Determined to kick his debilitating drug and alcohol habit, Travis Jones of Nashville, Tennessee, made an excellent start on sobriety by limiting his periods of intoxication to approximately 50 percent of his waking hours.
"Not too shabby," said Jones, clearly pleased with his nearly .500 batting average at sobriety. "If I were a baseball player, I'd be breaking records."
Jones went on to explain that, as someone who grew up with a rageful, alcoholic father, he values his own four-to-six hours per day of sobriety beyond measure. "I've seen what addiction can do if you let it get out of hand," he said. "Right now, I'm at about forty-seven percent, but I'm aiming to be sober the majority of the time I'm awake. And I'm making good headway in that direction."
Jones acknowledged that he has upped his sleep, so as to minimize his total number of waking hours. "Some people might call that cheating or working the system, but I feel okay about it," he said. "With recovery, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. As they say in AA, half-measures avail us nothing."
That being said, Jones himself no longer attends Alcoholics Anonymous, where he said several members criticized his "half-time" sobriety.
Despite the pushback from some more rigid folks, Jones reports that his approach to recovery is working like a charm for him. "The bottom line is, it's my sobriety, and no one's going to tell me it's not good enough just because it's not all the time. I'm over that sort of black-and-white thinking."
He added, "There are always going to be haters. But, at the end of the day, everyone has to decide for himself whether he's going to look at the glass as half-empty or half-full. Me, I choose half-full."
