Har Har de Har

Maybe some more solution stuff?  I may ruin my reputation here.  There's a young-ish dude who has become a really solid member of our morning meeting.  He's around two years sober and has really thrown himself into The Fellowship, although he has fought everything every step of the way.  I actually enjoy watching people like that grow if they stick around - you can see them fight and fight and fight, getting poor results, or no results, before finally trying our suggestions and finding out they work.  I was like that, too.  You couldn't tell me anything.  I had to do things my own way until I would saw that my way sucked.

This dude has a nice sense of humor that the group really appreciates.  He laughs at himself and he has an exquisite sense of timing.  However, sometimes people like that joke about everything all of the time.  I can do this and I'm not sure it's always healthy.  I can hide a problem behind a joke or I can tease someone who isn't a spot where they can be teased.  So I try to temper the humor with some honest sharing.  One of the backhanded benefits of Zoom meetings is that you don't get any of the immediate feedback that the humorist needs - when a joke is met with silence it's pretty disconcerting.  My friend has had a couple of really good shares.  His serious side - one I've gotten to explore in conversations after our meetings - has come out and it makes him more human.  When I'm hurting joking about it can be a release - humor IS the best medicine - but it can also be an unhealthy defense mechanism.