugging or drinking but because I was so nervous. When I got there I really had no idea what to think, I was coming down and I knew nothing of rehab. My first day there everyone treated me well but I was still fairly unsure about the whole thing. The first month I felt that way, although I gradually started coming around. I thought since I’d already been to rehab once before that I was just going to coast through four months and take it easy, I was wrong. It took me awhile but I finally realized that getting sober was a lot more serious than I thought. I rebelled a fair bit for my first month, anything I was told by the staff I tried to do the exact opposite. I finally figured out that they weren’t joking around when all the guys were told not to shave our heads and then I went ahead and shaved mine six hours later. That didn’t go over very well and I had my smoking privileges taken away for twenty four hours. That was when I really started to work on myself. I started coming around to the staff and really didn’t mind them anymore. My favourite day of the week was on Wednesday. During the day we were taken out into the community to do something like hiking, curling, fishing, etc., that night after super we had an AA meeting. I really started liking the meetings because I would see people who had been sober along time and it would give me hope. During the four months I was in rehab I had quite a few roommates but most of them left early or got kicked out. I did meet a few really good people that I formed close relationships with. After about three months I really started to want to go home, I was homesick. I stuck it out for the last month and couldn’t wait to leave. When the time came I was happy to be able to go back to my house and family but I knew I would always fondly remember rehab and everything it had done for me.