A few years ago, I was honored to write the foreword for a lovely book entitledLove Yourself Sober, written by two of my equally lovely British friends, Kate Baily and Mandy Manners. In addition to being an optimistic and helpful handbook for finding and maintaining sobriety (from alcohol), Kate and Mandy's book sets out to crush the myth that, as the Cambridge English Dictionary purports, to be sober is "to become calmer and more serious." These two Brits call bullshit on that outlook and invite newly sober women to "bring on the sparkle." They invite us to feel the awesomeness of a sober life and to love it.
I subscribe to their approach. From the moment I met him thirty years ago, my own partner (in life and in recovery) has also preached the doctrine that if you aren't having at least some fun in recovery, you need to switch things up.
Recovery is to be celebrated, regardless of what we are recovering from. There's a lot of hard work to recovery, to staying sober or healing other maladaptive coping mechanisms.
Looking for the light and the laughter in recovery is a necessity. We can love ourselves into and through our recovery; we need to try to have fun throughout all of it.