Facebook Keeps Trying to Remind Me How Alcoholic I Am
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Facebook Keeps Trying to Remind Me How Alcoholic I Am

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Facebook Keeps Trying to Remind Me How Alcoholic I AmEvery so often, I’ll be having a perfectly good day when Facebook catches me off guard and ruins it. I’ll be happily scrolling through my news feed (“Oh, look: kittens!”) when suddenly, Facebook encourages me to use the Memories feature to re-post old “shares”—status updates, video links, photos. For me, part of the beauty of Facebook has always been its impermanence, not its frightening ability to remember anything and everything I’ve ever done and said online. Maybe that’s just the short-term alcoholic in me talking. There was always a part of me hurtling forward with zero worries about the future and the impact I was having on anyone but myself. No, as a recovering alcoholic, I can get downright depressed by the past that Facebook insists on reminding me about. Given all the headway I’ve made in sobriety, I sometimes find myself threatened and embarrassed by what social media has at its fingertips when it comes to my alcoholism. If nothing else, it tells me that it wasn’t all that long ago that I was wildly out of control.

It’s like my alcoholism is buried in a shallow grave that Facebook is constantly happy to keep shoveling up. Remember that wedding where you drank whiskey and quoted Star Trek II all night for no reason? Look at how hilarious you thought you were with those deer antlers on at a Christmas party! It was 3 am and you were still posting songs when the rest of your Facebook friends were asleep. The photos are always a little greasier than I want them to be; the videos are pretty garbled and pixelated. But they’re also bizarrely accurate. They’re not all-quite-there—too-bright lighting and smeared colors—just like me in my drinking days. Some of my posts are straight-up gibberish, now set in stone. I know that vast swaths of my Facebook history are steeped in beer and fogged with booze, so it’s no surprise to me that they look the way they do. It’s fitting. I don’t remember them any differently. But it bothers me when I see videos of my youngest son taking his first steps to me and I don’t really remember it. Not the way I should. I’m lying there on the floor, as much staring into the middle distance as I am wondering where I’d hidden my bottle of vodka.

Still, I purposely don’t dwell on thoughts of how my past could have been different. In the same way, I refuse to delete my history on social media. I could maybe spend an entire weekend and go back through all of my Facebook posts over the years—deleting them, one by one, or maybe pruning my public past like a bonsai tree. But that’s not how I want to live my life. I think it comes down to Facebook assuming everyone loves their past—or at least wants to celebrate it. I don’t hate my past, but I don’t want to spend my life resurrecting it or replaying every beat of it, either. Years ago, my mom gave me this keepsake box—a collection of awards, certificates and stuff from school. It was an innocent gesture, but it cripples me. I just can’t bring myself to look through it. The thought of that box fills me with deep, black-pit sadness. I don’t want to see that version of myself—a kid full of blind promise, life and hope. It’s the same as how I look at my Facebook history. I shudder to see what I’ve posted or who I was back then. I’ve made a real sport out of not going back and looking at how innocent, naive, and starry-eyed young I used to be. I have to move forward.

I recently downloaded a new Internet browser and, for some reason, Facebook takes a second or two longer than it should to load. During those seconds, though, something interesting happens with its photos—I can see the digital scaffolding, so to speak. Each photo is tagged with a string of keywords: “This image may contain 1 person smiling, 1 garden, may be outside.” (It’s as creepy as it sounds.) It made me think about how Facebook’s algorithm would have transcribed my life while I was drinking: a kaleidoscope of beer pints, glasses of wine, dark-lit bars, airport Bloody Marys, tumblers of scotch. That’s how it would’ve measured me. I can’t be threatened by whatever past moments Facebook throws at me, though. I have to look at them as milestones. I’m no longer hemmed into a tiny life of Applebee’s happy hours and last calls at dive bars. The more sober time I get, the further removed I am from posts where I’m hoisting oversized jugs of wine over my head. They’re all part of the messy mosaic of my alcoholism—one that I keep open for (almost) anyone to see. At a certain point, I’ve learned that these are good to see every now and again—they’re reminders of just how far I’ve come and how much more fulfilling my life is now.

In most ways, Facebook makes me nostalgic for nostalgia. I don’t remember what it’s like to want something or to just-barely remember it. I miss those faint glows and trickles of half-remembered fragments—no matter how painful the memory actually was. Instead, thanks to Facebook and apps like Timehop, my past is catalogued, ordered, arranged, numbered and, worst of all, available. I can pull virtually any memory right off the shelf at a moment’s notice. And sometimes, Facebook accomplishes the rare feat of reminding me about something I have no memory of whatsoever. I’ll find myself staring at a photo gallery I don’t remember posting or reading an update I loaded years ago when I was, well, loaded—and I have a moment of brief panic. I don’t know who that person is. I’ve gotten used to it—the sad notion of feeling disconnected from my life—and it’s simply the cost of losing precious hours of my life to drinking. I suppose it’s appropriate that some of the very same posts that raised others’ eyebrows still manage to raise my own—only in a different way. Broadcasting specific moments from my life may have been important at the time, but revisiting them later in life was never a consideration. It reminds me of an old friend, whose family used to videotape everything that came across the airwaves. And I mean everything: movies, telethons, late-night talk shows. Their bookshelves were completely overfilled with VHS tapes—each one with a label that lovingly detailed its contents. It was amazing in all the same ways I knew they were never going back to watch any of them. No, it was a sort of hobo Netflix that gave them genuine comfort. They liked knowing their recordings were there on the shelf. In the same way, I know my drunken past exists on Facebook and, in some weirdly philosophical way, it remains alive. I draw odd comfort knowing it’s out there, but I don’t need to see the glassy-eyed version of myself to prove it existed.

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About Author

Paul Fuhr is an addiction recovery writer whose work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Live Oak Review, The Sobriety Collective and InRecovery Magazine, among others. He is the author of the alcoholism memoir “Bottleneck.” He's also the creator and co-host of "Drop the Needle," a podcast about music and recovery. Fuhr lives in Columbus, Ohio with his family and their cats, Dr. No and Goldeneye.