Thoughts on Six Years of Sobriety.
Sunday was my sixth sober anniversary. A lot of people use the term “birthday”, and I do too sometimes when not thinking about it. I’m not opposed to it in any way, I just don’t really like it. I have one birthday. I was born of woman in the summer of 1974, and that will never change. On February 16th, 2008, I didn’t drink. Then, for the next six straight years of days, I also didn’t drink. That would be pretty unremarkable, I suppose, except for the fact that I drank close to a bottle of 80 proof liquor a day for many, many years preceding.
But today, as I sit here thinking about the lessons I’ve learned in six years of sobriety, I find myself with little to write about. My life in inestimably better. In fact, I believe my life is inestimably longer. I might very well be dead right now if I had continued to drink. Especially considering how much I drank and drove. And of course, that means that other people’s lives are better and probably longer too.
I get a lot of congratulations when I mention how long I’ve been sober. People tell me it’s an accomplishment. They tell me they’re proud of me. That’s nice to hear, but it also make me sad, sometimes. Because it seems to me that it feeds into the moralism of addiction. I’m no better than an addict who didn’t recover. I may be different in some way, innately, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows why recovery finds some and misses others. But I’m not stronger, or smarter, or anything.
People tell me, “Keep up the fight!” But I’m only alive because I stopped fighting. I can’t defeat alcoholism. Recognizing and embracing that is the first step. Literally. I am powerless over alcohol. My life is unmanageable. I don’t battle my addiction. I submit to it. And in fact, I have come to be grateful for it. I’m glad I’m an alcoholic. Because it allowed me to find a way to live, sober, that I never had before. Even before I drank, I was lost. Now I have a map.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the kind things people say. I know how they mean it, and I know that without suffering their own addictions, there is little in the way of a frame that people can put around the picture of recovery. But the language is wrong. And I wonder how other addicts, still active in their addictions, hear it. And then I wonder, what would I have people say instead? Obviously, I want them to say something, or I wouldn’t mention my anniversary at all.
The truth is, I do want credit. I want people to think I’m strong and inspiring and courageous blah blah blah. I want to be admired for facing down and beating a terminal illness. The problem is, it isn’t true. And it just feeds an ego that needs no further stroking. Because the more I feel important and admired, the more I feel ashamed and vile. I still have the alcoholic’s duality. Grandiosity and humiliation, coexisting like a yolk and a white in the same shell.
I am the same degenerate, reprobate, liar, selfish, rancid, angry, lazy, depressed, stupid, nosy, son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever been. I still treat people badly and act selfishly and try to manage things that aren’t my business and inject myself into places that don’t need me. I’m desperate for attention and success and admiration. I’m cocksure and arrogant. I am afraid, all the time.
I act on those things less than I used to. Still not little enough. I have no hope of ever being perfect. I have little hope of ever even being good. I still do and say ugly things. I’m almost forty years old. I’ve had a lot less adult-hood than most of my friends. I’m still figuring out how to be a grown-up. I don’t always recognize when I’m being immature.
Today, I try to balance those things with helping others. With acknowledging when I’ve been wrong. With making amends when I can and they are wanted. I try to balance the dim and hateful view I have of myself with acceptance of the things that I have inside that are worthwhile as well: I’m smart and generous and adventurous. I’m willing to help people who need help with addictions. I’ve done some of that, and I have friends who were drunks who are sober now, and that makes me happy.
I’ve been sober for six years and a day. It’s not nothing. I’d love to take credit for it. But all that can do is walk me closer to a bar. I’m just a drunk. And if I had my way, if this were about my strength, my desires, I’d be an active drunk. At 10 am, I’d already be thinking about how to plan my day around the afternoon’s drunk, the nap, and then the evening’s drunk.
I’m an alcoholic. But I haven’t drunk today. It’s been a few days in a row now. I never want to forget what I am. I never want to forget where I was. How I got there, and then what got me from there to here.
Embark.
Emerge with me. From dark to day, to light.
We have too long slumbered from ourselves.
A flood of dawn, the morning birds to flight.
The new ones just erupting from their shells.
And look and look at all this newness here!
This growth and shining light and bursting life.
I cowered once. A lifetime’s draught of fear
drunk madly at the bladed edge of night.
I’m done with fear. I’m done with shame and guilt.
This breath we breathe, our heart that beats, this song
intoned in skin and blood and lips has filled
the stillness: ringing, hopeful, brave, and strong.
Embark with me, my darling! Stranger shores!
My past is meek. But, love, our future roars.
A Year Ago Today.
One year ago today, I woke up in the last hotel room in West Virginia. It was bitter cold. I had nearly slept in the car. After fourteen hours driving, I’d hoped to settle in for the night at something La Quinta or better. I ended up in a no-name driveby motel that looked like it would have been willing to rent rooms by the hour. I was glad to get it. Every hotel for a hundred miles had been booked solid. Construction crews and electrical riggers heading northeast to dig the megalopolis out of a storm not unlike the one that hit last night. The entire eastern seaboard, then as now, was lacquered with brittle ice.
The day before I had left St. Louis. I haven’t been back. My things had been packed into a huge truck and shipped east. I was racing the truck to my new home in East Coast City. It wasn’t much of a contest. It took me two days. The truck took a week. In my car I’d brought a few changes of clothes, a mattress pad and comforter, a portable radio. I would sleep on the floor. It was an amazing adventure and terrifying. Looking back, I was in a daze the whole time. I barely knew what was going on or how I actually did all the things I did.
It was still a little more than a month until I would begin my job at Major East Coast Medical Center. I wanted to have time off. Rare, for an American, to get a month off ever during one’s working life. I needed to learn my new city. I needed time to establish ties to the AA community. I knew that I would be lonely and frightened and lost. I was. Immediately.
A year ago today I looked up an AA meeting in the early afternoon. It was in a small community center in ECC’s bustling gay district. I went in and sat down. I felt nervous and ashamed, but I didn’t really know why. After starting the meeting, the chairperson asked if there were any anniversaries “this week”. It was a Wednesday. My anniversary is the 16th. In New York, people announce their anniversaries ahead of time. In St. Louis, we don’t. I didn’t know what they did here. I raised my hand.
I said, “Well, in St. Louis, we wouldn’t do this, but I don’t know how you do it here. On the 16th, I’ll have 5 years.” A woman sitting next to me looked at me like I had just done something unspeakably disgusting. “We don’t do that here, either,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if I smelled bad. The chair said, “Why don’t we celebrate that after it happens?” I slunk down and tried to melt into my folding metal chair.
After the reading and discussion, when it was time, I raised my hand to speak.
“Hi. I’m [Dr24hours] and I’m an alcoholic. I have lived in [ECC] for about 4 hours, and I’ve already fucked it up by doing the wrong thing at a meeting. I feel like now, everyone in AA in this whole damn city already thinks I’m an asshole. I’m excited to be here, because I’m starting a great new job. But I’m lonely, and I’m scared. You guys do AA different. Thanks.” I cried angry, embarrassed tears. I never went back to that meeting.
I wandered around the city until dark. and then went back to the big glass building I’d rented an apartment in. I sat down in the empty space. I propped myself up against the wall and stared into the world on the other side of my phone for a long time. I felt like I was making a mistake. A dreadful, horrible blunder in my life. I was lonely. And scared.
It wasn’t a mistake. I’ve flourished here in ways I can’t begin to do justice to. The intervening year from that day to this has been near-constant rising tide of wonderful, exciting developments that I do not begin to deserve. Professional success. The strange ensnaring tumult of new love. A new home. A new life. It’s been a good year.
The Gulf Between Science and Recovery.
I’m going to pick on a friend here, which isn’t fair, really. Drugmonkey is a prominent addiction researcher who does important work studying things I can’t begin to understand about the brain and how it reacts to intoxicants. He’s supportive of recovery however it occurs, and is deeply committed to finding ways to improve the lives of addicts and alcoholics. And he’s a scientist. So he likes his treatment to come with evidence. That’s reasonable and appropriate. It’s right. I wouldn’t be picking on him here if I didn’t think it was constructive.
Sadly, addiction science and addiction scientists seem to have a view of addiction that is completely out of step with how I understand addiction to work based on my personal experience, and the experience of my fellow members of AA. Tonight’s “discussion” (mostly me firing off a few dozen tweets) began with Dr. Monkey tweeting a link to this article. Now, the AA described in this article bears little resemblance to the AA I’ve experienced in a dozen states and at least 4 countries. The second paragraph describes a meanness and intolerance in AA I’ve neither witnessed nor heard tell of.
The description of Dr. Dodes’ work – if accurate – describes conclusions perfectly in concert with AA’s teachings (“In his view, addiction is a compulsive disorder, an attempt to cope with anguish by engaging in ritualistic behavior that is soothing and predictable, despite ongoing negative consequences.” This sentence might as well have been lifted from AA literature.) and yet presented as if it’s some deep and novel and contradictory revelation. In fact, it sounds to me precisely like what AA has been saying for four-fifths of a century.
When we got on to discussion of what does work, and what AA is, he tweeted this:
@Dr24hours and furthermore if 12-step like approaches DO work, then they SHOULD be adopted in addiction care. and payed for by insurance
— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 11, 2014
This is, to me, perfectly representative of the gulf between science and recovery. AA doesn’t “work”. Don’t get me wrong. AA works. AA works in the sense that when an alcoholic has come to the place we come to, of spiritual desolation and depravity, when we drink for total obliteration, when we cannot live with alcohol, but we don’t know how to die, AA allows us to return from death to life. It does so by allowing us to marshal resources otherwise unavailable to us. By providing a framework of action and accountability and social support that allows us to change when we cannot change on our own. Recovery is not about strength. In fact, for alcoholics like me, we cannot recover until our strength is proved utterly useless.
This is another thing the article, and many addiction researchers don’t understand. And that is: AA is not for everyone. The article discusses those “alcoholics” who spontaneously stop drinking or return to normal drinking. I’m happy for those people, and there are many of them. They did not, obviously, need AA. Far from claiming that total abstinence is the only way, and that the only way to quit drinking is through AA, our literature explicitly states that any who can go out and “drink like a gentleman”, or quit without the steps, has our blessing! AA is the net that catches us when everything else has failed.
I think those with medium-to-long term sobriety in AA will look at that tweet above and immediately shake their heads and think, “That won’t work.” AA works in large part because we do not attempt to impose the program on anyone. I do not believe that the twelve steps are magic in any way. I think they address precisely what Dr. Dodes wrote above: the compulsion to treat our real problem in a soothing way that doesn’t solve any problems and creates more of its own. And I suspect that any simple and structured framework that does that would work.
As the worst of the worst alcoholics, we can achieve long-term sobriety only by daily adherence to some structured program, supported by those who know the same depravity and who have walked the same path to light as we have. The program must address our underlying issues: resentment, depression, anxiety, abandonment. It must acknowledge that relapse is inevitable without lifelong commitment to principles that are bigger than we are. As soon as we believe that we have defeated alcoholism, we are defeated by it. And I believe it must be social. We recover only among our own kind.
Any attempt to distill the “essence” of the twelve steps to a pill, to a treatment regimen, is doomed from the outset. There is no such essence. The steps don’t “work”. They don’t cure us. AA doesn’t “work”. Not like that. There’s no way to take the program of AA and turn it into a medical treatment. AA works when medicine fails. It works when alcoholics come to that sunken road. Death or recovery. It’s a difficult choice. And many of us make a different one from the one I made. Usually because they do not realize they’re at the point yet of making that choice. Sometimes because they actively choose an alcoholic death.
AA works. Because it provides a framework, a social structure, that alcoholics can seize when and if they choose to. Some believe it works because they surrender to God, though that is not my personal experience. We do not impose our steps on anyone. We could not if we wanted to. It won’t work. We do not advertise or promote ourselves. We are simply here. Living ordinary lives. Sober. If you have decided you want what we have, and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take the steps.
If you haven’t decided that you want what we have, or if you are not willing to go to any length to get it, then AA isn’t for you. And that’s ok. Many may recover in other ways. Many may die. Many may not need “recovery” as we think of it. AA isn’t for every problem drinker. And not every problem drinker is an alcoholic as I understand it. The medical definition of “alcoholic” is not the one we use in AA.
I do not believe we will ever cure alcoholism. And if there were a pill I could take today that would allow me to drink like a normal person, I wouldn’t take it. I don’t want to drink like a normal person. I don’t want a medical recovery. My problem isn’t alcohol. My problem is me. Alcohol is how I tried to treat my problem for about twelve years. Now, I treat my problem by adhering to the program laid out in Alcoholics Anonymous. I cannot do this myself. Left to my own strength, my own morals, my own initiative, I drank. Left to my own strength, I will drink again.
I am sober because I came to a place where I could not live with myself anymore. I needed to address the sicknesses in my heart. I finally came to understand that alcohol, rather than assuaging that sickness, was the means by which I avoided confronting it. I gave up. And I did what I was told by people who had been where I was, and who had what I wanted. And I continue to today. Because I am not cured. And I don’t want to be.
When is Addiction Over?
Phillip Seymour Hoffman had been sober for 23 years prior to his relapse. Twenty. Three. Years. A friend commented to me last night, “You’d think after twenty-three years you’d be good.” Meaning, after such time in sobriety, one ought to be “out of the woods”, so to speak. Relapse should be off the table. Lessons learned. I’ve had friends ask, “Since you’ve been sober for so long now, don’t you think you could go back to drinking just a little, now and then?”
No. Vigilance against exactly such thoughts is the only way to stay alive. Hoffman’s story – decades of sobriety derailed by painkillers – is depressingly commonplace. I’ve had several acquaintances relapse and die under exactly the same circumstances. Sometimes it’s because they were opiate abusers and the painkillers prescribed legitimately fuel the relapse. Sometimes it’s because they were alcoholics and thought themselves immune from abuse of pills (this is my own fear). Sometimes it’s because in the fog of appropriate anesthesia their defenses against alcohol were degraded to the point that drinking seemed like a good idea.
In many ways, the mechanism of the relapse doesn’t matter. The destination does. We end up in morgues a lot. If we’re lucky, we just have to start over from scratch with our sobriety. If we’re unlucky, we endure another long slow dredge of addiction leading to isolation, depression, misery, impecunity, and grim morbidities. In some ways, Hoffman may have been fortunate to end as he did, rather than in slow decline.
When is addiction over? Never. Not for me. There are people who call themselves “ex-addicts”. They’re welcome to that label. I hope it works for them. I have no interest in adopting it. I am an alcoholic. I believe I was born an alcoholic. I shall certainly die an alcoholic. Hopefully, not for a long time, and without having had a drink between now and then.
My addiction is never over because I have no interest in learning to drink like normal people drink. Your glass of wine with dinner, your cocktail at a party, that is of nearly no interest to me. My desire is to drink by the gallon, until I cannot stand or see, until I vomit – perhaps intentionally – and then continue. That’s what I want. That’s what I would be doing right now if I could do so and not have negative consequences in my life for it.
Physicians keep prescribing opiates to addicts. And it keeps killing us. And I don’t know the answer. I know that I will suffer pain rather than take pain medication that alters my perceptions. I do not dare risk opiates, narcotics. Not if there is any alternative whatsoever. I cannot risk it.
I am fond of using the metaphor of remission for my disease. I am an alcoholic in remission. I do not exhibit the symptoms of alcoholism. I do not drink. I do not store resentments in my heart and mind. I do not take other mind-altering substances. My partner has never seen me drink. My colleagues have never seen me hung-over.
But remission is not really the right word. Not as I understand it (which I confess is poorly). By comparison to cancer, when someone is in remission, they are cancer-free. They have a survival profile similar to (if not quite the same as) persons who never had cancer. Any new cancer may be entirely unrelated to the first one. I am not free of my original disease. I never have been.
I still have my alcoholism. It is within me and will never, ever, recede. And the remarkable thing that I have come to understand is that I have a kind of wonderful symbiosis with this malignant thing inside me. Because of my disease, I have learned a way to live that is enthralling and exciting. I’ve learned to communicate and interact. I’ve learned to share. To let go of resentment and hatred and disappointment. To take life as it is and myself as I am. To give freely of what I have to offer and to accept gratefully the things I’ve been given.
My alcoholism tries relentlessly to kill me. And unless you’re like me, you probably can’t imagine just how grateful I am that it does.
Crowdfunding Shark Research.
As I promised, I will from time to time highlight interesting crowdfunding projects. Below is a new project from David Shiffman, AKA @whysharksmatter. If you’re interested in marine ecology, this seems like a cool project to support. – Dr. 24hours
My research focuses on the feeding ecology of sharks. This is important because sharks are ecologically and economically important animals that help keep the food chain in balance, but many are threatened with extinction due to overfishing. By studying what they eat, we can make more detailed conservation and management plans.
Any donation to my SciFund project helps, but larger donations have associated rewards, including the opportunity to join us for a day of shark research ($300 donation), or adopting a GPS satellite tagged shark that you can name and track on Google Earth ($3,000 donation).
My lab, the RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program (SharkTagging.com, Facebook.com/SharkTagging), is also active in education and outreach. Last year, we took over 1,000 high school students on the boat with us to learn about ocean conservation and help with our shark research.The project can be found here: https://experiment.com/projects/what-are-the-feeding-habits-of-threatened-sharks
I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has about my project or about sharks in general on twitter @WhySharksMatter – thanks!Sincerely,David Shiffman
Thank you, Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
I’d wager a hundred people a day die in this country from overdoses and addictions. Too many go unmourned. When someone famous dies it always restarts people’s compassion for addicts. We wonder how someone so talented and so successful could succumb. How could they not get the help they needed? Meanwhile, the everyday addict remains subject of scorn and derision for failure of morality and fortitude.
Neither of these narratives is much like the truth. Getting help doesn’t necessarily get us sober. Doesn’t get us clean. Nor can our own efforts of will. I am an alcoholic because I love alcohol. Because there is something wrong in my brain that makes my relationship to alcohol different from a normal person’s. I’m an alcoholic whether I drink or not. As active alcoholics, the amount we drink doesn’t define us. Nor the frequency. How we define ourselves may vary, but the one I use is this: when I drink, I lose the ability to control how much I consume. And, once I’ve consumed any, I immediately feel intense, usually irresistible cravings for more.
I have been sober for two weeks short of six years. I read today that Phillip Seymour Hoffman had been clean for 23 years prior to relapsing earlier this year. Today, or perhaps a few days ago, he took too much of whatever he likes too much of. Now he’s dead. And yes, it’s sad to see a person of tremendous gifts perish too soon, and in such an undignified way. And yes, he is just one person, and many hundreds of other families are grieving their own dead addicts today. And yes, city morgues, and underpasses, and homeless shelters are full of their own addicted dead.
I’m not going to comment today on how I think society should address these issues. I’m not going to comment today on why I believe recovery finds some and misses others. Today, I’m going to thank Phillip Seymour Hoffman for dying.
I mean that sincerely. I am grateful to him. For the witness he provides me of the ruthless consequences of surrendering again to the smoldering hell I cradle in my mind, in my body, probably in my genes. I thank Mr. Hoffman for the prematurity of his passing. For the sundered lives he leaves behind. For the uncompleted art and all the things we knew he had to share. We all have those things. Each of us is an ember in someone else’s fire.
There is no guarantee in sobriety. I can’t know that I will never drink again. I am a man with fault like scrimshaw muraling my bones. But I rarely feel further from a drink than when I watch someone I admire return to the mouth of the bottle. To die there, squalid; stripped of dignity and lost to shame. Especially because I know, lips to marrow, I know the seduction and compulsion to which I will inevitably return without the daily maintenance of my sobriety. Because to me, to us, we alcoholics, we addicts, a dark intoxicated death is not such a horrible thing to contemplate. It often sounds better than breath and sunlight.
Thank you, Mr. Hoffman, for reminding me the end I will all too easily return to seeking. Thank you for the gift of your relapse. For dying. For an hour of gratitude for the clarity of my vision, the steadiness of my hand. We alcoholics, we addicts, will keep dying young. But today, it wasn’t me.
Roundup from IMSH2014.
I had an excellent time at the International Meeting for Simulation in Healthcare. I was able to participate in a panel discussion and presentation of my work at MECMC. I sat in on a number of cool classes, and showed the poster of my work as well. I made connections with people in ECC (in the medical school of UHR), and also a professor from Seattle. There was one really interesting class I took on patient safety that I though was a great new (to me) way to look at safety in a hospital environment.
Like many good ideas, it involves a simple and straightforward way of looking at the world. They called it “Safety II”, which sort of reminded me of Type I and Type II error in statistics. Safety I, traditional patient safety thinking, involves trying to minimize errors and adverse events, and analyzing them when they do occur. Safety II means looking at those institutions with very low error rates, and trying to understand what they’re doing right. Then, adopt what they’re showcasing in terms of good patient safety. This seems to me like an intuitive but novel approach to patient safety.
And I won the raffle! IMSH2015 is in New Orleans, and I will be attending, almost certainly. Because I won a raffle that gives me two nights free hotel for the conference. It was very exciting. I’m a weirdly lucky dude. I win this kind of thing with a frequency that seems out-of-line with the real world probability. It’s clearly supernatural.
So I was pleased with the conference and with the time I spent away from work getting a lot of sleep and working out in the fabulous gym at the San Francisco Marriot Marquis (Thank you, MECMC!). I even swam. I’m still sore, but my body will thank me for working hard, right? I hope.
Now I need to buckle down and get a lot of work done in February, because in March I’m going away for two weeks. Japan and Korea. Very excited. And a little nervous. Language will be challenging. But that’s all part of the excitement. Life is good. I’m moving forward. I know how to let go of things that are not positive for me, or that I don’t contribute well to, and how to embrace things that are promising. I’m doing both these days. And I’m excited.
Weight and Fitness
I’m back down to the low weight of my adult life. About 187. I’m about 5’10”, maybe 5’9.5″, putting my BMI about 27. Perhaps a shade higher. So, I’m overweight, and not by a little. I get a lot of exercise. That’s important. And many people will say that one can be healthy at any weight, if their cardiovascular fitness is good. Now, I’m not going to take a strong position on the “healthy at any size” movement. I’m no nutritionist or physiologist (though I did research these topics for grant submissions in the past). Except to say that as usual, it’s incredibly complex and we don’t know the whole story yet[1]. We do know is that both adiposity and fitness influence health dramatically. And for the primary health issue of concern for me personally, type II diabetes, adiposity is a stronger predictor than fitness[2].
My fundamental fitness goals have not changed. I’m running. I’m running in the “East Coast City Don’t Have a Stroke at 58 Like Your Father 1,000,000K.” I’m racing against diabetes. My family history and my personal blood work tell me that I am prone to it. And that I am almost certainly going to have it eventually. I’m forestalling it as long as I can. My father was diabetic, type II, at 19. I am 39, and still in the clear. But I firmly believe that the only reason I don’t have diabetes is that I treat myself like I have diabetes. Mostly.
And of course, I want to be fit because I have vain, shallow ideas about what it means for a man to look good, and I want to look like the man in my head looks when I think of a man that looks good. I want to be fit. I want to be able to take my shirt of at the beach without being self-conscious. I want to feel attractive. I want to look good in a suit – bathing or business. But really, mostly, what I want is to be able to hike mountains when I’m 75. To go to the grocery store for myself when I’m 85, if I’m lucky enough to be alive.
Fitness is hard. I run and I work out and I watch what I eat and I am still overweight. I have an unfortunate genetic predisposition to obesity and diabetes. But I’m fighting like hell. To be fit. To be slender. And to be healthy. Yes, it’s at least mildly (possibly more) narcissistic. I can own that. I’m grateful that the things I invest myself in now are about health and wellness, rather than smoke and obliteration.
_______
[1] LaMonte & Blair Physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and adiposity: contributions to disease risk Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care: September 2006 – Volume 9 – Issue 5 – p 540–546
[2]Racette et al Abdominal Adiposity Is a Stronger Predictor of Insulin Resistance Than Fitness Among 50–95 Year Olds Diabetes Care March 2006 vol. 29 no. 3 673-678
Why the Eleventh Tradition.
The eleventh tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous states: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” At the link, there’s also a longer-form version that goes into a bit more detail. And for those seeking a comprehensive treatment, read the chapter is “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”. Fundamentally, what the eleventh tradition means is that AA does not promote itself. When I write that AA works, and that I believe in the program’s capacity to change lives, I’m not speaking for AA. I’m not AA’s spokesperson. I might say things here that go counter to AA published material. I also believe that for the purposes of AA, there’s no meaningful difference between pseudonymity and anonymity. I am unaware of AA having a policy on this topic.
As I wrote in my previous post, the reason for anonymity here is twofold. First, it protects me from the disclosure of my alcoholism in venues where I might want it to remain undiscovered. Second, and more important, it protects people who are newcomers, and who would ask me for help. It provides security for people who may be in real jeopardy if their alcoholism is revealed. If I use my real name here, and talk about sponsoring or other people in my life who are alcoholics, even if I don’t identify them, I may make their identities known inadvertently. Just like I would not list the journals that a pseudonymous scientist I know has published in. Breadcrumbs matter.
But it is especially important that celebrities not identify themselves as members of AA. As alcoholics? Sure, whatever. Say you’re an alcoholic in recovery. That’s great. People may assume whatever they choose. But when Roger Ebert outed himself on his 30th birthday, I was perturbed. Roger Ebert had strong political opinions. AA has none. Roger Ebert was an occasionally polarizing figure. AA seeks to avoid all controversy. Recently, a living celebrity in the early stages of sobriety “came out” as a member of AA. I feel the same, and even more so.
People in very early sobriety often end up on what we call a “pink cloud”. It means feeling wonderful, excited, gloriously sober. We often want to evangelize about AA and pull people into the program. We want everyone to see how we’ve changed. We’re thrilled about our new health and vitality and want to share it widely and loudly. Sponsors should help the newcomers embrace the pink cloud in an emotional sense, and should strongly curtail any evangelistic behavior. Even Bill W and Dr. Bob wanted to evangelize at first. And build AA hospitals. It’s a great, great thing that they saw the trap that leads to: prestige, wealth, politics, infighting, corruption. Things that have derailed essentially every large-scale charity project in human history.
One big reason that celebrities should keep quiet about being in AA is that they (just like the rest of us) often relapse. When public figures relapse and struggle and endure additional humiliations, they show others that getting sober seems impossible. When in fact, we don’t know anything about how the person is truly working a program. Sometimes, people work hard and fail (though in my experience, and in AA’s literature, we see that very rarely). Sometimes, people are going to AA to get courts or spouses or bosses off their back and have no particular interest in recovery. Those people have a harder time. Though even they sometimes recover.
Anonymity in AA is about protecting ourselves, our newcomers, and the program. We don’t promote AA. We simply live our lives, practice the principles, and volunteer to guide those who would seek us out to recover. AA has no lobby. Does not accept outside donations. (Really. Not an AA member? Keep your money. We don’t want it.) Has no formal organizational structure. Has only a single rule for membership. You may be a member of AA if you desire to stop drinking. That’s it.
The program of AA works because those who have recovered protect the program, and newcomers, by not associating our names with the program. We are anonymous. Because we have a disease that is misunderstood by the world. It is seen as a disease of moral failure and personal weakness. Indolence. Depravity. Our disease causes us to behave in shockingly anti-social ways. People who interact with us, while we are active in our disease, are thoroughly justified in choosing not to support us. To disassociate. To divorce us. Even, in the end, to let us die miserably and alone. The blame rests with us, not with our associates and companions. Not with the healthcare system. And not with AA. Accepting that blame is part of our recovery.
AA works because by practicing the program as it is laid out in the book, we can relent from our obsession with alcohol, our drunkenness, our misery. And go on to live productive and healthy lives. And then we share it with those who seek it. And that power, that ability, all of our recovery, rests on the broad beam of our anonymity.
Infactorium 