Why I Recover Loudly

Recently, someone tried to use my recovery against me. It was put to me that I was a danger because I am an alcoholic. I could “just snap,” they said.

It hurt. It hurt to have what I have exposed as my soft underbelly, my Achilles heel, used against me. 

It took a few days for me to know why it cut so deep -- I realized it cut into that gnawing part of me that says I’m less than because I’m an alcoholic. 

But then I gathered myself and remembered who I fucking am and the tremendous strength I have found in admitting this thing.

In being fully honest with myself and in refusing to have shame for who and what I am.

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There is a phrase in the recovery community: We recover loudly to keep others from dying quietly. 

I “went public” with my recovery when I finally felt confident that I got it. I was and will be sober, one day at a time (and this is key), for the rest of my life. I reached this point because I have, as they say in the rooms, “fully conceded to my innermost self that I am alcoholic.”

Alcoholic is a word that is whispered, a dirty word, a word that is filled with shame and despair and mutterings of the guy under the bridge with a brown paper sack. 

To me, the word alcoholic is as benign as diabetic -- the diabetic’s body does not respond well to sugar, just as my body doesn’t respond well to alcohol. 

That said, I don’t know of any diabetics that ate a piece of cake and then blew up their families or crashed a car and killed someone, but the principle remains the same.

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The idea that I could “just snap” is a fundamental misunderstanding of what recovery is and what alcoholism is. Yes, I could walk into the gas station and buy a forty. Yes, I could walk into the grocery store and buy some wine. I could even say to the cashier, I’m making beef bourguignon. No one would think anything of it. At 36, I have enough gray hair and crow’s feet now that they wouldn’t even check my ID.

My recovery is active. It is a living, breathing thing. I practice, as I heard, “constant vigilance.”

When I first heard the phrase “constant vigilance,” I thought, God that sounds exhausting. 

Every day, for the rest of my life, I have to be on the lookout for a drink to pounce on me?

But that’s not what that means. 

What was exhausting was the wrestling with and negotiating and attempts to moderate drinking. What was exhausting was the long and profound and extended fifteen year heartbreak of recognizing that I cannot drink. What was exhausting was the waking up, hungover as shit, dry mouth, chugging water, brushing my teeth and sighing to myself and wiping my tears and thinking, Not again. How did this happen to me again. 

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I’m not a danger because today I have a choice: I choose not to drink, one day at a time. I’m not a danger because I have recognized my weakness. This weakness for spirits, another archaic way of saying I can’t drink. What is dangerous is to keep this a secret, to make it such that this thing, these neural pathways that formed as they formed, for whatever reason, make me less than. 

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I am public because I am proud of my recovery. I take steps every day to ensure that I remember that I cannot drink, not once, ever. My alcoholism didn’t keep me from achieving what society would view as successful. 

Things I did while in active addiction: 

• Earned my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees

• Took progressively advancing (in both pay and position) jobs

• Bought a house (and this was 10 years ago, when houses were affordable)

• Got married

• Had babies (I of course did stop drinking when I was pregnant)

• Owned my own business

• Moved across the country

I held these things up, these balls that I juggled in the air, as reasons that I could not possibly be an alcoholic, because I wasn’t huddled on a street corner with a forty. 

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There are a lot of reasons why perhaps I should have kept my recovery closer to the vest. 

But I don’t care. 

That is my whole point. 

I don’t keep my recovery close to my vest because I don’t believe it to be a thing I should be ashamed of. In fact, it is my greatest achievement, or as Jamie Lee Curtis says, “her greatest legacy.” 

I fully believe that my sobriety reaches back in time and heals for my family what they could not heal. I believe my sobriety reaches back in time and heals my grandmother, whose father was a fall-down, can’t hold a job, had to move in with family during the Great Depression drunk. I believe my sobriety reaches back to salvage the innocence of my recent and far away ancestors’ childhoods. While I did not get sober while I was married to my first husband, I believe my life as a sober mother to our children heals some of what happened between us. And even if it doesn’t, it is all that I can do.

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Sometimes people don’t disclose their alcoholism because it may put their career at risk - may inadvertently implicate them as an “untrustworthy person,” that they may lose a professional license (say, a doctor, or nurse, or psychiatrist).

I don’t think much of this because I work in a profession (tree work -- I am an ISA Certified Arborist) where drugs and alcohol are absolute commonplace. The very funny thing about blue collar work is that it is technical, high angle, dangerous work -- and like, a lot of the time, it draws people with substance abuse issues. Like, the guy willing to throw a rope in a tree and climb up there with a chainsaw on his belt is doing it having just had a shot of Jim Beam, a Red Bull, and a cigarette for breakfast. 

My other professional background? Perhaps the most glamorized profession historically linked to alcoholism -- writing. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Capote, Carver, Cheever. All severe alcoholics whose legacies and writings are deeply entangled and romanticized with the bottle. 

Other times people just want to be private.

In being forthcoming about my sobriety, I have exposed the thing I was running from for so long. 

They can’t know, I thought. Or, back then, “If they only knew.” 

Why would I ever want to return to that? 

My recovery, was at one time my deepest held secret, the thing I fought and fought and fought against and fought to protect. No one could know that I was an alcoholic. It was too shameful. And what, if I admitted this out loud, would someone think if I were to, say, pick up a glass of champagne at a wedding? 

The key here is I recognize and I am fucking happy to say I will not pick up a glass of champagne at a wedding. Because, I know in my heart of hearts, that if I picked up a glass of champagne at a wedding, it would not end with that glass of champagne. It might that day. I might could pull it off for a few days, weeks, months. 

But in the end, I would be back where I was -- running from what I know to be true in my heart -- as stated earlier, what I have “conceded to my innermost self” : that I am alcoholic, and that to drink is to die.

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My ultimate goal is to reduce the stigma of the word alcoholic or alcoholism. Alcoholic is such a loaded, archaic term that even the medical community has recognized “alcohol use disorder” (AUD) in the DSM-5 rather than calling it alcoholism . AUD is a softer way to say, you’re not very good at drinking.

Today I don’t say, Not again. I don’t say, how did this happen to me again? 

Today I say, never again.

I have successfully silenced the voice that says, Maybe I could just have one. I have the tools at hand and a community to reach out to and all sorts of things that will quiet that thought before it ever reaches me sincerely.

Here’s hoping that my recovering loudly will help someone who is suffering silently.