Weekly meetings
Sober Side Up is a relaxed, peer-created recovery meeting held Sunday evenings at the Elma Timberland Library.
The library is closed for regular public hours during the meeting. A small number of patrons with extended-access passes may occasionally be elsewhere in the building, but this is uncommon. Sober Side Up meets in a separate reserved room off the main library, so other patrons do not ordinarily enter or pass through the meeting space.
Meetings officially run from 5:00–6:00 PM. The room is reserved until 7:00, and conversations sometimes continue after six.
When people arrive, it is pretty informal. We sit down, talk, and see how everybody is doing. There are usually free drinks and snacks on the table—water, pop, candy, snack cakes, whatever we have—and coffee can usually be made if somebody wants some.
Pick any number between 1 and 50 and you get a random question. It might be about recovery, life, something serious, or something completely ridiculous. There is not necessarily a right answer. It is mostly an icebreaker that gets everybody talking and usually leads naturally into other conversations.
The Sober Side Up lessons are peer-created and non-clinical. They usually begin with a story, situation, or idea people can relate to and then move into questions, discussion, reflection, and Reflection & Change. Sometimes I read the lesson, and sometimes other people in the room read parts of it.
The point is not to lecture anybody. It is to give the room something real to talk about and let people relate it to their own lives.
When the lesson is finished, we usually just talk for a while. Sometimes it is recovery-related, sometimes it is about life, and sometimes everybody is just bullshitting and laughing. Sometimes we even turn on the TV and watch something together.
There is no pressure to make every minute serious or about recovery. Sometimes just hanging out with other people in a safe place is enough. Then people head home when they are ready.