Until about a year ago, I took my anonymity seriously. To be fair, it’s not like I’m a notable public figure—nobody’s asking me how my recovery is going except the friends who know I’m sober. I took the 11th tradition of AA seriously and kept my lip buttoned unless I was in a meeting or with people I knew from the program.
AA’s second “A” was like a big scarlet letter. It flashed up in my mind whenever someone asked me, “Why don’t you drink?” or “Can I get you the wine list?” I had a collection of snappy comebacks for those moments:
I’m allergic to alcohol. I break out in handcuffs.
You’re drinking beer? That’s cute.
For your safety, I think I’ll stick with club soda.
I found ways of deflecting attention from my non-drinking. In Portland, this is not hard to do, even though it’s the microbrew capital of the world. My city is sometimes obnoxiously health-conscious, and it’s common to meet people who abstain from sugar, gluten, alcohol, caffeine and meat (the Paleo diet is big here). Often, when I refuse a drink, people assume it’s because I’m on a cleanse or just taking a break. Well, I am—but at this point, my “break” is almost a decade long, and I care less and less about who knows I am sober.
I started off breaking my anonymity in small ways. When a professor at my MFA program asked our workshop what we were proudest of, I said, “My sobriety.” I told people I went to AA and even asked friends to come to a meeting with me. I told every doctor who treated me or did a physical that I was sober and should not be prescribed opiates. I wasn’t exactly putting it on my job applications, but everyone who knew me eventually learned (or figured out) that I was in the club.
When I did this, I didn’t feel like I was exposing myself or bragging about my recovery. I’d been sober long enough to learn that getting that way was a lucky shot—I could take credit for doing the work to maintain what I had, but I was pretty clearly not AA’s spokesmodel. If anything, I felt like outing myself accomplished two things: it reduced the chances that I’d pick up a drink and it gave me more opportunities to talk to people who were sober, or wanted to be.
Over time, I got more comfortable with identifying myself as a sober alcoholic, an addict in remission. It just wasn’t a big deal anymore. Philip Seymour Hoffman died, Robin Williams died and people started talking about sobriety like it wasn’t something to be ashamed of. I remembered the first couple years of my recovery, how intent I was on finding stories about people like me. I read every recovery memoir I could find, dug through blogs about the non-drinking lifestyle and was relieved when people like Robert Downey, Jr. and Mary J. Blige openly discussed their relapses.
All the same, putting into writing I am an alcoholic scared the shit out of me the first time I did it.
One of my favorite indie presses, The Head & The Hand, put out a call for submissions for a new anthology. They’d done a collection called The Corn Belt Almanac (about food) and The Asteroid Belt Almanac (about the intersection of art and science). They were looking for contributions on spirituality and faith this time. Without thinking too hard, I wrote a personal essay—not my usual fiction—about my first time going through the 12 steps. I didn’t think they’d accept it, so I was more open than usual, more honest. When the editor reached out to me, praising the piece, I panicked. Was this really what I wanted? After all, it’s one thing to shrug off an offered vodka tonic in a crowded bar and another thing entirely to see, in black and white, my name over the sentence “I took my last drink in 2007.”
It comes down to this: I’m not ashamed of my alcoholism. Why should I be? It’s not an embarrassing secret—it’s the way that I am, as much a part of me as the color of my eyes. I can’t change it, and at this point, I don’t think I should have to hide it. After all, depression is a common mental disorder; so is anxiety. If I went around talking openly to people about how I’d grappled with something like bulimia, hadn’t purged in over a decade and was finally really healthy and happy with my body, how is that different than admitting that I’m an alcoholic? I would be an alcoholic even if I’d never picked up a drink. (Just as I knew I wanted to kiss girls before I ever got a chance to try it.)
Opening up about who and what I am connects me to the larger world in a way that drinking never did. The more I leave that second “A” behind, the bigger my life feels. I don’t need to hide, because in my mind there is nothing to hide. It’s just me. And I’m okay with being that person, today.
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