Hi Sober Lady,

I was fascinated to read your article about life outside of AA. I am a self-identified alcoholic currently in AA. Despite that, I’m struggling to understand if I really am an alcoholic and what that even means. For years, alcohol was a big part of my life. I never drank during the day, took pills, or used any other substances. But my pattern involved drinking every night, usually with friends, but sometimes alone. AA is helping me understand some of the unhealthy perspectives and traits that contributed to my drinking, but I’m also hoping there will be a day when I can have a glass of wine or an occasional drink. I am wondering if that might be possible with a different program, like Recovery Dharma or another alternative. I feel that AA has been helpful for me, and I don’t want to stop the personal growth it’s helped me achieve. Should I stop going to AA? What other option might be better for me?

Sincerely,

Conflicted

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Hi Conflicted,

Thanks for the question, and congratulations on taking steps to change behavior you thought needed to change. I’m glad that you are getting something out of AA. I often say that the Program taught me how to be a person. I learned ways to reflect on my behavior (past and present) without self-flagellation or antagonism; I learned how to take accountability when I was wrong without letting other people’s opinions dictate how I felt about myself; I learned about the importance of quiet self-reflection. AA is decidedly not for everyone, but I believe there are core principles in the twelve steps that can be valuable to anyone.

I’m not sure which article you’re referring to, but it sounds like we had pretty different mindsets coming into AA, and I think it’s worth outlining those before I delve into any advice. By the time I attended my first post-rehab AA meeting, there was no doubt in my mind that I was an alcoholic (or had severe alcohol use disorder, or was addicted to alcohol, or was a drunk by any other name). I’ve never believed I could have just one drink or been able to moderate my drinking in any meaningful way. I’ve been reading through old journals recently, and it’s actually astounding how early I was aware that I used alcohol with a feverish obsession my peers never seemed to exhibit.

In other words, I was the exact type of drinker for which AA was created. While I eventually drifted away from the Program, it wasn’t because I was unsure if I “qualified” as an alcoholic or thought that I’d gained enough wisdom or willpower to, as they say in the Big Book, “drink like a normal person.”

Still, plenty of people start going to AA meetings unsure of whether they really “need” to be there and ultimately decide to stay. Plenty more know they’re addicted to alcohol and decide that AA isn’t the right place for them. Still more, like you, land somewhere in between—you wanted to change your relationship with alcohol but are not sure if that means you were actually addicted to alcohol and if AA’s lifelong abstinence approach is what you need. This is totally normal. It’s also totally normal to know you can’t drink again, but still sometimes miss it.

Send me questions or suggestions!

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you whether there will ever be a day when you can have one glass of wine and not want another, or indulge in the occasional cocktail. I can tell you that a lot of people in recovery, especially in early recovery, fantasize about that. It’s why AA talks endlessly about “one day at a time.” The idea of lifelong abstinence is daunting—even for people like me who know they can’t have just one drink. So the Program tells you to focus on just staying sober today. I’ll give you my non-AA version of that advice: Don’t worry about what you might want or need in the future; focus on what feels right for you today.

If you’re currently getting a lot out of AA meetings, I don’t see any reason why you should stop going. Fortunately, you’re not bound to any one program or approach. You can keep going to AA and also check out some Recovery Dharma meetings, hop online for virtual SMART Recovery meetings, or explore any other options. All of the resources listed here are free or low-cost. The best way to figure out what works for you is to try a bunch of different options.

Many of the options (SMART, Recovery Dharma, Lifering) encourage abstinence, but none of them are going to berate you or kick you out if you drink (this is also true of AA, but it can be a bit more intense about it). Moderation Management is another option; it focuses more on changing your relationship to alcohol as opposed to abstaining completely.

But in general, I am a fan of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy. If you’re getting something out of AA, and the only things giving you pause are whether you “qualify” as an alcoholic, and if you can drink a glass of wine at some undetermined point in the future, I’d stick with what you’re doing. You can try other programs (like Recovery Dharma) at the same time, but there’s no reason to abandon a group that’s helping you in the meantime.

Whether you’re looking for recovery from addiction, moderating your alcohol use, or working on personal growth, it’s all a process. There will be difficult patches, breakthroughs, regression, progress, and certain approaches that work better than others. Don’t worry about labels, and try not to worry about what things might look like in the future. Just keep trying things on until you find something that fits.

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As a news consumer, I’m not exactly a tough nut for the news feed algorithm to crack. Pretty much any story about sobriety or addiction recovery makes it to the top of my feed and—proving that Pavlov was really on to something—I click every time. Thus, the news that Brad Pitt told an Esquire reporter that he was “back off the wagon” after seven years of sobriety reached me with all the subtlety of a tsunami.

Initially, I didn’t want to write about it. In general, I don’t speculate about other people’s recovery. If I know one thing in this world, it’s that recovery is a non-linear process that looks different for everyone. I also think it’s gross when people talk about celebrities’ recovery (or lack thereof) like it’s a parasocial spectator sport. When the kind folks at ms.now asked me if I would be interested in writing something about it, my brain immediately jumped to all the reasons I shouldn’t.

Then, I told the editors I’d do it. I thought it was worth writing for a few reasons. As the published piece suggests, whether or not a person can safely go back to drinking after a period of sobriety is a question I am asked all the time (for more on that, read the ms.now piece or this AASL one). Still, I could answer that question without mentioning Pitt at all. Some in the recovery space have taken the position that writing such a piece is “piling on” the actor when his alcohol use is “none of our business.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, that would be my take, too. But I think Pitt falls into the 1%. The whole issue also raises an interesting question—one I don’t necessarily have good answers to—about the reputation-laundering potential of recovery narratives. But to understand any of this, you need to know about allegations his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, made after a plane trip in 2016, and the crisis PR manager Pitt hired after those allegations became public.

According to court documents reviewed by Rolling Stone, Puck News, and other outlets, Jolie alleges that Pitt became violent towards her and their children on a private plane in 2016. He was reportedly very intoxicated at the time and, to put it mildly, scared the shit out of his family. So much so that Jolie filed divorce papers days after the flight. Perhaps still not our business, though a public figure (allegedly) being physically abusive towards his family is a different ballgame than merely speculating about his substance use—even if his substance use was the catalyst.

Pitt denies the allegations and no charges were ultimately filed, but he publicly acknowledges that he was drinking too much during his marriage and that doing so contributed to his divorce. “I was boozing too much,” he told GQ in 2017. “Truthfully, I could drink a Russian under the table with his own vodka. I was a professional.* I was good.”

In 2023, after stories broke about the alleged details of what happened on the flight, Pitt hired the same PR manager Johnny Depp used during his court battles with Amber Heard, Matthew Hiltzik. In a story about the crisis manager to the stars, The Observer reported that Hiltzik crafted Pitt’s “divorce narrative” to emphasize “contrition and sobriety over scandal.”

Two things can be true

I don’t mean to suggest that Pitt wasn’t contrite and sober following his divorce—how would I know? He probably was. But two things can be true: Pitt could be genuinely contrite and sober after his divorce, and it could be really important for his reputation (and thus his career) for the whole world to know that he is contrite and sober.

Last year, Pitt went on famous sober guy Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, which has an estimated 20 million monthly listeners—and talked about coming into recovery meetings “desperate,” “on his knees,” and needing to “wake the fuck up in some areas.”

I’m not doubting the veracity of his statements. But if—in the wake of an alleged alcohol-related abuse scandal—a celebrity hires a PR person to help get the word out about his sobriety, openly discusses that sobriety in The New York Times, award speeches, and on arguably the biggest recovery-related podcast on the planet before casually mentioning to a reporter on the record that he’s drinking again, is the takeaway really that we’re just nosy voyeurs who can’t mind our own business? Weren’t we supposed to have feelings about his sobriety? Isn’t that why he was talking about it so publicly in the first place?

Here’s where we get to the thorny question I don’t know how to answer: How do we give people the benefit of the doubt, respect how individual the recovery process can be, allow room for growth and redemption while also acknowledging that an actor’s reputation is directly connected to their livelihood and that addiction recovery narratives can help launder a celebrity’s reputation after allegations of abuse?

The thing is, I don’t actually care whether or not Brad Pitt drinks. I genuinely hope that he can do it in a way I never could. He also shouldn’t have to talk about anything he doesn’t want to. But he really seemed to want to talk about sobriety—the thing he said turned him from a “desperate” wreck to “happier every day.”

Quitting drinking isn’t always a big deal, but for Pitt it was. He’s the one who characterized himself and his relationship to alcohol thusly: “The terrible thing is I tend to run things into the ground. That’s why I’ve got to make something so calamitous. I’ve got to run it off a cliff.”

I hope that’s no longer true for him, but after seven years of a high-profile addiction-to-sobriety narrative, it’s certainly fair to wonder about it. Because the only reason I’m even thinking about cliffs is that Pitt told us how compelled he feels to run off of them.

*Pitt also used “professional” to describe his drinking in the new Esquire profile; this time referring not to drinking a Russian under the table, but drinking in moderation.

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When I conceived of Making a Scene, I thought I’d stick to film and television depictions of addiction. My good friend (who came up with the excellent MAS name) adamantly believes I should adhere to that plan. “Books are just different,” he insisted. “You can’t insert clips from books into the newsletter.”

Point taken. And I could have chosen the film adaptation of the book The Good House by Ann Leary—one exists—and it stars two talented and beloved actors, Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline. The charming duo from one of the great 90s classic films, Dave!

But I haven’t seen the film adaptation of The Good House, and I never will. The book means too much to me to engage with any other version of it. Specifically, Mary Beth Hurt’s narration of the audiobook brings protagonist Hildy Good to life with such droll specificity that I refuse to let even the great Sigourney Weaver tweak how I hear the character.

Usually when I recommend a book, I don’t mention if I read the print version or the audiobook. Occasionally, if I listened to the audio version, I’ll mention liking a narrator. When I recommend this book, I immediately ask the person if they have the Libby (library) app or an Audible account. I will then impress upon them the importance of listening to this book on audio. If they are unpersuaded, I’ll whip out my phone (the audiobook is perma-downloaded) and play them the first chapter.

By the time we part, I have either convinced the recommendee to listen to the audiobook or I’ve forever alienated someone who used to think I was normal.

In other words, The Good House audiobook was always going to find its way into Making a Scene, regardless of whether any other books (audio or otherwise) do.

The background:

Hildy Good is a real estate agent in the seaside town of Wendover, Massachusetts. She’s in her 60s, has two grown daughters, one grandson, and has lived in Wendover all her life—she knows everyone and everything that happens in the enclave.

Unfortunately for her, small towns work both ways: the townies also know everything about her—or so they believe. They know, for example, that Hildy likes—or ‘liked ’—to drink. They know that the previous year, Hildy’s daughters arranged an intervention for their mother and that she went to a 28-day treatment program at Hazelden.

They may know that Hildy never really considered herself an alcoholic, but they believe she returned from Hazelden sober and has ostensibly maintained her sobriety since. They don’t know that she still drinks (wine—just a little wine!) when she comes home at night.

Here’s a clip from chapter two to give you a sense of Hildy and how she thinks about these things:

He was “born three drinks short of comfortable,” the Hazelden speaker said. Hildy is certain that she’s not an alcoholic, whatever her daughters and the people at rehab might think. But those six words were so true for Hildy that even the steel walls of her defenses couldn’t stop them from breaking through. It’s a moment well known to anyone who has identified with another person’s addiction story. Hearing someone articulate a feeling you’ve lived with your whole life but never found the words or courage to express can take your breath away.

Of course, Hildy tells herself, identifying with that one thing alone is hardly proof that she has a problem. So what if she was born three drinks short of comfortable? She is a very successful real estate agent—the most successful real estate agent in the town of Wendover, Massachusetts! If she wants to have three glasses (or bottles) of wine on the terrace of her empty house, why should anyone else care?! She’s an adult, goddammit.

You don’t have to be the kind of drinker I was, or Hildy is here, to understand her logic. Whatever damage Hildy might be doing to herself with her solitary imbibing, she’s not harming anyone else.

That’s certainly the attitude Rebecca, a new arrival in Westover who quickly befriends Hildy, takes. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Rebecca begins having an affair with her psychiatrist, Peter, who works in the office above Hildy’s (it happens fairly early in the book).

The new friends become each other’s secret keepers: Rebecca knows that Hildy pretends to be sober in public but is very much not in private. Hildy knows that Rebecca and Peter are cheating on their respective spouses.

It’s in this context that the following exchange occurs:

I’ve vaguely and noncommittally mumbled my way through more of these types of conversations than I can count. Smiling and nodding while my stomach lurches down to my toes and a cold sweat breaks out across my body—yes, of course I remember saying that—smile smile smile, nod nod nod and hope the contents of my stomach can stay put until I escape this uncertain interrogation.

Send questions and suggestions!

Worse than what I might have said in a blackout, the real terror came when I did things I couldn’t remember. Someone would start to tell me what I’d done the night before and the terror would descend on me in a cold, brutal, urgent panic. It began with disbelief; rapid decay of what I thought I knew and then spiraled into an increasingly worse nightmare. I don’t think I can describe it any better than Leary does here:

Every note of this emotional progression feels painfully accurate to the experience of being a blackout drinker that—no matter how many times I listen to it—I have a visceral reaction. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion when you’ve totaled your vehicle in the exact same place. You know what’s coming, you’ve heard the squeal of tires and crunch of metal in your nightmares ever since it happened, but you’re powerless to stop it from happening to someone else, right before your eyes.

This exchange also helps us see why Hildy’s homebody wine-drinking might not be as harmless as she believes. When she’s blacked out, she can’t stay contained in her insulated bubble; she’s free to wander out of it at will and wake up none the wiser. Unless, of course, someone tells her what she’s done.

Hildy’s thin veil of denial is pierced when Hildy hears the sadness (or pity, as she says) in Rebecca’s voice.

This, too, feels damningly accurate. It’s easy to maintain your defenses when someone is angry—it’s what they were made for—warding off attacks. We instinctively match anger with anger—Yes, you did! No, I didn’t!

But sadness, or pity, is a different beast. It slithers past the standard defenses and hisses the uncomfortable truth—that your enemy might not be the person to whom all of your vitriol is directed—that it might be something far less tangible, and located much closer to home.

In that moment, when Hildy understands—however briefly—that the previous night she was doing exactly what Rebecca said and has no memory of it, we get the best description of what it feels like to be a blackout drinker (or, at least how I felt as a blackout drinker) that I’ve ever encountered.

“It’s like a suctioning of the soul, being told the things your body does when your mind is in that dead zone. It’s like having your very skin peeled off, like being publicly stripped down to some gruesome inner membrane that nobody should see, and revealing it to all.”

This moment of truth, the raw, humiliating exposure of it, coupled with the reality that Rebecca’s concern for her friend is not quite as intense as her concern that Hildy may have told someone about her affair with Peter, causes Hildy to snap. She lashes out even more venomously and with even more unhinged defenses of her drinking. That, too, feels painfully realistic.

Blacking out was the most traumatic, terrifying, and embarrassing part of my drinking. When I have nightmares about drinking, the drinking part is never actually in the dream. It’s always the morning after; waking up with no memory of what I’d done or said, knowing only that the potential for embarrassment and harm was limitless, left me permanently anxious, nauseated, and craving something I could use to escape those feelings.

Most often, a blackout drinker is depicted from the outside. We see the consequences of their blackout, the stupor of not knowing what they’ve done, and the horror of realization. We watch all of that on a talented actor’s face and feel their emotional response (especially if we have our own experience with it), but I’ve never heard the actual feeling described so vividly and accurately inside a fictional character’s brain.

So as much as I love The Good House, Kevin Kline, and Sigourney Weaver, I won’t watch the movie adaptation. I simply can’t imagine being inside any version of Hildy Good’s head that doesn’t include Hurt’s outstanding narration of Leary’s precise, brutally accurate words.

If you’ve read the book (or listened to the audiobook, or seen the movie), I’d love to know your thoughts. I’d also love your thoughts on Hurt’s narration and, as always, suggestions for what I should cover next for Making a Scene.

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I only skimmed the story because I was sure I knew how it ended. Stories with headlines that include the words “Woman, hiker, dead, remote, naked, suspicious, neck,” tend to end a certain grisly way. I assumed what you probably assumed—what anyone who pays attention to the news would assume—that somewhere out there was a boyfriend, a spurned hiking partner, a forest-dwelling madman, or some other creep responsible for the woman’s death. It felt like a tragic story I’d read too many times before.

This was in April. A pair of hikers in Big Sur had found her face down in a pool of water on Pine Ridge Trail, wearing only a sports bra. They told news outlets that they glimpsed a gash on her forehead as well as suspicious markings on her neck. She was quickly identified as Joanna Ruth Shields, a 37-year-old hiker and skateboarder.

News stories about Shields’ death spread rapidly across social media; the accompanying photos showed a quintessential outdoorsy California girl. She looked like someone I would have become friends with at summer camp. Someone who was on multiple sports teams in high school but also hung out in the park to slackline with hippies. Someone people would describe as vivacious.

I remember thinking that I hoped they’d catch the guy who did it. Then, I forgot about the story entirely.

But a few weeks ago, I started seeing new headlines about the “shocking cause of the Big Sur hiker’s death.” The tawdriest publications made sure to include that she was found naked and with “mysterious marks on her neck,” though by this time the outlets knew that neither her nudity nor the marks on her neck were relevant to her death.

According to the sheriff-coroner of Monterey County, Shields’ cause of death was “probable alcohol withdrawal seizures due to chronic alcohol use disorder.” In a press release posted on July 23rd, the sheriff’s office said that the marks on her neck were the result of “postmortem insect activity” and the gash on her forehead was superficial and didn’t contribute to her death.

I was surprised. So many of the details about how and where her body was found seemed to suggest an attack, though of course all of the “evidence” was circumstantial; it was always possible there were non-nefarious explanations. For example, her hiking buddy told authorities that the last time he saw Shields alive, she said she was going to the bathroom and to wash up, potentially explaining the nudity.

Her friend told the hikers who found her body the same story, though no one seemed particularly inclined to believe him. News reports described the hikers’ interaction with Shields’ friend as “a chilling encounter,” though neither the hikers nor the news outlets explained exactly what made it so. It seemed like everyone was primed for a Gabby Petito-esque tragedy.

Many of my assumptions about Shields (and her cause of death) were based on pictures of her that accompanied the news stories. In them, Shields looked young, healthy, happy, outdoorsy, so I assumed she was all of those things. Indeed, reports from her family and friends suggest she was many of those things. But we now know that she was also very ill.

Send questions and suggestions!

In its statement, the Sheriff’s office explained its conclusion about alcohol withdrawal was the result of “forensic examination, a reliable medical and health history, and information obtained from Ms. Shields’ family during the investigation.” Of course there was more going on with Shields than anyone could glean from a few photos; we’ve all lived in an Instagram world long enough to understand that. But that didn’t stop me from falling headfirst into the appearance trap. I fell into it despite knowing better than most how deceiving appearances can be.

For most of my life, I was chronically underweight. At first, there was no real reason for it—I was just a skinny kid. Later, I discovered I had an undiagnosed colon issue and needed surgeries, all of which led to dropping more weight and a significant change in diet. Until recently, the only time I had a “normal” Body Mass Index* was after I graduated college, when I started drinking roughly a fifth of vodka every day.

Drinking that much every day boosted my caloric intake faster than eating ever could. Food was not terribly important to me; drinking was the most important thing in my life. Though they didn’t know the reason for the change, people who had been worried about my perpetual stick-thinness suddenly rushed to tell me how good I looked. How I finally looked “healthy.”

Similarly, when I first started going to AA meetings, old-timers liked to joke that they “spilled more than I drank.” They, too, fell into the appearance trap. All they saw was a fresh-faced (courtesy of a month in rehab), 23-year-old woman starting her adult life.

They didn’t know I’d spent the nine months before rehab waking up with shaking hands and a jittering heart, or that I’d survived a .4 blood alcohol content, or that doctors had told me my liver enzymes were at levels they’d expect to see in a middle-aged alcoholic male. They never implied I wasn’t welcome at the meeting or didn’t belong, but there was an immediate assumption about my history based exclusively on my appearance.

Societally, we don’t think of women in their 20s and 30s as likely candidates for the kind of chronic alcohol use that can result in fatal withdrawal, but that’s a mistake. It happens, as do fatalities from other alcohol-associated conditions. (Despite the many headlines about younger generations forgoing booze, alcohol-associated liver disease is on the rise among young adults, especially young women).

Too often, we think we can identify someone with an addiction just by looking at them. We think we know what health looks like. And, especially when it comes to women’s appearances, people feel entitled to comment on them.

When I was actively addicted to alcohol, I looked for anything that might suggest the problem was not as bad as I knew in my (palpitating) heart that it was. I remember smugly leaving a friend’s house after her parents remarked on how “healthy” I looked, knowing there was a water bottle of vodka in my car just a few feet away.

I know her parents cared about me and were only trying to be supportive. I love them dearly. But I took that word and ran with it. It spun through my head on a self-satisfied loop the whole drive home. Healthy healthy healthy. I knew it wasn’t true. But their belief that it was—after so many years of concerned looks, whispers, and unrequested extra helpings of food—felt almost as good as if it was.

At the time, I knew that I was physically dependent on alcohol. I knew what the shakes were and I knew that alcohol made them go away. I knew they were a bad sign and I knew that they would probably get worse. I didn’t, however, know that alcohol withdrawal can actually kill you.

Maybe Shields didn’t know it either—a lot of people don’t. Maybe she thought she could power through and come out the other side. Maybe she went to Big Sur to do exactly that. Or maybe it all happened by accident. Whatever the circumstances, it’s a tragedy—deepened by the reality that it could have been avoided with proper medical care.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the idea that we’re more surprised by a 37-year-old woman dying from alcohol withdrawal on a backpacking trip than from a violent attack. On one hand, I get it. An entire (true crime) industry is based on stories that begin exactly like this one. I can’t fault anyone for making the same assumption I did.

Some people seem almost disappointed by the truth. Days after her cause of death was confirmed and months after the markings on her neck were identified as the work of insects, new posts like the one below popped up all over the internet.

There are people who want this story to be something it’s not. There’s something unsatisfying about mundane explanations for details that seem so dramatic—the kinds of details we’re used to following on true crime podcasts and Reddit message boards. Those stories animate and enrage us. They have a perpetrator—someone to hunt, someone to blame, and someone who might eventually be brought to “justice.” There’s a villain and a victim.

The true story of Shields’ death is villianless. There’s only the unsettling, heartbreaking reality that she died far too young, alone on a trail in Big Sur, from alcohol withdrawal.

There is no silver lining to her death. I wish she’d had more time. I wish she hadn’t died alone. I wish she’d been closer to medical care. That it happened at all can remind us of a few important realities: Appearances can be deceiving, and assumptions can be deadly. Not everyone knows about the dangers of abruptly stopping chronic alcohol use. No one is immune to pain, the desire to anesthetize, or how their brain responds to that anesthesia. Dying from alcohol withdrawal may be less dramatic than a fatal, violent attack, but it is no less tragic.

*The Body Mass Index was created in the 1830s by a mathematician (not a doctor) and is useless for gauging an individual’s health, but doctors insist on using it anyway. For more on that: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10693914/

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Dear Sober Lady,

My almost-16-year-old nephew, “Joe,” has substance addiction issues. He has been raised mostly by his grandmother and grandfather, but he has now chosen to live with his recovering addict father (his mother is also a recovering addict, but is estranged).

He wants to get clean and says he cannot while going to his current high school and living in the same area. It’s a combination of alcohol and drugs, partially facilitated by dealers who give out “freebies” to get kids hooked. He is on Medi-Cal through Kaiser, and we are all looking for a facility where he can stay for a while, as well as alternative high schools. His father is taking him to meetings every day, has gotten him a sponsor, and is taking him to therapy every week.

My question is: how do we help and make sure things are going “well” without derailing anything? Joe has been raised with love, but probably with too many conflicting (disguised as well-meaning) voices, ranging from feeling sorry for him to being angry with him. Some family members make things worse when trying to help.

His dad has been in rehab 7-8 times, and he has been sober for several years now, but he is also limited in what he understands and how to get help beyond his own needs. For instance, there’s a lot he doesn’t understand about how school systems work. I can’t see Joe living with his dad beyond a few months, but I’m hoping I’m wrong.

Thank you,

Complex Family

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Hi, CF,

Thank you for the question, and I understand how anxiety-inducing the situation must be for everyone involved.

There’s a lot to be hopeful about here:

1. Joe wants to be sober and has identified some of the potential challenges/triggers that might derail those efforts. I’m not blowing smoke when I say this is the most important ingredient of recovery and many adults never get there. It’s very promising that Joe has done so.

2. He wants to live with a sober person. Even if it took his dad several tries to get there, it sounds like he’s providing structure around recovery meetings and can identify with Joe’s experience. Having someone who “gets it” is incredibly valuable—especially if you feel like there are a lot of people who don’t get it telling you what to do.

3. He’s attending recovery meetings and working with a therapist. Both are important; 12-step meetings can be vital to recovery, but for most people, meetings are not an adequate replacement for therapy. This is especially true for teenagers.

4. Finally, Joe’s has a solid support network. Even if they come with some chaos and unhelpful attributes, having people who love you and are invested in your recovery is always going to be better than the alternative.

It sounds like there have been a lot of well-meaning cooks in the chaotic kitchen of Joe’s upbringing. That’s understandable. Raising a teenager with any combination of substance addiction or estranged parents is challenging for any family; toss in more issues with substance misuse, and those challenges multiply.

Even in the best situations, teenagers often feel like there are too many opinionated adult voices offering unsolicited and contradictory advice about how they should live their lives. If you feel like Joe’s had too many conflicting voices in his life, I’m certain he would agree.

All of which leads me to your main question: How do you help and make sure things are going well without adding to the chaos or derailing Joe’s recovery?

The answer lies in the fine art of the open-ended question. Having a lot of voices in one’s life is most annoying when they’re telling you what to do. Calling him to ask how he’s doing, if he needs anything, or even just to chat is a way of showing up for him without being yet another force that pulls him in one direction or another. The point is to make clear that you’re there for him not as a person with an addiction or troubled kid, but as a loved one.

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If you live near his dad, you can do this physically as well. See a movie or take him to dinner. Don’t use these calls or visits to grill him about his substance use or recovery. If he brings it up, you’re happy to talk about it. But having caused plenty of adult consternation in my youth, I know how frustrating it is to feel more like an “issue” than a person. Show him that you can be a port in a storm, not the gale-force winds blowing his little boat in a certain direction.

I’m not suggesting you ignore the addiction part of the equation, only that you not make it the focus of your conversations with Joe. It sounds like his dad could use help figuring out treatment options and alternative schools, and you may be able to provide more concrete assistance. A few resources may be able to help:

The first is findtreatment.gov. You can search by location and filter options by insurance, type of facility or program, etc. I’m a bit biased toward inpatient programs, because that’s what I needed, but I know people who have been through Kaiser’s outpatient chemical dependency program and speak very highly of it, if that’s an option. On the left side of that webpage, you’ll see where you can filter the results by Medicaid.

As far as schools go, you might check out the National Center for Education Statistics database, which is the U.S. Department of Education’s school locator. It lets you retrieve information on all public schools in the country. You can filter by state, county, and school type to pull up alternative schools by location. It’s a bit clunky, but comprehensive and free. There’s also Niche.com; it has a better user interface but may be less complete (at least for public schools) than NCES.

By helping Joe’s dad with some of the areas he’s less equipped to handle, you’re not only alleviating that burden for them, but you’re directing your energy (and concern) toward specific, achievable tasks. When there’s a complicated issue with several moving parts, it’s easy to feel either hopelessly overwhelmed or try to tackle them all at once. Neither is terribly effective, and both are exhausting.

If you find there is more than one logistically feasible option, you or his dad can present them to Joe and ask him what he thinks. Giving him a sense of agency over these decisions may also make him more invested in the work they’ll undoubtedly entail.

Think of yourself as half researcher, half safety net. You can come up with treatment and school options and pass them along, but hopefully those decisions will ultimately be up to Joe. The safety net part is achieved by staying present in his life. Unless he brings it up or the situation explicitly calls for it, treat him like you would any other almost-16-year-old loved one. Offer him a space to feel like an asset rather than a liability—where he can simply be your great-nephew and not your great-nephew with a substance use disorder.

Will he know on some level that your many calls and invitations stem from concern about his substance use? Sure. But with so many (well-meaning) people focusing exclusively on his “problem,” he might need a space where he feels like someone still sees the person he was before substances took over.

Good luck!

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Apologies for the newsletter arriving a day late. I had the opportunity to meet an AASL reader (and new friend), Dave, for coffee, and he kindly allowed me to interview him. It threw my routine off a bit, hence the Friday publication, but I think it’s worth it and I hope you do too.

One of the reasons I wanted to start doing these Q&As is because there are so many different experiences of addiction (and recovery). The more stories we hear, the more we realize that substance use disorders don’t present the same for everyone, nor is there only one path to recovery. I’m very grateful to Dave for letting me share his experience.

All posts on Ask a Sober Lady are free for anyone to read. That said, paying subscribers are the only way to keep the newsletter afloat. If you’re in a position to upgrade from a free to a paid subscription, I could really use the support. If not, I understand; all subscriptions, shares, and likes are appreciated!

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KM: Thanks for letting me do this, Dave. Let’s start from the beginning.

D: I grew up in the shadow of the steel mills in South Chicago. Everyone drank. There was at least one bar on every corner. Alcohol was just a part of society. My father died when I was in high school. I can still recall at his funeral, people coming up to me, a junior in high school, and saying, “You’re the man of the family now.” I had an older brother, and I couldn’t figure out why no one was telling him that, but the whole thing was surreal.

I had always felt a little outside the family, for lack of a better term. Like, at big family gatherings, I would just drift off and go watch a movie in a different room. I didn’t feel the clannish warmth. Not because of bad things; I just...never felt it. So after my dad died, I was trying to take care of my now-widowed mother. My brother was living upstairs with his new wife, but he never really was the sort of hands-on caretaker guy. I was always that little kid. If someone in the family had an object that broke, I’d put it back together.

So, in a sense, I was sort of groomed for fixing things. That never really let up.

KM: Did you start drinking in high school?

D: What’s in high school? Booze, girls, loud music, and being crazy. But also feeling awkward and wanting that feeling of awkwardness to go away. I drank a bunch of cheap wine, and that feeling would go away—things got better. So the stage was kind of set—the environment was very conducive to drinking.

And it didn’t seem like there was anything wrong with that. We all knew people who abused drugs and alcohol, and it was visible. You knew who was fucked up and not managing life—you could see it. So I just assumed everyone else was handling it well. If someone is not in jail and they have a roof over their head, you assume they’re fine.

K: Right, so if that’s not you, what’s the problem?

D: There were many crazy episodes in high school and college. There were times when I got shitfaced or blacked out, but I was also first or second [in my class] in academics.

KM: If you’re performing in a certain way, your drinking can’t be a problem, right?.

D: Yep, and that continued after graduation and throughout grad school. I met a woman, became a father, got a full-time job.

I should add: no one chooses this. No one says, ‘God damn, I want to get addicted to something.’ No, you handle things. In retrospect, of course, you realize you're handling things like social anxiety, depression, whatever. You're dealing with life.

I was handling things. And yes, there were those moments where, okay, I drank too much, my buddies drove me home or whatever, but that was by no means the norm. And I’d wake up the next day and be just fine. I was responsible; I fixed things, took care of what needed to be taken care of, and generally tried to be a good guy.

I don’t know what qualifies as a ‘functional alcoholic’ or what that even means, but at least I wasn’t fucking up my life in huge, obvious ways. But nothing happens in a vacuum. The marriage was far too early. A friend that I met in recovery says of her first husband that they were ‘playing house.’ I said yes, that’s exactly it. Except for us, there were kids involved, so it was more painful. That’s when things started to unravel. It was a really nasty, murky part of my life. I was not living at home.

KM: Where were you living?

D: My company had been sponsoring research at Iowa State University for about eight years, and they were about to shut that research down. Around the time I was getting divorced, my boss said, “Go to Iowa State University. Live there for a month, shut down research.”

Long story short, they were closing down a lot of what they were doing, and I was the first person out the door. I ended up working as a scientific consultant. I figured I’d live in Iowa temporarily. I assumed it was temporary because...well, Iowa’s not the edge of the planet, but you can kind of see it from there.

That was 34 years ago. It just started to grow on me. I loved the work I was doing, and I love living there.

K: So you left that job but stayed in a similar field?

D: I worked as a scientific consultant. Most people are busy making stuff. But if you’re making something, how do you know if things haven’t gone wrong with it, or if something goes wrong, why it happened? You may know how to make stuff, but you may not know how to do that fixing triage. I help businesses with that.

K: Sounds like everything was good...

D: So, how did I end up asking a sober lady? Okay, I was living on my own in a college town. That was tough. When you live there, it’s like there’s the towny part, there’s the college students, and then there’s me, older, unmarried, and out of place. Ames is a great place to either be a college student or to start a family, but if you’re not in those categories, it’s kind of like, ‘what the hell are you doing?’

It was fun, but there was a stagnancy to it. I’d go to work, work my ass off, walk home, pass a little hole-in-the-wall bar, and then drink my ass off with the locals.

K: Work hard, play hard?

D: Yeah, and I figured, ‘Who am I hurting?’

K: Sure.

D: I’m jumping over big gaps, but eventually I met the woman who would become my second wife. Our first date was at a wine bar. We talked until the place closed. She was special. Her father made his own beer and wine. So there was always plenty of that around. We both drank plenty.

At first, it wasn’t sloppy. There were none of those episodes. Somewhere along the way. And this is where I’m not the best. What’s the word I’m looking for...

K: Reliable narrator?

D: There we go. One night, her dad made a batch of wine that didn’t come out quite right. I can still recall very clearly that she took one sip and was like, “Whoa, that is terrible,” and never took another sip. I was like, ‘It’s not great, but I’ll definitely drink it.”

I come to find out that her first husband was a raging alcoholic. This guy was an asshole—destructive, violent, lost their house, all this stuff. I was like, I’m not that guy; you know that, right? But that night is when it started to creep in her mind that maybe I was.

One Saturday, I went out for two drinks. They were hefty drinks, but only two. Next thing I know, I wake up at three in the morning, sitting in my car, locked out of my house, and with no idea what happened. Turns out, I had phoned in to a book club, participated in the book club that my wife and I essentially ran. I don’t remember that. Doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

But then I realized I had stuff from Home Depot in the back of my car. I’d gone to the hardware store, bought stuff, and then drove around with no memory of any of it. That was truly the watershed moment. It wasn’t like I just passed out; my brain shut off, but I could keep going and be oblivious to what was happening. That’s when I realized I’d crossed into something I couldn’t just say was harmless anymore.

K: Did you tell her that?

D: It took quite a while to convince her to let me back into the house. I think I slept downstairs. But it was a very dark night. I thought, why don’t I just go and run my car into an embankment? It felt like the end.

Then, I realized I don’t trust her to take care of the dogs. I am a dog person, and my dogs truly saved my life that night.

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I told her I’d go to AA, and she said she’d heard that before. Not from me, but from her two ex-husbands. I did start going to AA. But something changed after that; she was just reliving being married to an alcoholic. But it was done. She told me to get out of the house. So, she got the house I didn’t want, and I got the dogs she didn’t want.

K: Did you keep going to AA?

D: I did for a while, but a friend I was in the meeting with introduced me to SMART Recovery. SMART Recovery is based in cognitive behavioral therapy. That’s what really helped me get to the next phase of recovery; like ok, I’ve stopped, but now what? I don’t want to keep saying, “Don’t do it, don’t do it”-I want to know what’s next. How am I processing things? How do we get through life?

D: I’ve always had an affinity not for religion but philosophy, and especially Stoicism. I came across some addiction counselors blending Stoicism and CBT. One of them is this Scottish guy living in Canada, Donald Robertson; his writing really struck a chord with me. Also Buddhism—that’s helped me understand my addiction and recovery. No one has got it together. We’re all lost. But the question is how you get through it. I hate clichés, but some of them are true. And you have to get comfortable with discomfort.

K: And that helped you understand, as you say, what’s next for you?

D: It took stopping that constant, daily depressive substance to clear my system out. I don’t know when it happened, but suddenly I was thinking differently and acting differently. I retired. I kind of like where I’m at now. I started volunteering three mornings a week at the botanical gardens. I asked if there were chores that no one else wanted to do, and they had plenty. So I said I’d do that.

K: That’s amazing.

D: So it’s a great physical workout. I do nasty shit that the Hort people don’t want to do, and they’re so grateful. I get to watch a botanical garden every season. Working in a botanical garden all through the year…it reminds you that shit changes. Life is changing all the time.

So that’s where I find myself now. It’s so easy to say, if I only found the right woman or the right job or whatever. But then what? Life doesn’t stop when things are perfect. There will always be challenges; they’ll just change.

K: So what brought you out here?

D: At one point at the beginning of the year, I said, “I’ve got a car that’s new to me. I used to drive long distances. Can I still do it in my golden years? What if I drove to both oceans?” I drove to Maryland and saw a friend I know through recovery and then drove out here to see my niece and her family.

I’m four and a half years sober now. Last night I was having dinner with my niece and her husband. They were drinking wine with the pasta. I can appreciate that it would be nice, but I honestly don’t need it anymore. I don’t even really want a glass because I strongly suspect I’d immediately ask myself ‘why stop at just one?’ So I’m just not going to open that door.

But I’m also not afraid of it. This past winter, I had a nasty cold and took medicine with alcohol in it. I wasn’t drinking it for a rush. I didn’t feel a rush. The medicine did its job. I’m okay. I’m not like living under a bridge again. There are people who tell me they could never do that. I’m not going to argue with them. That’s their life. I know that I can’t control anything except myself.

K: Good old serenity prayer

D: When I was a kid, I remember seeing a needlepoint with the serenity prayer in an old aunt’s apartment and thinking it didn’t mean anything—it was just old lady stuff. All these years later, I’ve come to find out it’s a goddamn roadmap.

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Housekeeping: Next week’s newsletter will hit your inboxes on Friday instead of Thursday.

Last week, I met a college friend for dinner in Brooklyn. I hadn’t visited New York since a brief trip in 2019, a few years before my partner and I moved to rural Washington.

I mentioned the move and Sam told me he’d seen pictures I’d posted. “It looks amazing,” he said, “but I never ever would have guessed you’d end up living with goats in farm country.”

I laughed. No one saw it coming, least of all the people who knew me in college. Sam and I met during freshman orientation and became fast friends, in no small part because we delighted in each other’s debaucherous antics. It goes without saying that I was a heavy drinker in college (a world record understatement), but I was also extremely social.

So, as Sam was accurately implying, if you had asked anyone who knew me then what my adult life would be like, they probably would have guessed I’d land in a big city with a great bar scene and a gaggle of messy friends by my side. Which is exactly how I pictured my future life, too. The notion that my days would involve cleaning up goat shit in overalls and a trucker hat would have entered the picture only as either a punishment or a punchline.

In 2005, after my Sophomore year of college, I got a publishing internship in New York. I spent my days alternating between working for free at a publishing house and working for minimum wage at American Eagle Outfitters in SoHo. (If I never hear the phrase “Can I show you our denim wall?” it will be too soon.) Nights were spent with my college boyfriend, an NYC native who knew all the bars and liquor stores that would serve almost-but-not-quite 21-year-olds.

At the time, New York City felt like a playground upon which my friends and I could play-act adulthood without the responsibilities of adult life. It was exciting but also a hazy, inherently temporary adventure.

My first (and last) attempt at being a Real Adult in a Real City came a few years later, about six months after I graduated from college. I took a publishing-adjacent job in Chicago in late December of 2007. It didn’t last long. By the end of January, I was back in California and in treatment for alcohol addiction.

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I was already addicted to alcohol before I moved to Chicago. For months, my hands shook in the morning, which led to drinking immediately after waking up, which led to constant drinking throughout the day until whenever I passed out. That routine began in the quaint, protected suburbs where my parents lived and I secretly drank.

It was during this post-college period that I learned I wasn’t actually an extrovert. Being social had simply been a useful cover for drinking. In college, no one I knew sat around and drank by themselves. To drink was to be social; I was definitely going to drink, so I guess that meant being social. On my own, in post-graduation limbo? Drinking all by myself was fine with me.

So while I can’t blame the city of Chicago for my demise (though I initially tried), it was there that my downward spiral accelerated considerably. It’s a drinking-friendly city—I was warily pleased to discover that the 7-Elevens sold hard liquor, not just beer and wine as they did in California.

I passed three different 7-Elevens on my way to work and eventually reached the point where I felt genuine pride on days when I made it past the first two stores, only to cave and slip into the third. With a shaking hand, I’d hand my ID to the clerk at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning and not get so much as a side eye. Instead, I received a very bored “see you tomorrow.” And they would.

It was a relief to get sober in a small town in Marin County—a place once known for its hippie, artsy roots (and now known for very expensive houses), but never for an abundance of bars or liquor stores.

Eventually, I moved to an even more remote place, surrounding myself with nature, animals, and a healthy dose of solitude. It’s not what I—or anyone who knew me when I was drinking—would have expected, but it fits. It feels right.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to the solitude, nature, and overall distance from the bright lights and big city until I visited friends in New York over the 4th of July (a very smart, calm, and normal time to visit the most populous city in the United States).

It sounds ridiculous, but it was jarring to see multiple liquor stores, bars, and other places to procure booze on almost every block. Restaurants featured drink specials more prominently than food—even the beverage options at the theater where I saw a show were limited to something-something vodka and something-something tequila. (I only remember important ingredients.)

It wasn’t that these were particularly tempting to me, but I found myself repeatedly muttering, ‘How does anyone get or stay sober here!?’ I wondered if my sobriety was less my own doing and more the result of sequestering myself to the life of a goat farmer. Was I really as secure in my sobriety as I felt? Or had I merely cocooned myself from temptation?

It took me a few days to realize that I had broken my first (and only) rule about recovery: Don’t assume what’s true for you will be true for someone else. I was superimposing my triggers and perspective onto an entire city and forgetting how individual and nuanced the process can be.

There may be many bars and liquor stores in New York, but there are also countless recovery meetings (both 12-step and not) and support groups, roughly a gazillion therapists with an expertise in addiction—far more than you’ll ever find in Goatlandia—and some of the best hospitals in the world.

In my rush to notice every liquor store on every block, I forgot that I actually know tons of people who got sober in New York and other major cities (even my old pal, Chicago).

Sobriety surprised me when it revealed that I’m not actually an extrovert thrilled by big city life. I wanted to be that person (she seemed cool), but it’s just not how I’m built. The noise and chaos of my drinking never allowed me to grasp that it was possible to let go of the person I thought I was supposed to be and instead figure out who I actually am.

Recovery doesn’t make you a certain kind of person; it shows you who you are once you’re no longer driven by destructive, insatiable desires. As it turns out, I’m someone who spends her free time pulling weeds and cleaning up after four goats who are mostly interested in trying to eat her hair and defecating in all the freshly cleaned spots in their stall. College me would be horrified, and she’d be wrong.

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At last, the time has come to discuss a seminal film in my recovery media canon—a movie I’ve obliquely referenced in this newsletter, but never given the full Making A Scene treatment: 28 Days.

The star-studded film hit theaters in 2000, and I have watched it countless times since. Sandra Bullock plays Gwen, a binge-drinking party girl who reluctantly finds herself in inpatient treatment for addiction. Along the way, we meet her long-suffering and (understandably) uptight sister, Lily (Elizabeth Perkins), Gwen’s boyfriend, Jasper (Dominic West), her rehab counselor, Cornell (my king, Steve Buscemi), as well as an assortment of substance-addicted misfits who we’ll come to know and—perhaps begrudgingly—love by the end of the movie.

I love 28 Days for many reasons—some personal, some narratively—but all because of how it handles certain aspects of recovery. The few people I’ve found who have seen the movie (even independently of an interest in recovery) love it. The critics and reviewers on the film rating website Rotten Tomatoes? Not so much: The movie has a meager 33% from critics and only a 50% audience (“popcornometer”) score.

If you haven’t seen the film (or it’s been a while), all you need to know is that Gwen, the aforementioned binge drinker, ruins her sister’s wedding by...doing all the things you might expect a prodigious drinker to do: She flails on the dance floor, loses her balance, and topples onto the wedding cake. In an attempt to rectify the situation, she steals the “Just Married” limo (after stripping off her bridesmaid gown) and drives it through an unassuming neighborhood looking for “a cake store,” before crashing the limo into a house. You know, classic blackout drunk wedding guest things.

Following her escapades, Gwen is given two options: jail or inpatient treatment; she wisely chooses the latter, and the bulk of the movie takes place in rehab.

Immediately, it’s clear that our gal is uninterested in sobriety. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Gwen walks down to the lake (of course there’s a lake) to find Cornell (Steve Buscemi) smoking a cigarette. Out of cigarettes and without other substances to take the edge off, she offers him “all the money in her bank account if she could just bum one of those smokes.”

So much happens in this short interaction, and it’s one example of what makes Sandra Bullock’s performance in this so great. Gwen’s jitters are palpable, but like any true Bad Kid, she sees the guy smoking away from the hubbub of everyone else and immediately assumes he’s a fellow misanthrope who doesn’t want to be in treatment and is possibly her best option to procure a substance with a “little more kick.”

As someone who’s made many friends by identifying a fellow misfit substance user hiding their addiction under the guise of being a too-cool-for-school outsider, every note of this scene rings true. If you ever became friends with the quiet kid smoking weed behind the gym at a pep rally, or skipped Freshman orientation to smoke cigarettes and loftily scoff at the childishness of capture the flag, you know what I mean. For his part, Buscemi’s deadpan silence somehow manages to scream “you’re fucked” better than the actual words ever could.

In this one-plus minute scene, Gwen’s attitude toward treatment and sobriety is made abundantly clear. She doesn’t have a problem. She doesn’t need to be here. Rehab is not for people like her. Cool people. Smart people. Writers. Someone with a job, a boyfriend, friends.

For proof, Gwen argues, look no further than the rest of her cohort—substance-addicted losers with whom she would never interact in real life. They need to be here, she explains to Cornell. They’ve got the wrong guy; her being here is all a big mistake.

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The perfectly cast Buscemi tries to remind his gum-snapping patient that her options were rehab or jail, and if she doesn’t want to take the first option, he’s more than happy to arrange a transfer to the second.

Gwen takes this warning about as seriously as she takes any warning, which is to say, she sneaks out of visiting day with Jasper and returns later that night looking like she’s on her way home from a bar crawl.

In Cornell’s office the next day, he explains to Gwen that sneaking out of rehab to get wasted is exactly the kind of thing that gets you kicked out of rehab, and she’ll be transferred to jail the following morning. After trying and (shockingly) failing to convince him that she can quit drinking anytime she wants, she scurries upstairs to her room, where the following scene unfolds.

I can’t remember exactly when I first saw this movie, certainly before I got sober. But for the next seven years, or however long it was until I got sober, one line from this movie—from Buscemi’s speech—was etched into my brain: “If anyone had a clue how wrong it felt for you to be sober, they wouldn’t even think of asking you to stay that way. They’d say shit, man, do it...do whatever you need to do to feel like a normal human being again.”

I remember thinking, exactly. Everyone who thinks I drink too much just doesn’t get it. The part that didn’t land so squarely in my teenage brain was that the words that were making me feel so seen and understood were coming from a character who, moments later, explains that he woke up one morning on an unknown street with no idea how he got there, covered in blood.

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As Cornell narrates the story of his “rock bottom,” we watch Gwen hit hers—launching herself out the window after the stash of Vicodin she tossed out the window to prove she didn’t need.

Her crash landing is the wake-up call one might have expected her to have after actually crashing a car into someone’s home, but, hey, it takes what it takes. She manages to convince Cornell to stop her transfer to jail and let her have a second chance at treatment. Predictably, her fellow patients aren’t as forgiving. The following scene feels so true to (at least my experience of) rehab that it still delights me every time I watch it. Also, Alan Tudyk as Gerhart (the blonde guy with glasses) is amazing (in this scene and throughout the movie).

Our Gwen has officially cracked (in a good way). She’s accepted that she doesn’t use substances like “normal” people and needs help to get sober. Her air of terminal uniqueness is getting pummeled by the other people in her group, and her wall of cool indifference and judgment has been replaced by raw emotion.

Perhaps most surprisingly, at least to Gwen, that raw emotion is celebrated by the very people who had just berated her. Finally, she is expressing how she truly feels. The tiny smile on her face as she settles back in her chair lets us know that their unexpected approval matters to her. She’s no longer looking down at them; these are her peers.

It’s worth pausing here and noting that the rehab industry has a long, terrible history of using humiliation and abuse to “break down” residents who they see as resisting the program, and it’s deeply wrong and ineffectual. I realize that there’s a hint of that in this scene. But if I think it crossed a line into humiliation or abuse, I wouldn’t have picked this movie for MAS.

To me, the scene reads like the airing of legitimate grievances by a group of people trying to do a very hard thing, and feeling as though one of the members of said group isn’t taking it seriously—is, in fact, getting away with breaking rules that exist for legitimate reasons.

The rest of the film follows Gwen as she navigates the remainder of her treatment, including reckoning with her past and potential future. I won’t reveal more than that, but if you’re interested and haven’t seen the movie, please watch and let me know your thoughts.

What I love most about this movie is how well it depicts the strangest thing that happens in recovery: The speed with which people you would never encounter in “real life”—people you might think are weird, annoying, or obnoxious—become your life preservers and comrades in arms.

When I went to treatment in January of 2008, one of the women in my cohort was among the most annoying people I’ve ever encountered. At no point during my 28 days did this woman become less annoying.

But if this lady ever called me at 2 am from the parking lot of a liquor store she was debating whether to enter, I would be in my car and on my way to her in two seconds flat. Her 100% sheer obnoxiousness would have no bearing on whether or not I showed up to drive her away from that liquor store and to an all-night diner. Rehab taught me that you don’t have to like someone to understand and empathize with their pain—or take an active role when asked for help.

And that’s the most annoying person I could think of. What happens more often is that your cohort of misfit drug users can become some of the closest friends you’ll ever make. You wouldn’t have ever been friends in “real life,” but how real was that life? The one where you lied to everyone, hid bottles, and no one ever understood why you couldn’t just stop.

That bizarre and beautiful alchemization is what makes 28 Days succeed. Sure, it has moments of cringy cheesiness endemic to all feel-good movies of that era (if anyone expected me to end a chant with NOOOOOO DRUGS, I would SIMPLYYYYY DIE! And no one can convince me equine therapy as depicted in the movie is a real thing), but what the film gets absolutely right is the emotional trajectory of a specific type of rehab experience.

So why did the critics hate it so much? Apparently, according to the Los Angeles Times, in a sentiment echoed by many other reviewers, “28 Days is too glib too often to make much of an impression any way you look at it.”

The gist of these reviews is that the film is too lighthearted for such a serious subject. I could point out the many serious and genuinely heartbreaking parts of the film, but I’d rather focus on the fact that recovery—especially the kind that comes through a motley crew of people with addiction—can be joyful, absurd, and hilarious. That the funniest, silliest things can make you laugh until you cry right before the life-and-death stakes of addiction reappear, as stark as ever.

Plus, it’s a helluva cast.

If you’ve seen the movie, let’s chat about it in the comments. If you haven’t, go watch it and join us!

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Hi Sober Lady,

I come from a long line of alcoholics; it’s been something I’ve kept an eye on my whole life, but luckily, I’ve never been attracted to drinking at all. The same can’t be said for my cousin, who recently graduated from high school and is starting college out of state in the fall. She hasn’t dealt with anything like arrests yet, but I’m becoming increasingly concerned. Over the past few months, I got several late-night drunk dials asking to pick her up from weeknight parties, and she definitely showed up noticeably drunk to last Thanksgiving. It generally seems like she has very little self-control around booze. I’m worried about what this will look like for her in college.

Her father has had stints of sobriety, but he remains what I consider to be a high-functioning alcoholic. I’ve seen a lot of people in recovery say something along the lines of an addict won’t quit until they truly want to, but my question is: As someone who got sober pretty young, do you think there’s anything someone could have said to reach you before your drinking truly became a problem? I’m already fighting an uphill battle being in my 30s and wanting to talk to a soon-to-be college kid about drinking, but she’s a pretty thoughtful and analytical girl, so I’m wondering if there’s any way to reach her before this becomes a real problem?

Best,

The “Cool” Relative

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Hi Cool Relative,

Thank you for the question; I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I would love to have a tidy, hopeful answer for you—a neat sentence or two that would allow your cousin to understand that she’s playing with fire and has a decent chance of getting burned. Unfortunately, I don’t. What I can tell you is that my familial history of alcoholism was made abundantly clear to me when I was her age, and it made exactly no difference in how I used or even thought about alcohol.

I don’t say this to discourage your involvement. You can play an important role here; it may just be a little more involved than a one-off conversation. While I can only speak from my own experience as someone whose teenage self sounds a lot like your cousin, it may help to understand why I was so resistant to discussions about my alcohol use and my family’s history.

In my mind, there was a huge distinction between being a young adult who was also, shall we say, an enthusiastic drinker and being a real adult with real adult responsibilities while also being an alcoholic. As a now middle-aged teetotaler, I can draw a straight line from one to the other, but whether it was my budding alcoholism or lack of a fully developed frontal lobe, I was simply not going to acknowledge any relationship between my being a normal teenager who’s just having fun, okay??!! and [parent/relative with addiction] who I’m probably still mad at for having that addiction!!

Again, it’s easy to see the relationship now, but teenage Katie makes a valid point. (It may not outweigh the validity of your points, but valid is valid.) Your cousin is likely not the only kid partying on weeknights during the second semester of their senior year of high school; it’s pretty common for kids her age to start drinking around this time. It is possible that her behavior is simply that of a 17 or 18-year-old who is newish to alcohol use and ecstatically on the brink of what feels like freedom/adulthood. Put another way: There’s probably a kid out there who is doing the same thing right now and won’t end up with alcohol use disorder or any kind of addiction.

Risk-wise, is that a false equivalency given her family history? Probably. She’s statistically at higher risk than a hypothetical kid without addiction in his family. Showing up to Thanksgiving obviously drunk isn’t a great look and can be a warning sign, but an increased risk isn’t the same thing as a predetermined outcome. More importantly, it’s extremely hard to sell a teenager on the idea that she should behave differently from all of her friends because Dad and Grandpa drank (or still drink) too much.

If her father has had “stints of sobriety,” she’s probably well aware that alcohol can be addictive. If you think she’s truly unaware that addiction runs in families, it’s fine to enlighten her, but I’d do so casually. If she comments on her Dad’s drinking or her own, you can say something like, “You know that runs in families, right? Keep an eye on that when you’re away at school,” or something along those lines. But I think she probably knows—as I did—and just thinks that information is a world away from being applicable to her.

The last reason I wouldn’t bring up her drinking right now, when she’s unlikely to fully appreciate the risk, is so you can leave the door open for that conversation in the future. When I was her age, and throughout college, I had a list of people in my head who had expressed any type of concern about my drinking, which I automatically interpreted as criticism. The people on that list, my young, moronic brain insisted, were not to be trusted. They were people who wanted me to either drink like they did (which was boring as hell, that same brain told me) or not drink at all, which was obviously not an option. Those people were not to be trusted. Those people could never be told the full truth.

Send questions and feedback!

The people I did reach out to when I was in crisis, or when I was brave enough to raise the subject of my own alcohol use, were the people who picked up the phone when I called. They were the people who listened to me ramble frantically, asked if I was safe, followed up without disapproval or reproach, and always, always gave me the impression that what mattered most to them was my safety and happiness.

If drinking the way I was drinking made me happy (as I claimed, lying to both myself and others), then their primary concern was my safety. There was no telling me what to do; no warning me about my family history; there was simply the sense that I had a judgment-free port in any storm.

That’s the person I hope you can be for your cousin. The person who loves her unconditionally, who is there for her when things get messy, and who never acts like he knows what she needs better than she does. I hope you can be the person she trusts with the things she’s too scared to tell anyone else.

She’s going to need someone like that in her life—we all do. When I was your cousin’s age, I was incredibly fortunate to have a pair of adults in my life who were in that sweet spot of being at least a decade older than me but not so old that they seemed parental. They were the steady 30-something cousin to my wild, 18-year-old self, and I needed them more than I ever could have known at the time.

They couldn’t and didn’t prevent me from becoming an alcoholic because nothing could. I had to keep going until I crashed; it was the only way I would truly believe that I was addicted to alcohol. I hope that’s not true for your cousin, but it could be.

Knowing I wouldn’t listen if they tried to tell me what my “problem” was, those adult-friends gave me space to be the messiest version of myself without condemnation or sanctimony. They gently suggested that things didn’t have to be the way they were. They spent a lot of time “just checking in.” It helped more than I can say.

The fact that your cousin is already calling you to pick her up from drunken escapades suggests that she sees you as this kind of person. Be there for her. Express concern for her safety and well-being. Tell her that you’re always on her side. Then, if and when the time comes for her to take a hard look at her alcohol use, I’d bet good money that you’re someone she turns to for support.

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’s first memoir, Drunk Mom, gave readers an unsparing look at a new mom’s alcoholism and eventual sobriety. Written as both a love letter and apology to her son, Bydlowska’s latest book, Unshaming, discusses the relapses that followed the success of her first memoir and the relationship between shame (or unshaming) and recovery.

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KM: Hi Jowita! Thanks for doing this. Congratulations on the publication of “Unshaming.”

JB: Thanks! I never thought I would make a career based on my substance use. Drunk Mom was initially supposed to be a novel. I write fiction. And I was very against self-help. Drunk Mom was not in any way intended to be a memoir, and certainly not self-help. But eventually it had to be a memoir because there just wasn’t enough fiction in it.

When it came out, my publicist was like, “It’s good to say you wrote this book because you wanted to help new parents,” so I would just repeat that phrase. And I did get letters from people the book helped, and that was really meaningful, but it wasn’t necessarily what I was trying to do when I wrote it.

[Unshaming] was completely different because I went in wanting to share my experience and connect with others, which is what we do in recovery—at least most of us.

KM: So, before we get into all of that, how did your substance use start, and how did you get into recovery in the first place?

JB: I was a blackout drinker from the first drink; my drinking was not of the ‘educational variety.’ I was one of these special people who blacked out, had a terrible time, came to in a cold bathtub at 13 or 14, and immediately thought, ‘I need to do this again.’

KM: Yes, exactly same—minus the cold bathtub.

JB: So that probably gives you a good idea of what my drinking was like and why I ended up in AA. Were you in AA?

KM: I was for a long time. I haven’t been in years, but if I really were worried about drinking, I’d go back in a heartbeat.

JB: I went to AA because—well, I didn’t know there was anything else. I don’t actually think there was anything else. I was 27 the first time I got sober, and I only knew about AA from movies, but it seemed like something I would maybe want to do.

This was around 2006. I went to AA, and I credit it with giving me sobriety and discipline and, frankly, brainwashing me enough to get my shit together. I was sober for about three and a half years. Everything was fine until we got to the Higher Power part. It wasn’t even the Higher Power, exactly; I just eventually ended up feeling like I could never please this Program. It’s funny because there’s this part in AA where they say progress, not perfection, but I think that’s bullshit.

KM: Ugh. That’s when the culture of the meeting really starts to matter.

JB: I live in Toronto, and it has a very specific vibe. They say Toronto is the only city in Canada that’s similar to the Bible Belt in the United States. We said the Lord’s Prayer at the end of every meeting, all the hand-holding, it was very much like church. And there was a time when I needed that discipline; I needed to see sober young people; these were people I would probably drink and do drugs with, only we’re in a church basement with the lights on, and everyone’s sober.

KM: And drinking shitty coffee.

JB: And smoking. Anyway, I relapsed just before I found out I was pregnant, and when I came back to meetings, people would say, ‘Well, did you not pray enough? Did you not go to enough meetings? What is your higher power? Who is your higher power? You have to decide whether there’s God or there isn’t.’

KM: Not super helpful.

JB: No. But then I got pregnant and...I mean, the baby was like that siren on the top of a car. Alarms were going off. Because I’d never felt love like this before—not for a man, not for writing, or anything else, and I’m still battling the urge to drink. How could alcohol be bigger than the love I had for this little creature? How could something be so powerful?

Send questions and suggestions

I managed to stay sober through the pregnancy, but I relapsed right after—it was probably post-partum related, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. I had all these little stupid rituals set up. I fed him formula so that I wouldn’t breastfeed him. I would sneak bottles into the bottom of his stroller and sip them on walks. It’s a crazy way to live. Babies alone are hard enough work, right?

KM: And hiding drinking is a full-time job on top of that.

JB: So there were 11 months of drinking after he was born; all of which I talk about in Drunk Mom. I eventually agreed to go to rehab, but I did such an addict thing. I told myself that I was writing a novel about a young mother in a big city who is drinking in secret. She’s pushing a stroller and hiding bottles and doing all this weird shit too, so I’m really just doing research for the novel.

KM: Classic drinking-writer rationalization.

JB: Exactly. Even in rehab, I went with a notebook, and I was like, ‘I’m just here to research my novel. I’m gonna observe these sad people with addictions.’

Obviously, there was part of me that knew I was there because I needed it, and my addiction was out of control, but for the longest time, I just said everything was about the novel.

But I also decided to go to rehab because I was so baffled about why I couldn’t stop drinking. If [endangering my son] didn’t stop me, nothing would. I figured this would at least give me a break from my environment. I’ll be supervised somewhere for a month, and maybe when they release me, I’ll have a different frame of mind.

I remember sitting in rehab about two weeks in, and then you know we had one of those relapse prevention counseling sessions, and they were asking about what—be it drugs or anything else—might be triggering.

KM: And your primary substance was alcohol?

JB: Yes, but only because I encountered it first; it could have been anything. So they asked this, and immediately in my head I’m like, ‘well, MDMA is great and not addictive, and I like techno, and it’s going to be amazing.’ It was like my relapse was already in there—there was no removing it, no fucking spiritual surgery that could cut it out of me.

I know people have spiritual experiences, and I know they have come to Jesus moments, and all kinds of things, but that wasn’t the case for me. What was it like for you? I’m just curious.

KM: My drinking started very much the way you describe yours. From the jump, I was like ‘this is the thing that will fix me.’ It didn’t matter that I was blacking out or barfing in a trash can—I just wanted to do it again.

I didn’t have the spiritual experience in like a one big moment way, but I ended up in the ER, and the psych ward, and everything around that broke through my denial and made me realize that I either had to stop drinking completely or I would die.

But I am conflicted about rehab—even though it unequivocally saved me—because mostly what it did was keep me away from alcohol, for 30 days. And thinking about how expensive rehab is...even as a “success story,” it doesn’t feel like it should cost as much as it does.

JB: I’m a huge fan of the YouTube show Soft White Underbelly. It’s a guy doing a lot of interviews with people on Skid Row in LA, but he interviews addicts, sex workers, and people who we don’t usually get interviews from. The first question that comes to mind is always, ‘Who helps these people?’

I’m in Canada, we have free healthcare, but even for that, like, when I wanted to go to rehab the second time, you know, they said there’s no beds available for two months. I could be dead in two months! Especially if I were an opioid addict, with all the stuff that’s on the street—two months is a long time. Even as an alcoholic, I couldn’t wait two months. I had to take out a loan to pay for it. Recovery is a privilege on so many levels.

KM: Even though AA and rehab are very different, that’s one thing AA has going for it: It’s free, available to anyone, and accessible, at least something.

JB: That’s true, and eventually, I went to agnostic meetings—I guess it makes sense that with so much traditionally religiously minded AA here, it would also be the hub of the Agnostic AA movement.

I chaired a meeting once, and I invited a speaker who was using psychedelics, and my meeting was so liberal that no one cared. They were like ‘fuck yeah, this is our church.’ No one said she was doing the Program wrong. So I’ve gone to the most liberal meeting you could possibly come up with, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally free of judgment.

It’s funny, I’m listening to you, and it sounds like we both don’t want to totally disregard AA because we got something out of it.

KM: Definitely. I got sober in the Bay Area, which is very different from the Bible Belt. The meetings I went to were pretty laid back about the God stuff. But that doesn’t mean I never encountered judgment. I take anti-anxiety medication. I know people who would consider that a relapse, and that’s just noise I don’t need in my head.

My addiction was to alcohol, and as long as I am sober from alcohol, I consider myself sober. If someone convinces me that an anti-anxiety pill before the dentist means I’m no longer sober, I’ve lost the plot of what my problem was in the first place. Because if I’m not sober, what’s to stop me from going out and drinking?

JB: I love that. I’m gonna try to remember that: if I weren’t sober, I would be drinking. In the past, I was on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication as well, and I had a sponsor who was like, ‘By taking these, you’re not being sober.’ I had that exact thought of, like, OK, well, I’ll just quit [AA].

KM: That makes me furious. And annoyed, because AA is actually pretty clear about members not being doctors and how they shouldn’t give medical advice. You’re not really supposed to police other people’s recovery period.

JB: I think that’s part of why there’s so much shame around relapse. After Drunk Mom came out, there was a lot of attention—and a lot of bad attention. It was published at a time when people made fun of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Anna Nicole Smith. My book comes out during this timeline, and it’s like, “Look at what a horrible mom she was.”

But then, on the flip side, I became this poster child for sobriety. I’m on television and podcasts, and I’m doing CBC [Canada’s National Radio] commentary about the Toronto mayor who relapsed. They’re asking me to do all this stuff because I’m sober, but I’m actually not sober; I’ve been relapsing, so I’m just like cosplaying sobriety. I was living this crazy, hellish life where I was like social media sober. Meanwhile, people are still writing to me about Drunk Mom, saying it helped them get sober. And I was so happy for them, but I also had incredible shame over being a hypocrite.

KM: Is that where “Unshaming” came from?

JB: Yes. I felt perpetually ashamed because of how much shame is attached to relapse. It’s cute when you relapse once and come back and have this story of redemption, but when you do it 20 times, or you keep doing it for years, it’s no longer cute. It just became a part of me. And I wasn’t necessarily drinking more, but I was drinking in a way where I gave up on doing anything else. So Unshaming became, intentionally this time, a memoir, where I wanted to talk about my experience, I wanted to talk about my experience with shame and relapse, I don’t think that’s something we talk about enough in recovery. I wanted to connect with others.

KM: I think that’s true for lots of parts of recovery. I can’t speak directly to relapsing on alcohol, but there can be shame around not being “fixed” by sobriety. Like, ‘why aren’t you better if you’re sober? Why are you still depressed or anxious? Why are you still engaging in other unhealthy and destructive behaviors?’

JB: That’s totally true. What you’re describing—I call it relapse because I’m talking in the context of addiction—but [often in recovery spaces] there isn’t a lot of room for repeating a behavior that [people in the recovery space] don’t like. It’s like ‘we’re gonna let you get away with it once, we’re gonna clap, we’re gonna have a welcome party for you, you crawl out of depression or addiction, welcome back, but don’t do it again.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve relapsed. And I’ve had long periods of sobriety—I would have two years or six months, but, to me, anything past three months, I consider a period of sobriety. Even though my drinking wasn’t at all as bad as it used to be, it was still a crutch I was using and hiding.

I start Unshaming by talking about this horrible accident when I rode a bike into a cement wall and crushed my face and broke my cheekbones. I had to come up with a story the next day because I don’t want to tell people that I was drinking because I’m supposed to be sober. So I’m not telling the doctors, my coworkers, or my loved ones. , and and I have to come up with a story the next day, because I don’t want to tell people that I was drinking, so you know, I’m like, oh, I was on a bike ride, it was first thing in the morning, I’m not telling doctors what happened, I’m not telling my loved ones, and it was just getting harder and harder to cover up.

So I started to wonder, OK, what if I fucked up 20 times? That’s really bad. That means this is my pattern now, and I’m a chronic relapser. But then I also thought—and not in a toxic-positivity way, but genuinely—that it also meant I had hope 20 times. There are 20 times when I picked myself up and got back into recovery.

KM: That’s such a great way to think about it. And such an accomplishment! Because when you’re in [the throes of addiction], it seems so impossible to get out of it. Fighting for sobriety that many times is something to be proud of.

JB: It’s also just made me realize how individual recovery is for people, which is why AA doesn’t work for everybody. I use my relapse and recovery to explain the whole process of unshaming and what it means. I know it’s a made-up word; I’m not starting like an unshaming brand or anything—I don’t have a spiel. I know that the way you make shame smaller is by sharing your darkness and bringing more light to it. I probably picked that up from AA or even the Catholic Church, but I really believe it.

The key, though, is to share it with someone you trust. AA might be the safe place for some people, but it’s not for everyone. Maybe it’s a therapist or loved one. But sharing it with someone you trust definitely eliminates a lot of shame.

In the book, I talk about how, at the end of my last bout of drinking, everyone left: my son left, my partner was on a trip, and it was just this little Chihuahua puppy and me. I had no one to talk to, so I would whisper into his ear. Please get me out of this loneliness. Please help me out of this shame. And that was the first creature I shared my shame with. And, weirdly enough, that became enough of a connection, and I was able to get on Zoom and start going to recovery meetings again.

KM: When I first started writing about the messy and shameful parts of my drinking, there were definitely people who were like...“Why are you telling the internet this?” And there are still probably people thinking, “Why is she continuing to tell the internet this?” But I do it because it takes the charge out of the things I was ashamed of—especially if someone else can relate and feel less alone as a result.

In AA, they say you’ll eventually look at the past without regret. That’s not entirely true for me. I have plenty of regrets about the past, but I don’t feel shame about them the way I used to. And for me, that’s the difference between keeping something inside and saying it out loud.

JB: People need that. So many readers have written to me, but one of the most devastating is this one I got years ago from a woman who said, “I’m not looking for advice, I don’t want anything, I just want to tell you what I’m doing. I have four kids, I’m married to a doctor, small town in the Midwest, and I drink every day, and I drive my kids drunk. I just needed to tell someone that.”

I think there’s such a huge liberation in being open about all this darkness. Liberation in just being yourself and not lying to anyone.

KM: It’s important to have those spaces. I really believe there needs to be more space and support for people who take different paths. It’s not a straight upward trajectory, and it’s not universal; the more we allow each person to evolve on their own without berating them for how they should be doing things, the more people will start to examine their relationship with substances or addictive behaviors and look at what’s underneath that urge. But we have to give them room for that to happen.

JB: I absolutely agree, and this is why I also like your newsletter, because it’s clear you’re not trying to push your particular brand of recovery, which is what most people who publish memoirs or write newsletters do.

After Drunk Mom, that’s what people wanted me to do! I had so many people say, “Why didn’t you do anything with Drunk Mom [as a brand]? You could have blah blah.” I don’t want to. It’s not that I don’t care, but I’m only qualified to talk about what did and didn’t work for me.

KM: Exactly. It always drives me crazy when someone has a bad experience with AA and then writes a book about how AA is bad for everyone. Like, that’s not actually different from saying, “I had a great experience in AA, so it will be great for everyone.”

So, now that “Unshaming” is out, what are you working on?

JB: I’m primarily a fiction writer, but I am working on a third book about addiction. This one is about the loved ones of addicts. There are so many, obviously, in my own life and also the people I hear from.

I have learned that loved ones of addicts have a really hard time talking about themselves. Everything that they tell you is about what the addict did, didn’t do, how they were in relation to the addict, and I think that’s quite heartbreaking. I want to hear from a bunch of people: parents, sisters, brothers, and kids. My son is letting me interview him for it, so I wanted to...I want to know what we’re doing to them.

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Among the many things I’m grateful for about my sobriety, high on the list is when I got sober. Alcohol took me down hard and fast—I was only 23 years old, and it was 2008. The 23-year-old part is nice because I’ve gotten to live through almost two decades without alcohol addiction pummeling me at every turn. The 2008 part is lucky because iPhones had existed for less than a year. Other “camera phones,” as we olds called them, were around, but the notion that we’d use them to document and share every moment of our lives was still pretty foreign.

Combined with the sad, self-imposed isolation of the end of my drinking, the visual documentation of my escapades is pretty tame. Are there a slew of pictures from high school and college where purple eyeliner is smudged across my barely open lids and a hazy where am I smile plays on my lips? Sure. Multiple snapshots of me drinking from a handle of vodka while dressed as Max from “Where the Wild Things Are?” Undeniable.

But I shudder to think of the pictures and videos that might exist if I were drinking now, when nearly everyone carries the ability to record high-definition video in their pockets. Is that hypothetical terror amplified when I think about the culture of sharing online anything the lens captures? Absolutely.

But I’m also just a random person. Other than our collective appetite for schadenfreude, there’s no reason for strangers on the internet to care about an embarrassing video of me. The same cannot be said for Hunter Biden.

The sole surviving son of former President Biden is known for myriad scandals—some fabricated or engineered by his father’s political opposition, others undeniably the younger Biden’s own doing.

If you’re worried this post will somehow relitigate those scandals, you underestimate how much I love and appreciate my readers. I would never do that to you, and I’d never do it to myself.

But, as Biden recently tweeted, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re almost certainly familiar with his substance use, addiction, and the interpersonal mess that comes with active addiction and the resources to feed its insatiable appetite. You’ve probably seen pictures of him in motel rooms with drugs, drug paraphernalia, and in various states of undress. What you have seen, in other words, is someone with an addiction to drugs in the throes of that addiction.

You’ve seen those images because they were incredibly valuable to his father’s political opposition and various media entities. You’ve seen them because of long-held societal stigma about crack cocaine and the people who use it. You’ve seen them because we delight in watching people who were born with privilege far above our own fall to depths we consider well beneath us.

Until very recently, Biden hadn’t been particularly vocal about his addiction and recovery. He wrote vividly about both in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things (which I read and enjoyed). He did some press around its publication, but in a world of extremely online people, he was comparatively silent.

Last month, Biden appeared on Twitter/X and Substack, quickly becoming one of the internet’s most-discussed social media accounts. Instead of scandal or snark—two reliable sources of trending topics—Biden’s account was making headlines for posts with much rarer qualities: earnestness, accountability, and self-deprecation.

In one of the most widely discussed interactions, a Trump supporter (or “MAGA influencer,” according to The Daily Beast) asks Biden what’s on his laptop (the source of all those pictures). Biden replies that the infamous hacked and stolen laptop has been available for anyone to peruse for years, asking if she’s been living under a rock. It’s all pretty normal Twitter fare until she replies that she’d “rather live under a rock than smoke it.”

His response was simple, straightforward, and indicative of how he’s been talking about his recovery: “Me too. It was awful.”

This is not a radical statement. Addiction is awful. Anyone who has lived through a serious addiction to substances can attest to the nightmare of living in its grip. There’s a reason it destroys families, ruins lives, and otherwise causes incalculable harm. The pictures on his laptop didn’t depict Biden as a rich party guy having the time of his life; they showed a person trapped by the all-consuming need to keep drugs in his system and his brain detached from reality.

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His response did, however, put the Trump supporter in an awkward position. What do you say when your snarky, pointed jab is simply an accepted part of your target’s everyday reality? He knows he was addicted to crack; his recovery requires a daily awareness of that fact.

If the Trump supporter’s response is any indication, there’s nothing else to do but similarly acknowledge the reality. She responds, “Well, damn, Hunter, that makes me sad. Glad you’re off that stuff. Hope you stay clean,” and wishes him good luck.

Biden has had similar interactions over the past few weeks with people who previously delighted in front-page stories about his substance use. The replies to his tweets about recovery are filled with people sharing how addiction shaped their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

I don’t mean to imply all is happiness and harmony over on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Biden’s mad about plenty and making his feelings known. There’s also some weird crypto stuff I don’t understand or care about. But when it comes to his previous substance use, Biden’s comments demonstrate several important ideas for recovery: honesty about one’s past use, accountability for harms caused, and a desire to use that honesty and accountability to emphasize the humanity of every person in the grip of addiction. He also makes fun of himself—which I think is an important part of recovery—but is probably all the more true for someone with as much media coverage as he’s gotten.

I don’t know Biden personally; I have no idea what his life is really like. But I know the most traumatic events of his life have been public political fodder since he was a child. I know the whole world has access to a laptop full of images of him in the darkest crevices of his addiction. I know that media pundits and politicians made names for themselves by mocking every detail of his addiction they could find. Given all that, it’s inspiring to see him come out with the message, Yep, that was me, and that’s what my addiction was like. If you’re in a similarly dark place, know that help is out there, and you’re not alone.

Facing this shit head-on negates anyone else’s ability to shame you for it.

When I first started writing about what it felt like to be physically and psychologically dependent on alcohol and the things I did in service of my addiction, people would say it was “brave.” The truth is, it had nothing to do with bravery.

Addiction thrives in silence and isolation; left to its own devices, it’s a weed that will choke the life out of everything around it. The more you keep hidden away because you’re ashamed to look at it, the faster that weed will grow. Sharing the things I was ashamed of removed the charge around them. Rather than being cause for concern, talking openly about how I sometimes miss alcohol or the challenges of being sober is crucial to my recovery because it’s all the same stuff I lied about when I was drinking.

Once you put words to the thing that haunts you, it’s no longer an unknown monster hiding under the bed. You may still be dealing with a monster, but now you can see it, identify it, and figure out what to do about it. If you ask, people who have lived with the same monster will help you deal with it. Eventually, you may get the chance to do the same for others.

One of the benefits of having someone as polarizing as Hunter Biden in these discussions is how thoroughly it underscores that you don’t have to like, agree, or have anything in common with someone to see their humanity. You don’t have to like their paintings, agree with their dad, or know anything about crypto. You just have to know that no one chooses addiction. Someone may choose to use drugs—plenty of people do for a variety of reasons—but no one willingly hands the reins to their life over to a bottle or pill or powder and says, “Yep, go ahead and fuck everything up. While you’re at it, make my loved ones collateral damage.”

Still, that’s what addiction does. No one makes it to the other side without a long list of things they aren’t particularly proud of. That’s true whether three or 3 million people witnessed your fall. What Biden is currently illustrating is how taking accountability for one’s past isn’t about self-flagellation, public apologies, or pity. It’s about accepting reality, finding compassion, and filling the space that used to hold so much shame with gratitude and a little bit of humor.

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I’m not a doctor or mental health professional, so my advice shouldn’t be construed as medical or therapeutic. You are free to take or leave it.

Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, I became well-versed in the “Very Special Episode” of TV. A strange mashup of regular TV and after-school special, these episodes featured a show’s regular cast of characters encountering an Issue (drinking, drugs, divorce, disordered eating, date rape—even things that don’t start with D) that didn’t typically arise in their otherwise charmed lives.

In these early days, there was a nice little lesson about either not doing these things (drinking, drugs) or finding a trusted adult to have a brief but meaningful conversation with before the episode concludes.

As I got older and TV shows became more complex, there were fewer obvious morality tales and more reliance on character archetypes. We had the protagonist’s fun-loving but will-get-you-suspended sidekick, the queer friend, the nerd with a crush, the very hot, brooding guy who’s secretly dyslexic—ok, that last one is just My So-Called Life—but similar characters appear consistently throughout this era of television.

These archetypes were often a vehicle for the narrative tropes with which we’re so familiar. If the character is using, all sorts of juicy crises might unfold. If they’re in recovery, the threat of relapse is an easy way to build tension and drama. If the character actually relapses, it can trigger a slew of heart-wrenching, messy plotlines.

Too often, this results in the character becoming more of a plot device than a person. It’s difficult to think of characters in recovery who aren’t largely identified by their past use or current sobriety. One relatively early exception to this familiar character arc is The West Wing’s Leo McGarry (played by the incomparable John Spencer).

As Chief of Staff to President Bartlet (Martin Sheen), McGarry’s previous substance use isn’t mentioned until the fourth episode of the first season. When it is addressed, it’s the least significant plot point—all we learn is that he attends AA meetings.

The specifics of McGarry’s history aren’t addressed until halfway through the season. The absence of discussion in the show’s early days isn’t because Leo’s a minor character—he’s central to the show. In a dash of realism in a show with an otherwise sketchy record in that department, the President’s inner circle has more pressing things to deal with than the fact that half a decade ago, the Chief of Staff misused substances.

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The only episode in the show’s seven-season run in which Leo’s past use becomes enough of a plot point to clear the (detailed and rigorous) criteria for inclusion in Making a Scene occurs in episode 3 of season 9.

In “Bartlet for America,” show creator and writer Aaron Sorkin (himself sober at the time) subverts the traditional relapse narrative without diminishing its stakes.

If you need spoiler alerts for a show that ended more than 20 years ago: Spoiler alert.

The setup: President Bartlet recently admitted to the public that he has a relapsing-remitting case of Multiple Sclerosis. He was aware of his diagnosis while campaigning, but never disclosed it, opting instead to have his physician wife (Stockard Channing) treat him for the incurable, progressive disease. Only the smallest handful of people knew before he became President, most of whom were in his immediate family.

Politicians in the opposition (Republican) party are deeply outraged and want to know who knew what, and when. They’re also eager to do as much damage to the administration as possible, regardless of the connection to Bartlet’s illness.

As Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry is high on the list for a congressional hearing, ostensibly about Bartlet’s diagnosis.

From the outset, it’s clear that McGarry is worried about something other than his knowledge of Bartlet’s MS. There’s a past incident—something that happened on the campaign trail—that a smug and weaselly congressman named Gibson was somehow privy to.

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The day of the hearing, McGarry’s lawyer, Jordan Kendall (Joanna Gleason), is begging Leo to tell her what Gibson has in his back pocket, as it increasingly looks like he’s planning on torpedoing the Chief of Staff with it. The scene alternates between McGarry recounting the story to Kendall and flashbacks of the incident.

I had a little trouble tracking down clips I could embed, so, uh, don’t mind the Korean subtitles on the first clip (unless you speak Korean, in which case, enjoy) and the questionable video quality on the second clip. The audio works well on both, and if you’d like a transcript of the full episode, you can find that here.

The scene:

If I hadn’t known that Sorkin was in recovery when he wrote these lines, I would have after this scene. He succinctly encapsulates the self-imposed isolation and visceral yearning that drives addiction. I can remember being drunk and thinking his exact words before I’d ever heard them on TV. How can you have enough of feeling like this? How can you not want to feel like this longer?

And while John Spencer was an incredible actor, the fact that he, too, was in recovery undoubtedly deepens his portrayal.

Every moment of Spencer’s performance is layered and understated. We see him grapple with his desire for the Johnnie Walker Blue. We feel the slight shame under his reasonable, if not accurate, excuse for declining to partake (the need to stay sharp for his candidate’s debate).

Even the casual urgency of Spencer’s “now gimme a sip of that” is simultaneously subtle and gutting. Unlike traditional relapse narratives, we know that McGarry physically makes it out of the relapse and back to recovery relatively unscathed. What we don’t know is if, years later, the incident will destroy him anyway.

Predictably, Mr. “I don’t get drunk in front of people. I get drunk alone,” keeps drinking after the big-money boys leave. Downstairs, candidate Bartlet is having an MS attack, and no one can find McGarry, who is passed out in his hotel room.

When one of the men he was drinking with earlier knocks on his door after forgetting his briefcase, it’s clear that McGarry has been indulging in a party of one.

Unfortunately, that man is none other than Congressman Gibson, who is now in the committee hearing armed with the knowledge that not only did Bartlet and McGarry hide the President’s MS, but McGarry hid his campaign trail relapse.

The next clip is short, but has to be (according to my anecdotal observations) one of the most-referenced exchanges about addiction recovery on TV.

I love and hate what Leo says here. He’s right that alcoholism doesn’t have anything to do with being smart or stupid. His analogy about anorexia is apt. Addiction most certainly can be ‘a family thing.’ But the MENSA line is obnoxious. If alcoholism doesn’t have anything to do with being smart or stupid, why does it matter how many alcoholics are in the Fraternal Order of Smarty Pants?

I digress. The last part of the scene is one I couldn’t find an embeddable clip for, but it’s short enough that it doesn’t matter.

Kendall asks McGarry who knows about his relapse, and he tells her that only Josh and Bartlet know. When she asks why, he replies, “I went to rehab. My friends embraced me when I got out. You relapse, it’s not like that. ‘Get away from me’— that’s what it’s like.”

I could write a whole post about that line, but for now, I’ll just say that this is an unfortunate and too common response to a relapse. It’s ridiculous to spout platitudes like “relapse is a part of recovery,” and then treat people who actually relapse like failures or pariahs. Nonetheless, it happens, and it’s another element of the scene that feels painfully accurate.

If you haven’t seen the episode or haven’t watched it in a while, I highly recommend it. It’s worth rewatching just for Spencer’s superb performance. And if you have other examples of characters in recovery who are depicted like actual people, please let me know in the comments or via email! I’m always looking for the next scene to make.

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I was in an airport bar somewhere between Montana and Chicago when I heard that Heath Ledger had died. It was January 22nd, 2008, and I was doing my best to act as if my entire world was not crumbling beneath my feet. I was coming home from a trip to visit my boyfriend, who had discovered that the only thing I was more compulsive about than drinking was lying about my drinking.

When I got on the airplane in Montana, an older man was seated next to me. After takeoff, we both promptly ordered drinks. I was 23 and, although I have no evidence to support this, I remember thinking he was a football coach. At least, he looked the part: He had a southern drawl and a maroon shirt bearing the name of a sports team.

Mostly, what I remember is his delight over how quickly I finished my first drink and ordered another. “Atta girl!” he said, slapping the knee of his blue jeans, and told the waitress he’d take another cocktail as well. By the time our plan landed, we’d both had several drinks.

“I hope you don’t mind if I say,” he began, leaning in too close as the plane taxied on the runway, “I appreciate a young lady who knows how to hold her liquor.” At the time, I was aware this was a weird thing to say for a stranger to say to a woman at least 30 years his junior, but I couldn’t help but flush with a sick pride.

I’d just spent the week trying and failing to hide my chronic alcohol use from the person I loved—a person who’d made it clear that he was disgusted and disappointed by my drinking. So if some random man wanted to compliment me for the same behavior I’d been so resoundingly criticized for, I’d take it.

I can’t remember if I stopped at an airport bar during a layover, or, in a decision that could only be made by someone with a true dependency on alcohol, decided to hit the airport bar in Chicago before taking the train home. I just remember being in a crowd of people staring at a TV behind the bar and a shot of vodka gliding down my throat when a news anchor announced that Heath Ledger—the critically acclaimed actor of Brokeback Mountain, but whom I associated with the (equally important) teenage classic 10 Things I Hate About You—had died. Initial reports suggested that sleeping pills and other prescription medications were present at the scene, but there was little reporting beyond that.

I registered news as though I were in a dream—muttering “sad” and “oh no” along with the other customers, but more focused on finishing another drink and (reluctantly) making my way back to my real, crumbling life.

I kept drinking once I got back to my sister’s apartment and started again when I woke up in the morning. Though I don’t remember this, it was the same day (January 23rd, 2008), The Sun published a video showing Amy Winehouse smoking crack—setting the tabloids, gossip columns, and even legacy media outlets into a frenzy. The default position of these culture critics was that Winehouse was an object lesson in depravity.

This was, after all, the era of widespread ridicule of Anna Nicole Smith (both before and after her death), mockery of Lindsey Lohan, and Britney Spears for their substance misuse, multiple stints in rehab, and grainy photos taken without their consent through the windows of their homes. It’s impossible to ignore the gendered aspects of the coverage—women were portrayed as irresponsible and insane; men were more likely to be tortured and tragic. After Ledger’s death, for example, the blogger Perez Hilton sold t-shirts with a heart around Ledger’s image and the words “Why Couldn’t It Be Britney?” underneath.

Bloggers spewed unvarnished cruelty, but legacy media gave the ghoulishness a sheen of legitimate discourse. When the Winehouse video surfaced, the New York Times ultimately chalked the incident up to the singer having either narcissistic or idiotic motivations—either way, deserving of blame.

NYT Culture correspondent Jon Pareles wrote:

“Why, for instance, was Ms. Winehouse letting someone shoot video, in a private setting, of her puffing that pipe in the first place? Maybe it’s some version of ‘keepin’ it real,’ the fallacy that insists art must be autobiographical to be worthwhile, as if art were documentation rather than storytelling. Maybe it’s obliviousness, although, since the camera followed her around, she was likely to know it was there. Maybe she mistakenly trusted that whoever made the video would resist another temptation: the potential profit to be made providing it to a tabloid.

Perhaps Ms. Winehouse misunderstood what should be clear in the age of the Internet: Everything recorded can be duplicated and distributed. And possibly the video was, in its own bleary way, a kind of performance. She is keeping her audience informed if not exactly entertained.”

In every hypothetical presented, the violation of Winehouse’s privacy is presented as either cynically orchestrated by the singer for publicity (because who doesn’t want their award-winning career overshadowed by headlines about their use of crack cocaine?) or the result of her own shallow carelessness.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of any of this; I was stumbling through what would be the last day of my drinking. While writers were churning out their Winehouse think pieces for the following day, I was in the Emergency Room with a .4 Blood Alcohol Content and a cop watching my every move.

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When I met with a psychiatrist in the ER—a formality that needed to occur before my inevitable admission to the Psych Ward hours later, he kept trying to convince me that I must have had some other motivation for bringing alcohol to work with me than...simply wanting to drink alcohol. In a prolonged exchange so strange I remember it vividly among the haze of that day, the doctor was intensely focused on why I would bring a bottle of vodka to work.

“That’s not what alcoholics do,” he said. “They might leave work to drink, but they don’t bring it into the office with them.” (Which is a wild thing to say, but also, have you heard of a little television show called Mad Men?) He proceeded to tell me that his theory was that I brought alcohol to work because I hated my job (true) and subconsciously wanted to get fired (false).

I found this whole statement confusing. I was happy to have someone tell me I wasn’t an alcoholic (though I was starting to believe otherwise), but I didn’t buy that I was engaging in subconscious trickery in hopes of getting fired. I thought, and still think, that I simply couldn’t be without alcohol for any meaningful length of time.

Roughly a week later, after I’d been through detox and the psych ward (and a different psychiatrist had made a convincing case for my alcoholism), I was getting settled in an inpatient rehab. Someone got a copy of US Weekly, which is how we all learned that Britney Spears had been put on a 5150 hold in an LA psych unit after barricading herself in the bathroom with her young son.

None of the patients in my rehab needed an explanation of what a 5150 hold was (California’s involuntary psychiatric hold for up to 72 hours if a designated professional deems the individual a risk to themselves or others); at least a third of us were personally familiar with the process. While we may not have had the solemn appreciation for what it must have been like to be hounded and publicly picked apart for years, we absolutely understood the 5150 of it all. She was one of us.

That incident was the catalyst for Spears’s much-discussed conservatorship. While watching that debate unfold a few years ago, I remember thinking how surreal it was that Spears’s independence (her finances, medical decisions, career choices) had been frozen during the same 13 years that I’d had the opportunity to build a sober adult life.

I was sad to learn that she was arrested for a DUI a few months ago, and I can’t do anything beyond hoping that she gets whatever help she needs. And while the media coverage I’ve seen of the incident hasn’t mirrored the downright cruel coverage of the aughts, I can’t help but notice how much attention it's received. There’s no excuse for driving under the influence, and she’s lucky no one was hurt before she was stopped.

But it’s notable that another Spears story got completely swallowed by her DUI coverage. Just hours before her arrest, news broke that the singer was granted a restraining order against a man who had been harassing her since 2013—a man who had previously been convicted of stalking her and trespassing at her home. I don’t know what living with those kinds of threats does to a person, but it’s a good reminder of all the parts of a person’s life (celebrity or otherwise) we don’t see.

Would the maybe-football-coach on the airplane have been so impressed with my alcohol tolerance if he’d known I’d earned it through around-the-clock alcohol intake? Would the ER psychiatrist have spent so long trying to convince me of his theory of my subconscious motivations if I’d been older than 23, or a man? I don’t know. But I do know that behind every addiction exists something more complex than what the casual observer sees, and that people with addiction deserve our compassion, even if we can’t always accept or tolerate the behavior that results from it.

The one media personality who spoke out about this in 2007, after a highly publicized incident in which Spears shaved her head and beat a paparazzi’s car with an umbrella, was someone who knew well what it was like to live in the dark morass of active addiction: Craig Ferguson.

His words were prescient then and just as relevant now. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch the segment below. I’ve done so countless times. Every time I watch, it strikes me how difficult it is for Ferguson to convey to his late-night audience that he’s not launching into jokes about Spears. They’re so primed to laugh at what they’ve seen of the superstar’s corroding mental health that he has to repeat that no, really, he’s being serious about this. I hope that, nearly two decades later, it wouldn’t take us so long to figure that out.

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Hi SL,

If your partner drinks, how do you navigate being around that sober?

I’ve been dating somebody for a few months, and it’s my first relationship since getting sober a couple of years ago. I was initially of the opinion that somebody who drinks occasionally and very moderately and responsibly would be just fine …. And I’m starting to mentally pivot towards maybe needing to be with somebody who is also completely sober and moving on from this current relationship.

Is it crazy to just not want to be around it and have to be the sober person watching the other person with the slightest of hangovers after a drink or two on Fridays or Saturdays or multiple days a week?

I feel like I’ve extracted alcohol from my life, and I don’t know if I wanna observe it in my partner or have drinking be something that they want to do, even occasionally, if I have to sit there and be around it. I just can’t stand the way it can tweak personalities and moods with just a drink or two.

Am I being too harsh here? Is this going to be too limiting for me as I date and have relationships?

Sincerely,

Sober and annoyed

Hi SA,

Thank you for the question. Before I get into the specifics of your current situation, I want to flag the last thing you said: “Is this going to be too limiting for me as I date and have relationships?“

Like the creaky, old teetotaler that I am, I can assure you that how you feel about having a partner who imbibes may change the longer you stay sober. (Or it may not!) The point is, don’t assume that whatever conclusions you come to now about your partner’s alcohol use will dictate your comfort level in any potential future relationships. Some sober people feel that they could never be in a relationship with someone who drinks or uses drugs, and they continue to feel that way throughout their sobriety. Many more, however, eventually realize that our comfort level changes depending on countless factors, not the least of which is how we’re feeling about our own sobriety.

Ok, getting into the specifics of your current relationship. It sounds like your partner drinks frequently (weekends, maybe a few nights a week), but not excessively. You repeatedly say a drink or two, so I’m guessing that’s the norm for this person.

You are allowed to be uncomfortable with whatever makes you uncomfortable! And while part of recovery is learning to sit with discomfort, that doesn’t mean you have to seek it out in your personal relationships. That said, you’re unlikely to find a relationship in which you experience no discomfort or annoyance at all, so it’s worth figuring out how much this matters to you.

Let’s call your partner...Sam. It’s a lovely little gender-neutral name. Have you spoken to Sam about your feelings? More importantly, have you figured out what your feelings are? Discomfort can mean a lot of things.

Are you ok being around Sam when they’re mildly hungover? Do you care if Sam goes out with friends and has a couple of drinks as long as you don’t have to see them either drunk or hungover? Do you not want to hear about Sam’s drinking life at all? Or, as I suspect might be the case, are you kind of over the relationship generally, which is heightening your annoyance and discomfort around their alcohol use?

Only you know the answers to these questions. But nothing in your email gives me a sense of what your relationship is like when Sam’s not drinking—i.e., what you get out of the relationship that’s making the struggle around their alcohol use so difficult. Instead, you seem more concerned about what being uncomfortable with Sam’s alcohol use might mean for future relationships.

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I don’t say this to criticize you, and please forgive me if I’m reading this incorrectly. But it’s not uncommon for subconscious doubts about a relationship to manifest as an issue with a single behavior or trait. Alcohol use seems like a logical one because I do not doubt that there is very real and understandable discomfort there.

If I’m wrong, and Sam’s drinking is the only issue here, I’d suggest figuring out the scenarios in which you are/n’t comfortable being around their drinking or the aftermath of it. Rate them on a scale of hard, medium, and light.

As hypotheticals: Maybe being around Sam’s group of friends when they’re drinking is a hard boundary—the discomfort is too much, and you flatly don’t want to be around it (maybe except special occasions like birthdays) vs a soft boundary, like being irritated by the morning sluggishness that comes after two glasses of wine but gets shaken off over the course of the day.

Once you’ve figured that out, it’s time for you and Sam to talk. If you think this is a relationship worth working on, I’d explain how you’ve been feeling and share some reflections on where you’ve discovered the hard lines for you.

Warning! Some things to avoid:

-Avoid suggesting that Sam SHOULD quit drinking for your comfort. If Sam wants to make that decision on their own, that’s fine, but it’s not reasonable to ask someone you’ve only been dating for a few months to stop using alcohol when their use boils down to 1-2 drinks a few times a week.

(Side note: Which is not to say 1-2 drinks can’t be annoying. There are people in my life who, after 1-2 drinks, can spike my blood pressure so high it feels like my head will erupt like a science project volcano; I can tolerate others getting sloppy drunk without the slightest annoyance.)

-I would strongly avoid framing the issue as “Sam’s” problem. I don’t think you see it as their problem, but it’s a line of discussion that can inspire some defensiveness, regardless of whether it’s warranted. Instead, make sure to frame it as something you’ve realized about yourself and your comfort level, and ask if they’d be willing to talk through the various issues and options with you.

But you may be right that, at least for now, you should be with someone who doesn’t drink at all. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing wrong with Sam if they decide they’re not that person.

For the first year and a half or so of my sobriety, I only dated other sober people. I don’t know that it was a conscious decision as much as I was spending most of my time around other sober people, but that’s how things shook out. After that, I knew I wasn’t going to be the right fit for someone who was a heavy drinker, but I was open to dating people who drank moderately.

My partner of nearly 13 years is a very moderate drinker—made all the more so by the one hard and fast rule I have: no hard liquor in the house. I can’t be a work-from-home lady with bottles of booze sitting around unconsumed; it would be like smoking a cigarette while pumping gas: almost certain to end badly. So my partner will sometimes have a beer or two, and when we’re out, he’ll sometimes have a “real” drink, and I can’t explain how it’s possible, but I can count the number of times I’ve seen him actually drunk on one hand. It baffles but impresses me.

But that doesn’t mean all is smooth sailing in the House of Sober Lady. My partner wishes he could keep hard liquor in the house, especially for when we have guests or just in case he ever wants a fancy drink. And I feel guilty because I want him to have that! But I know that, for me, it’s too dangerous a proposition.

I’ve been sober for 18 years, and I am as certain as I’ve ever been that I can’t safely live in a house where there’s hard alcohol. I don’t love having beer or wine in the house, but it doesn’t make me feel unsafe the way hard alcohol does. Everyone has their own lines around this stuff–it’s not about being wrong or right or limiting or generous, it’s about parsing what you need from what you want.

It’s perfectly fine to end relationships over unfulfilled wants. But if you mistake those wants for absolute needs, you may in fact be limiting your options in the future. So get really detailed about the distinction between your wants and your needs. Both are important, but knowing the difference can help orient you on your path forward.

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Loving someone who is actively addicted to a substance can be a bit like loving the sun. Get too close, and you get burned; run too far, and you can end up isolated in a frigid darkness. Just like planets in our solar system, there’s a Goldilocks zone. A place where you’re not so enmeshed with someone that it becomes agonizing and unsafe, but not so far that you ignore the reality of your own history and needs.

My interviewee this week, Alethia (name and some details changed), was kind enough to chat with me about being the adult child of a still active alcoholic, recovery, and the ecosystem of addiction.

Katie: Hi, Alethia, thanks for doing this. Can you tell me a bit about your experience with addiction?

Alethia: I’m the adult child of a still very active alcoholic; I grew up in the midst of that, but didn’t really know what it was. For a long time, my dad’s alcoholism just seemed normal because I didn’t know anything different.

K: How old were you when you figured out something might be wrong?

It was a slow dawning that started in high school, I think. Also in high school and definitely college, his drinking got way worse, and it was just undeniable that it was not normal behavior.

K: Yeah, I think a lot of those realizations happen in high school and college when you’re starting to get more exposure to other families and what does and doesn’t happen regularly. Were there some key moments where you remember having that realization?

A: There were definitely moments in childhood when I wondered. Part of our family comes from a country known for its heavy drinking; he would always kind of nod to his drinking as part of his culture, and I remember thinking...this might be cultural, but it also seems...bad? It wasn’t like he was interested in engaging in any other part of that culture.

It was really high school when my dad’s parents’ health really started to decline. My grandfather was also a problem drinker. At the time, I wouldn’t have known enough to use the word ‘alcoholic,’ but I knew it was a problem. My sister and I were getting ready to leave for college when my mother left my father for many valid reasons. I don’t blame her for leaving, but the way it happened was really shitty. So for my Dad, there was this massive confluence of dynamics that contributed to the pre-existing issue of alcoholism, and everything just exploded.

His drinking and behavior became more and more unmanageable, and my sister eventually dropped out of college to care for him full-time. It was—and still is—a mess.

K: How did you handle that?

A: I wanted to stay far away from the situation. I wasn’t in Al-Anon in college, but I was starting to explore spirituality and mindfulness, and that was helpful to a degree.

Shortly after college, I moved to a new city for a job, and a family friend let me stay with her while I got my footing. I was really struggling and, blessedly, she was like, “You’re going insane because of your father’s drinking, and it’s getting to the point where I need you to go to Al-Anon or you have to find somewhere else to stay.”

K: Oh, wow. So what did that look like, practically speaking?

A: Panic attacks, obsessing over when the next shoe is gonna drop, hypervigilance, and feeling totally consumed by his drinking. My father doesn’t have a formal diagnosis around any of this, but there are also some mental health issues that are part of the situation and aren’t addressed. He was engaging in very manipulative and kind of stalking behavior towards me. Like, he called my employer and tried to get me fired because I didn’t vote for the presidential candidate he liked. Stuff like that.

K: So your sister was still with your dad at this time?

My recollection of the timeline is a little bit hazy, but I know that she was still heavily involved in his care at this time, if not living with him full-time. That’s still the case today. She’s in the process of trying to become his legal conservator. So, sadly, we don’t have much of a relationship because we’ve taken very different approaches to the situation.

K: That’s really hard.

A: It is. And I know it comes from a place of love; she really means [her total involvement in Dad’s life] as an expression of love. It’s just that for me, it reads as a deep codependency, and I just can’t be involved in it.

So that’s what the family friend was referring to, which she told me to go to Al-Anon. I was careening towards a mental health collapse myself under the stress and the weight of it. I didn’t understand how codependency functioned; I didn’t understand that what was modeled for me was the idea that obsessiveness is love. That martyring and sacrificing your own wellness for another is an expression of affection. The family friend I was staying with had a good friend in AA, who told her I needed to go to Al-Anon.

K: How’d you feel about that?

A: Well, I didn’t want to be homeless. That was a pretty big incentive, especially being a recent college grad and working for peanuts. But I really didn’t understand what Al-Anon was. I basically thought I was going to an AA meeting, which was confusing. I was like, “Uh, so I can better understand what my Dad should be doing?” But as I said, I didn’t have much of an option, so I went.

K: How was it?

A: The first thing I saw was the 12 steps with the word God all over the place, and I was like, ‘Great, it’s a cult.’

Immediately, I was like, “I hate this, but I have to be here so I don’t become homeless.” But then I started listening to people share and realized they weren’t talking about being alcoholics, they were related to alcoholics, or married to alcoholics, I know that’s not the right medical term or whatever—

K: Don’t worry about it.

A: But from that first Al-Anon meeting, I’ve never really looked back.

When I say I haven’t looked back, though, that doesn’t mean my recovery hasn’t waxed and waned. It’s just to say that I’m so grateful for that family friend telling me I had to go to Al-Anon because I was really losing it. I was losing my sense of self, my mental and emotional health, my self-worth, all of it.

Al-Anon gave me a system that allowed me to go from being chronically overwhelmed to chronically overwhelmed with glimmers of serenity to now, for the most part, feeling relatively serene with periods of overwhelm.

K: That’s wonderful.

A: Don’t get me wrong, my life isn’t perfect. I’m currently very pregnant, I’m losing my housing in six months for complicated reasons—there’s plenty of stress in my life. But the way I handle it and the way I feel about things generally is so different, and that’s what the program offered me. When I was deeply codependent, I didn’t even think it was ethical to have self-respect or self-integrity. It gave me a relationship with a “higher power,” which to me just means trusting in something bigger than myself and my own smarts.

K: I imagine there’s a lot of freedom and autonomy in not having your emotional state completely tied to another person’s behavior.

A: Absolutely. Eventually, I joined CoDA (Codependents Anonymous) as a complement to Al-Anon. Al-Anon helped me become less and less enmeshed with active alcohol users. But my codependent tendencies still show up in other types of relationships.

CoDA has given me both more specific and broader ways to address my own codependent tendencies that don’t necessarily involve alcohol addiction. But I definitely needed Al-Anon first—that’s what allowed me to navigate the high intensity of worrying about someone else’s addiction and losing myself in the process.

K: With your dad, have there been bouts of sobriety? Have there been either false or sustained starts in that direction? I ask because I know it can complicate the question of whether it feels safe to get emotionally involved.

A: Unfortunately, it’s just been a pretty linear downward trend. If there’s a dip upward, it’s a blip. He’s never acknowledged his alcohol use as problematic, much less tried to get help. I don’t say this as a way to put myself on a pedestal compared to my other relatives, but as far as I know, I’m the only person in my family who has pursued any kind of recovery—either for their own use or to deal with someone else’s. I think that just creates conditions for the addict not to have to look at the problem that’s plainly obvious. I don’t mean this as a commentary on the intention or how well-meaning the actions are, but rather how, as they say in AA, “cunning, baffling, and powerful” alcohol is.

To me, the notion that this disease is sequestered to an individual is so obviously and plainly wrong. I think if more of my family were in a program or working on these issues, my Dad wouldn’t be able to deny his reality as much. Like, these delusions are working in tandem.

A program like Al-Anon is really helpful in identifying those patterns. It offers profound compassion to both the alcoholic and the loved one, but also invites us to look deeply at how we are contributing to the problem. Which doesn’t mean that we cause or control any of it. It just means looking at your own behavior and realizing, “Oh, sometimes I can get a little high on being the savior here.” How do I acknowledge that? Because the addict doesn’t deserve to be the mechanism through which I feel better about myself.

That was a long-winded way of saying my father’s trend has been perpetually downward, and at some point it just becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of the more your brain gets damaged, the less you have the capacity to process what’s happening.

K: How do you handle triggering situations or relationships?

A: I mean, I personally don’t drink because I’m uninterested in contributing to that industry. But when it comes to other people drinking—again, I really credit Al-Anon here—I’ve gotten so much better at reminding myself that what they’re doing is literally not my business. If it starts to bother me, that’s a signal for me about me—it has nothing to do with them. If that signal is discomfort, then I can pay attention to that and leave or do whatever I need to do, but it’s not anyone else’s problem but mine.

I can’t do anything about another person’s drinking, but I can discern some important information about myself when those kinds of feelings come up. And it helps to have a higher power or belief in something bigger than yourself.

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K: Why do you think that’s important?

A: I believe that much of addiction has to do with how connected we feel to something bigger than ourselves. That’s not me trying to advocate for a particular religious dogma or whatever, but I do think we live in a culture where we almost worship individualism and human intelligence as though it’s a God. We’re more interested in getting to the top of a hierarchy than in existing collectively with others, and I think that really fosters addiction.

For example, my dad and his siblings were raised Catholic and, for very justifiable reasons, left the Church. They were rightly disgusted by the abuses that were taking place. But there was nothing to replace that sense of connection, which I believe turned into feelings of unmooredness and alienation. Of not having a sense of belonging.

I think people not feeling like they belong is a massive contributing factor to why addiction has taken such deep root in our society. Because, let’s be honest: substance use can in some ways make you feel like you have a ticket straight to heaven, right? But it comes at a high cost.

That’s why 12-step programs are spiritual programs. If we can reestablish a sense of existential belonging—whatever that ends up looking like for us —it doesn’t have to be religious, then the thing that addiction granted us, whether it’s codependency or addiction, is just paltry in comparison.

In other words, I think what we’re seeing culturally with our relationship to substances and addiction is our best version of trying to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. But so many of us haven’t been raised to know how to do that in a healthy way.

I think it’s important to figure out what we’re trying to harness with our substance use or codependency or whatever it is. When I was deeply codependent, trying to be a savior to my dad, I was both trying to take on this role of a God, but I was also hungering for a sense of belonging. It’s not just a medical event where you sequester to the individual, but about the broader ecosystem the person resides within.

K: I completely agree, and it’s not discussed enough. Societally, I don’t think we’re great at understanding that two things can be true. With addiction, yes, there’s this individual medical process happening, but there’s also a societal process happening, and (for many people) a spiritual one. It’s complex.

A: At one point, I was in a psychiatric ward because of severe suicidality. I had a few years in Al-Anon, so I’d developed a relationship with a higher power, and I really, really, really leaned into that during this time. And it’s just like you’re saying: I was in a medical emergency; I needed to go to a medical setting in order to be stabilized and put on medication and all of that. But I also had this spiritual practice, and the doctors actually commented on how much they thought it was helping my progress and recovery. So it’s exactly like you’re saying; it’s never one at the expense of the other, it’s both.

K: Thank you so much, Alethia. Is there anything else you want to say?

A: I’ll just close by sharing that I’m having a baby in a few weeks, which is something I never thought I’d do. What I witnessed growing up seemed so unmanageable, and I knew I didn’t want that. But recovery and therapy have actually helped me to land in a place in my life where not only does that feel safe, it’s exciting to take that leap with someone I deeply trust. If someone had told me at the start of my recovery that I’d be having a baby, I straight up wouldn’t have believed it. To feel safe enough to do this is pretty wild, given how I grew up.

K: I’m so happy for you. Thank you again for doing the interview!

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Coppins writes an excellent, compelling story, but I was utterly baffled and slightly appalled by its conception and execution. I wrote about the issues it raises for Slate, and I’d love to know what you think. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s a gift link.

Long before I started the Making a Scene part of this newsletter, I wanted to write about one of the most fun characters in TV history: Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose. Played to perfection by the brilliant Catherine O’ Hara (RIP), Moira is the eccentric former soap star and high-maintenance matriarch of the once-wealthy Rose family.

At first glance, her character arc doesn’t quite fit Making a Scene. Moira’s alcohol use isn’t one of the primary themes of the show; it’s always used for comedic effect, and recovery is never discussed (perhaps because her alcohol use is never discussed in the context of addiction).

Her alcohol use is very much a part of her character, and there are some really interesting, subtle moments related to her use that we don’t often see on TV. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the premise of Schitt’s Creek is kind of reverse Beverly Hillbillies: the formerly wealthy Rose family discovers their business manager has been embezzling from them, and they’re actually broke. The only asset the bank isn’t seizing is Schitt’s Creek, a town Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) bought as a joke for his adult son David, because of the name. Schitt’s Creek isn’t worth anything, so the bank has no interest in it.

Unceremoniously kicked out of their mansion, Johnny and Moira Rose and their two very sheltered adult children, David and Alexis, move to Schitt’s Creek to a) have someplace to live and b) get away from their high society shame. Many funny and heartwarming adventures ensue.

There are only a few episodes in which we see Moira drink to excess. The first time we see Moira get truly drunk is about halfway through season one, when she films a commercial for the local “fruit winery. ”

Although she gets pretty wasted, it’s less the specific incident that tips us off that she might have a complicated history with alcohol than the pep talk her husband Johnny gives her when she’s too drunk and self-conscious to continue with the commercial.

Moira: I can’t. Can’t.

Johnny: You can! Moira, remember “Sunrise Bay?” You were drunk most of season three... And half of season four. And the end of season five.

Moira: I’ll have to take your word for it.

Did I use to have a drinking problem?

Johnny: The point is, you can do this, Moira. You’re radiant. You’re beguiling. You’re daytime television’s brightest star!

Although we see her drink in subsequent episodes, it’s not a major plot point until close to the end of the third season in the episode “The Affair.” In her new role as a city council member, Moira is reluctantly cajoled into attending a social mixer after a conference. The next morning, she wakes up in Roland’s bed. Unable to remember the night before, and learning the hard way that Roland sleeps in the nude, Moira (incorrectly) assumes the worst.

Again, this is largely played for comedic effect, and it doesn’t feel particularly problematic because we’ve never seen her black out before, and she experiences genuine regret, even if that regret stems largely from “squandering” her chance to sleep alone in a nice hotel (relatable).

In season four, Moira offers to be the designated driver for Alexis and Twyla’s “girls’ night.” Yet it’s Moira who gets drunk after getting bored waiting for the girls and finding “A charming speakeasy at the back of the club.” Fortunately, Alexis is sober and ends up driving them home.

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Although Moira quitting drinking is never fully discussed*, by episode six of season five, she’s deliberately abstaining from alcohol (and pot brownies), even when the vast majority of her casino/concertgoing party has big plans for a debaucherous night. Crucially, when one friend offers “magic brownies,” another woman says, “Oh Moira, we don’t expect you to have one.”

The line suggests her friends are aware that Moira is deliberately abstaining from alcohol and cannabis, or that she has a known pattern of managing her intake at certain times. The show never explains it. The other non-drinker (Jocelyn) is explicitly not drinking because she’s breastfeeding; Moria’s reason is never articulated. They are placed in parallel abstinence without comment. It’s such an interesting choice.

To be clear, our girl doesn’t stay abstinent for too long, though we only see her drunk once more (and it’s very sweet—literally and figuratively, she’s back at Herb Ertlinger’s “fruit winery” because he wants to name a rosé after her. Though she is drinking at the same weird winery as she was in season one, the emotional quality of this drinking is entirely different. She’s open, warm, emotionally available, and bonding with her son. She may still be drinking, but her character has evolved in positive ways.

Throughout the rest of the show, Moira is seen drinking wine or toasting with champagne, but never to excess.

What I love about this almost Rorschach Test of an arc is how it subtly underscores the fluidity of alcohol use. We’re given enough information to know that Moira doesn’t have an entirely healthy relationship with alcohol, but it’s never pathologized, nor is it so disturbing that it overshadows the comedy. In part, that’s because it’s rarely a major plot point; we get the sense that her family knows she goes through these bouts of problematic alcohol use but also fully expects that she’ll come out the other side. That subtlety around substance use is refreshing. So often, addiction is used as a major plot point, and recovery is often used to build tension about whether or not someone is going to relapse.

Even with all of Moira’s character absurdities, her drinking behavior is representative of many, many people. She may have a history of problematic alcohol use, but we only see that a few times in the show. Those few times cause her to at least try to cut back for a period of time, but ultimately she falls back into casual alcohol use. If something stressful rolls around, she may or may not deal with it by getting drunk. This cycle of alcohol moderation, excess, and abstention, and then moderation again, may be reflective of alcohol use disorder, but if so, as depicted, it seems to be on the mild end of the spectrum.

In rehab, the counselors told me that blacking out is a sure sign of alcoholism, yet plenty of people have blacked out at one time or another and aren’t addicted to alcohol. There really aren’t any hard and fast rules that say “if this happens once, you’re an alcoholic.”

Many people’s relationship with alcohol changes over time, or goes through nonlinear patterns that never quite meet the criteria for a disorder, but only by the slimmest of margins. Moira is so dramatic and absurd in...everything, that it’s easy to see her alcohol use as simply another part of the roller coaster ride that is her personality. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but it’s a good reminder that even fictional substance use can be complicated and the whole picture usually matters more than any one incident.

*I didn’t have time to rewatch all of the episodes mentioned, so I’m going on memory. If I’m wrong about any of this, please correct me.

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When Susan Cheever was researching My Name Is Bill, her biography of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, she found something in Wilson’s archives that she later told The Washington Post1 “made her blood run cold.”

Wilson had been battling emphysema for years, and by the summer and fall of 1970, it was clear that he didn’t have long to live. By September, he had round-the-clock care and left his bedroom only when he required hospitalization. Cheever had been poring through the notes from the home nurses when she found the offending entries.

At 6:10 a.m. on Christmas morning, Wilson asked for “three shots of whiskey,” which he was promptly denied.

A week later, Wilson asked for booze again a week later, on Jan. 2, 1971. Subsequent requests were made on the 8th and the 14th. (Hey, man, if at first you don’t succeed...)

Upon finding these notes, Cheever was initially “shocked and horrified.” It was a sentiment many members of Alcoholics Anonymous instinctively felt when learning of Wilson’s request—this was, after all, the man who had made lifelong recovery possible for them, who taught them about the gifts of sobriety, who openly discussed how the obsession to drink had been lifted. How could a man with 36 years of sobriety make such a request so close to the end?

Now, most people in AA use this story as an example of the “cunning, baffling, powerful” nature of alcohol for the alcoholic, and I don’t disagree. They understand Wilson explicitly rejected any attempts to deify him or turn him into some kind of guru. For all his other faults, he was determined to be one “garden variety (recovered) drunk” among others. What could be a better example of both his fundamental human-ness and the awesome power alcohol holds in the alcoholic’s mind?

That’s all well and good. I have a different question: WHY DIDN’T THEY GIVE HIM A SHOT OF WHISKEY?

My guess is that they believed it was good for everyone involved to be able to say that the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous got sober in 1934 and didn’t consume another drop of alcohol until he died in 1971. In other words, I think it was mostly about optics and branding. Maybe that was the right call.

This feels almost sacrilegious to say among certain groups, but it’s the truth: if I am bedridden with only a few days to live, if my loved ones are gathered around just waiting for my organs to shut down, and I ask for a shot of vodka? I will come back and haunt the crap out of anyone who denies me.

To be absolutely clear: This is how I feel right now about a very specific, very hypothetical situation. I’ve always been hesitant to share it because a) who knows how I’ll really feel when the time comes, and b) if you get nothing else from this newsletter, I hope it’s that what’s right for me could be totally wrong for someone else and vice versa.

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So why even bring it up? Because I think about the Bill/deathbed/whiskey anecdote frequently, and have often wondered why I feel the way I do about it.

I stay sober because if I don’t, my whole life falls apart. I stay sober so I can go into each day with a brain that is present and semi-functional and doesn’t spend every moment battling a destructive chaos of its own creation. I stay sober so I can (with *widely* varying degrees of success) do the work I want to do. So I can spend time with my loved ones, pet my animals, and notice that the first fawn of the season has arrived in my yard.

I stay sober because I want to wring every beautiful moment out of life, even if that means putting up with a bunch of ugly, soul-crushing moments that show up uninvited. I stay sober because I don’t want to squander the second chance I was given; there are things I want to see and experience, and the last thing I want is to end up back in the nightmarish funhouse of my drinking.

I am not suggesting that if I received a terminal diagnosis today, I’d go drink (I wouldn’t). But IF I reached what was unquestionably the end and IF at that moment, I wanted a drink, you bet your ass I’d ask for one. I refuse to believe that doing so would somehow magically discredit the years of sobriety that came before. For me, sobriety has always been about an appreciation and acceptance of life.

I hope that when the end comes—and I mean the very end—I won’t adhere to anyone else’s idea of how a sober person should die. I hope that no one denies me a deathbed request for their own purposes. Maybe I’ll want a shot of vodka, maybe I’ll want apple juice, but I know I’ll want the agency to make that choice. Because if I can stay sober until my body creaks and grinds to a halt? I’m going to raise a toast to myself for a job well done.

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Dear Sober Lady,

After reading about someone with a sex addiction, I wanted to write in to ask if you take non-substance-related “addictions” less seriously than substance-related addictions. As someone who has been addicted to cocaine, it’s hard for me to imagine having that compulsion around anything other than a drug. But I recently had an experience that made me wonder if I’m being too judgmental about others’ addictions.

I’m five years clean from cocaine, but I still drink and smoke weed on occasion; I never felt like either of those was out of control for me, so despite advice from early NA meetings, I didn’t feel the need to quit. While out with a friend for drinks, I mentioned that I was sleepy and wanted to go home, and she said, “You know what’s good for that?” and mimicked snorting cocaine. I told her, “You know that I’ve been clean for 5 years,” and despite her being a nurse and a friend who I thought knew better, she said my problem wasn’t that big of a deal. I asked her why she thought that, and she said that if it was, I’d stop drinking too.

I went home immediately out of frustration. This isn’t the first time someone took my addiction lightly, but it is since I’ve gotten clean. Is there any truth to the idea that a “real” cocaine addiction also requires quitting drinking? What’s the best way to respond to these situations? And are all addictions equally serious?

Best,

Judged

Hi Judged,

Thanks for the question(s); I’m going to address your specific scenario as well as your broader question about the seriousness of other addictions, because both are important. Let’s start with the one about your friend’s assessment of your past cocaine use. No, there is no truth to the idea that having a cocaine addiction inherently means you also have a drinking problem or otherwise need to quit drinking. Put another way, just because you can use alcohol in moderation doesn’t mean that you can also use cocaine in moderation, as it sounds like you know from personal experience.

Do many people who develop one substance use disorder often quit using other substances because they’re worried about misusing them as well? Yes, all the time. Do some people with an addiction to one substance also have an addiction to another substance? You betcha. But none of this happens automatically or in the same way for everyone. Most importantly, you are not obligated to prove anything to anyone.

As for the best way to respond to these situations, I’m really tempted to say stop hanging out with people who minimize your past cocaine use and subsequent recovery by making casual “jokes” about how you should use again. But I don’t know your history with this person, and I’m sure your relationship is characterized by more than this one incident.

It’s up to you how you respond, but it’s crucial to understand that neither her nor anyone else’s opinion matters when it comes to the “seriousness” of your past cocaine use. You don’t need anyone’s permission to stop using a substance. If saving money or wanting to be less annoying at parties were your reasons, that would be good enough.

You clearly got to a point where you feel like you needed to stop, and kudos to you for doing so. I don’t know what’s going on with your nurse friend, but I know she’s wrong from both a medical and a being-a-good-friend perspective. “I don’t want to” is all you should need to say. “I don’t do that anymore” also works.

Regarding your first question, I think you’re asking if compulsive behaviors that people often frame as addictions, like sex, food, shopping, video game use, and social media, are addictions in the same way that alcohol or cocaine addiction is.

It’s a fair question that requires a definition of addiction. We often think of addiction as a binary thing, something like cancer that you either have or don’t, and of which there can be different types and subtypes. That’s not true, and it’s why clinicians have moved from using words like “alcoholism” to alcohol use disorder. How a person uses a substance and the consequences of that use on their life are much better indicators of severity than just the specific substance or behavior in question. (For the sake of clarity, I call severe substance use disorders ‘addiction’ because using four words when I could use one is a bummer.)

Typically, substance addiction is characterized by chronic, compulsive use of a substance despite repeated negative consequences in one’s life. It’s not about the quantity of alcohol you put away, or even how often you drink. It’s about how preoccupied you are with drinking, if you want to stop drinking but can’t, if you prioritize drinking over important responsibilities, if you lie about your drinking for fear someone will suggest you stop, the list goes on.

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These are exceedingly useful criteria and an excellent barometer for judging one’s relationship to many behaviors. From a strictly medical standpoint, the only behavioral addiction in the DSM-5— the manual clinicians use to diagnose mental health disorders—is gambling disorder. But things take a long time to find their way into the DSM. Years of study, debate, and academic jousting are required for a new condition to make it into this psychiatry bible. Nonetheless, the criteria it uses to diagnose substance use disorders and gambling disorder can be useful in understanding one’s relationship to behaviors that haven’t yet made the DSM cut.

Addiction severity isn’t determined by the substance used or behavior; it’s determined by the effect it’s having on a person’s life. If Bob routinely drinks more than intended and sometimes craves alcohol but doesn’t meet any of the other DSM criteria, he’s probably in a less serious situation than Jane, whose compulsive video game use resulted in being fired from her work, the loss of important personal relationships, and growing debt.

It doesn’t matter to me if the medical establishment formally calls something an “addiction”— doctors and, more likely, insurance companies can worry about that. But if using a substance or engaging in a certain behavior results in a person being plagued by obsessive thoughts, fighting debilitating cravings, abandoning loved ones and responsibilities, and an inability to stop, it is obviously harmful and requires help. Whether or not the world views a compulsion as a “real addiction” isn’t relevant; the impact it has on one’s life is.

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My interviewee this week is Jasmine*. She’s a friend of mine with lots of experience in recovery. I hope you enjoy hearing her valuable, nuanced perspective on reckoning with her past and staying sober in the present.

*Name and some identifying details changed

Katie: Hi Jasmine! Thank you for doing this. Tell me about how your substance use started.

Jasmine: I started smoking pot and drinking when I was 12 or 13. My older brother did both, and I hung out with him and his friends a few times.

Right away, it was clear that I didn’t drink or use like other people—even my brother and his friends, who drank a lot, were like ‘whoa, easy there.’ A few hours later, I was puking my guts out, and that trend continued the whole time I was drinking; I pretty much always drank until I threw up.

K: Yeah, it was obvious from the jump with me, too. Even the friends I was partying with in high school said, “Okay, you do this in a way that we don’t.” So I was hiding stuff pretty early on.

J: I got used to rationalizing and lying to maintain an appearance. My brother got caught drinking and with drugs, and it caused a lot of drama in my family. I was always maintaining this web of lies that I had to keep straight. I had to protect the most important thing, which was drinking and getting high.

Substances also freed me from a lot of the cultural shame I was feeling. At the time, I wasn’t out to anyone, even myself. I literally didn’t know the word “transgender.” I just assumed all little boys wanted to be girls. I thought that was a normal part of every boy’s experience.

In high school, I started experimenting with gender expression. I would get high and ride my bike to the city, where there was a stretch of thrift stores. I would thrift a bunch of women’s clothing and shoplift makeup from Walgreens. When my parents were out, I would put on all this stuff, look in the mirror, and feel more like myself. But then I would hear my brother open the front door, or my parents would come back early, and I would take everything off in a panic. I felt such shame that when everyone was in bed, I’d gather everything together and put it in a bag in the garbage. I did that over and over.

K: What happened after high school?

J: The number one thing I wanted to do was get my own place. I hated the suburban town I grew up in. I spent a lot of time in the city. I grew up in a suburb of Oakland, and I spent a lot of time in Oakland and Berkeley. So I got an apartment in Oakland with some friends. I knew if I did that, I could be high all the time. And I was.

My 20s are a blur. I tried to go to college, but dropped out. My high school girlfriend broke up with me because I wasn’t doing anything with my life. She was doing all these cool things, and I was just interested in one thing. In retrospect, it was very fair.

I did a lot of psychedelics during this time. I was all for anything that made me feel different. But I was also very depressed. I didn’t care what happened to me. I would show up late to work with puke on my shirt—I didn’t care.

There was this 18-month stretch where I was hitchhiking and bumming around the Pacific Northwest. The whole thing was very scary. I was doing a lot of drugs and doing a lot of sketchy things for money. I can’t believe I survived it, honestly.

K: What happened after the road trip?

J: I ended up back in Oakland and moved in with two people in a two-bedroom apartment, who had sectioned off a tiny area as a separate room to save on rent. When I unpacked, I found some of my quote-unquote cross-dressing stuff from my teenage years and was like, Oh, that seems like more fun now.

So I started wearing some of those clothes and asked my roommate if she would teach me how to do makeup. We started doing that together. She was a Women’s Studies major at San Francisco State University, and one day she took a book down from her bookshelf and silently handed it to me. It was A Transgender History by Susan Stryker.

In the introduction, she defines the terms she uses in the book and describes what transgender means. And I was like oh my god, I think this describes me. For the next few months, I was just preparing myself for coming out, socially transitioning, and getting connected with a therapist—it all happened very quickly.

K: From what you’re saying, it sounds like all the pieces had been in a fuzzy picture in the background and then suddenly became clear.

J: Exactly. I knew as soon as I had the word for it. It was a lot to process, and very scary because I didn’t know how my parents or my friends would react.

K: That must have been terrifying.

J: It was. I definitely relied on changing my emotional channel using drugs and alcohol. It’s weird because I was doing a lot of MDMA at the time, and I found it very useful to talk through all this stuff with my roommates. Even though it was messy and toxic, it was simultaneously very helpful.

K: There’s a reason that MDMA therapy is a thing that helps some people with PTSD.

J: It was a very exciting but also complicated time. Coming out didn’t go over super well with everyone in my life. When I socially transitioned [changing my outward appearance and how I identified], I was in danger in a way I never had been before. I was followed, harassed, and people would yell things at me on the street, things like that.

I started hanging out with the trans and queer community and learning about that culture and history, which was really valuable to me. But the people I was hanging out with were still people who drank and used like me. Even though I felt more connected to myself than I did before, I still felt like there was something else wrong with me.

K: What happened to make you want to get sober?

J: I had to leave a living situation that had become dangerous. I was taking refuge with some friends for a few weeks, and one night I had a dream that I was sober, playing board games with people who weren’t my actual family but whom I considered family. In the dream, I had a powerful sense of presence and calm that I hadn’t felt in real life for years. It wasn’t like I heard a voice, but the subtext of the dream was very clear to me—that this is something that was possible for me.

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The next day, when everyone in the house was doing drugs, and someone passed the pipe to me, I was just like, “No thank you, actually.” I spent the next two weeks holding on for dear life. I kept everything to myself because what was I supposed to say? Uhh, God told me to be sober?

I finally asked a friend who had previously been in recovery what to do. He suggested an AA meeting, which I initially resisted. All I knew about AA was that my uncle went, and it seemed like a big drag. In the movies, meetings are always in these concrete rooms, and it’s just a real downer. But my friend said exactly the right thing.

K: What was that?

J: He said you don’t have to be an alcoholic to go to AA. For some reason, that made me feel like I could go. From there, it was the classic AA story where I showed up, sat down, and wanted nothing more than to run out of the room because it felt like my whole nervous system was on fire.

But the meeting started, someone started sharing their story, and I had that moment of Oh, that’s me; maybe I am an alcoholic. I was so desperate for a solution, and the feeling I had after that dream was still really powerful. That kept me going back to AA.

K: I’m glad you did.

J: Yeah, me too. I’m learning that this isn’t the case everywhere, but my experience with Oakland AA was very welcoming. It wasn’t strict, exclusive, or dogmatic at all. It wasn’t perfect 100% of the time, but for the most part, it was. And AA has taught me how to navigate so many things—including some of the shitty experiences I’ve had with people in AA.

K: Like what?

J: Even in Oakland, I came across some people who were weirded out by my being trans. I encountered people who were fascinated with what’s in my pants and asked me about it in a weird and sexualized way. I had a sponsee drunk dial me and say really gross and inappropriate things.

K: That’s so fucked up. That’s not the way you talk to a human being.

J: It’s also not what AA is for. This is not why I shared my number with you.

K: You’re supposed to call me if you feel like drinking. Not if you want to know what’s in my pants.

J: I had access to support, including through my connections in [AA], so I feel grateful for that. I’m also grateful that I had so many instances of safely connecting with people in the Program because it showed me that the negative experiences aren’t a function of AA, they’re a function of people being weird or inappropriate.

K: You get to ‘practice these principles in all your affairs?’

J: Yes. But also, very practically, using these life skills and coping skills that AA taught me. And learning that major life changes still happen when you’re sober. And they can be good or bad changes, but the point is that I’m not directly pouring gasoline on the fire.

K: You recently moved to a more rural area in California, right?

J: Yeah, and that’s been hard. I was really plugged into the recovery community in Oakland. I helped start a meeting there. Then, I was suddenly away from my support network—both in terms of the people and the places where I would show up. There’s comfort in routine.

When I moved here, I tried really hard to be open to the meetings, but I noticed a lot of things that I was uncomfortable with or just weren’t working for me.

K: Like what?

J: It was hard going into a meeting and realizing that ‘oh, not only am I the only trans person here, I’m also the only queer person here.’ I obviously don’t know everyone’s identity, but it certainly felt like I was the only queer person. Even going to women’s meetings, I’ve found a lot of the women look at me like they don’t really know what to do with me. And that’s unfortunate.

K: It’s not the feeling you want when you’re going somewhere for support.

J: Yeah, it felt very precarious. I didn’t feel like there were people I could connect with at this moment in my life. I checked in with friends from home to be like, “Am I just not being willing and open?” But at some point, I realized I felt I needed to perform socially to stay safe. Which is obviously not ideal for a support system.

K: Right, a home group is supposed to be the place you can go when everything in your life is falling apart, and you know the group won’t judge you and will catch you no matter which way you’re falling. If you can’t trust that, what’s the point?

J: It was hard to learn that AA everywhere isn’t like what I experienced in Oakland. It’s a strength and a weakness of the Program. There’s no strict structure; you can say and do whatever you want. That’s what made the meetings I went to in Oakland so great, but also what makes me feel uncomfortable going where I live now.

K: How did you come across Recovery Dharma?

J: My friends were very patient and listened to me as I complained about all of this, and they kept telling me to keep trying different things. One in particular knew of Recovery Dharma and suggested I check it out.

I kept meaning to go, but several weeks ago, I had this weird experience where a non-alcoholic beer really triggered a craving on a deeply unsettling level. I was positive that even if I went out and got drunk, the craving wouldn’t go away. It was horrible. I talked to a friend who listened very sympathetically, listened to me, and said, “Okay, now what?”

I started talking about all these AA tools that I was going to use, and she responded, “Great, how about you go to a fucking meeting?”

K: Bet you loved hearing that.

J: I knew she was right, and I also didn’t want to. But I was desperate. I didn’t want to feel the way I was feeling anymore, and I didn’t want to drink or use drugs, so I went to the RD meeting. And I got that sense of relief I used to get with AA meetings.

I was really vulnerable in the meeting and told people that I’m new here and need to connect with people. I exchanged numbers with people after the meeting, and I’ve hung out with a couple of them, and that’s been nice.

K: Good for you. That’s a hard thing to say. And people can’t know it unless you put it out there.

J: Asking for help is huge. It sounds simple, but it’s so difficult for me. I feel like I have to be perfect and put together, or I’m a failure as a human. But I have to agree to just set that feeling aside and do what I need to do to stay sober.

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Contains spoilers for the 2012 movie, “Flight.”

Many great actors are terrible at playing drunk people. It’s easy to go over the top when your character loses all inhibition. Sometimes, it feels like actors play inebriated characters the way they think the viewers perceive drunk people, forgetting that even booze-hounds have their own internal logic, even if no one else can identify or understand it.

Of the drunk character roles, one of the hardest to play is a (so-called) functional alcoholic. You know the type—they get up, go to work, and may even successfully drive a car with a Blood Alcohol Content that would body slam the average drinker off their feet and to the floor.

It’s hard to play this role because the actor is usually playing multiple characters. One is charming and fun—if only for the small window during which they’ve gotten their drink timing exactly right. It’s the drunk person’s cruising altitude—flying the perfect amount of buzzed.

By definition, though, cruising altitude is temporary. The other characters the actor must play appear during takeoffs and landings, like the internal battle needed to summon the energy to suit up, defy gravity and the weather gods, and launch a hunk of metal off the ground and up through the clouds. Similarly, the precision and focus needed to descend and land smoothly, something that can be tricky even in the best circumstances. Coming down too quickly or unsteadily can be catastrophic. An actor has to be able to pull off these highs and lows without falling into a caricature of addiction.

I’ve never seen a better portrayal of this than Denzel Washington in “Flight.” The 2012 film follows “Whip” Whitaker, a pilot and alcoholic used to waking up still drunk—even when his morning consists of piloting a commercial aircraft full of people from Orlando to Atlanta. All he needs is a line or two of cocaine, and Whip is ready for takeoff.

After making it through a harrowing storm and up to cruising altitude, Whip sneaks three airplane bottles of vodka from the beverage cart and dumps them into his orange juice. Downing the juice in just a few gulps, Whip lets his copilot take over and settles in for a nap.

He wakes up to the sound of metal clanging and the airplane rapidly descending. After a horrifying scene of mechanical failure and airplane nosedives (which I admittedly skipped during last night’s rewatch because the first time I saw it, I vowed never to fly again), Whip manages a bunch of fancy (if aeronautically inaccurate) flying moves, avoiding a nosedive into a populated area and instead performing a semi-successful crash landing in an open field.

When he wakes up in the hospital, we immediately learn two things about the crash that will be central to the pilot’s emotional arc:

1. Six of the 102 people on board died in the accident, including the beautiful flight attendant Katerina, with whom Whitaker spent the previous night.

2. If any other pilot faced a similar mechanical failure, everyone on board would likely have died. Whitaker’s fancy flying was terrifying, but it saved the lives of almost everyone on board. The consensus, according to the pilot union rep, Charlie (Bruce Greenwood), is “The way [Whitaker] landed that plane was nothing short of a miracle.”

It’s a perfect setup to drive an arrogant, damaged active alcoholic out of his mind. As a pilot, Whip’s job was to get everyone to Atlanta safely, and he failed, losing someone he cared about in the process.

Despite his cocaine use that morning and drinking during the flight, the crash was actually not his fault. There’s no disagreement among the experts that only an exceptionally skilled pilot could have landed the plane with only 6 deaths. He got drunk, and people in his care died, but those people didn’t die because he was drunk. Right?

In the immediate wake of the crash, Whip vows to quit drinking. He hides out at his grandfather’s old farmhouse, where he determinedly pours out all the alcohol he can find. When he arrives for a meeting with Charlie and the union lawyer, Hugh (Don Cheadle), the pilot is more sober than we’ve seen him at any point during the first 50 minutes of the movie.

Hugh tells Whip that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will be running the investigation into the crash, and its team collected blood, skin, and hair samples from everyone on board. The toxicology report from the hospital shows that Whip was piloting the plane with cocaine in his system and a .24 BAC.

Ah, Whip Whitaker. Welcome to the club of trying to lie your way out of a while-you-were-sleeping blood test. He tells Hugh that his .24 must have been because “he had a couple of beers the night before,” and it’s a little like watching my tiny dog trying to carry a stick that’s 5 times longer than her entire body. It’s so absurd that you don’t even wonder if it’s going to work, but you can’t help but admire the delusion necessary to think it’s possible.

Hugh obviously doesn’t buy this, but also doesn’t care. He promises to get the toxicology report excluded from the investigation. But Whip now knows there’s concrete evidence of his substance use during the flight. He ends his self-imposed sobriety before he’s even left the building. Thus begins a bender, complete with a new girlfriend who is just starting AA and unsuccessfully pleads with Whip to join her.

Charlie and Hugh, having successfully gotten the toxicology report kicked, are determined to get Whip through the hearing without being obviously drunk. By this point, it’s become clear that the pilots’ union and the airline are solely concerned with getting Whip through the hearing successfully so they can shift the blame onto the plane manufacturer.

The viewers (at least this viewer) can’t help but want that too, if only because Washington’s portrayal of Whip is so sympathetic and raw, without ever dipping into melodrama. All of the tormented personalities inside Whip Whitaker are visible in every stare, every sip, every bottle tossed into the trash. For those who don’t know what it’s like to care about someone with an alcohol addiction despite the terrible things they’ve said and done, this film will make you understand.

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The only way Whip can stay sober in the week leading up to the hearing is by staying in Charlie’s house. The day before the hearing, he truthfully tells Hugh that he’s been sober for nine days, two hours, and 26 minutes, “but who’s counting?” All Whip has to do is get through one more night and the next day’s hearing without drinking, and all will be well.

Charlie and Hugh think they’ve covered every base: Whip will be staying in a hotel room all night with a person guarding the door. They’ve emptied the minibar of booze and filled it with apple juice and other disappointments. Whip doesn’t have access to alcohol, and without access to his vice, there’s no reason he can’t make it through the hearing and get everyone—himself included—off the hook.

That night, Whip is bored, anxious, and thirsty. When he hears an odd noise, he investigates and realizes the deadbolt to the adjoining room isn’t locked—and it appears to be empty.

The scene is more devastating than if we watched every minute of the bender we know is coming next. By this point, the film has made abundantly clear that for Whip Whitaker, there is no such thing as one drink. We don’t need to see the chaos that ensued because we’ve been watching it for nearly two hours.

I remember watching this when it came out in theaters. Despite being four years sober and well-versed in how addiction works, I couldn’t help thinking the same thing my family and friends had wondered about me only a few years prior: why can’t he just stop?

The next morning, Hugh and Charlie find both hotel rooms in chaos and Whip bloody on the floor of the bathroom, having fallen at some point in the evening and hit his head. This, too, is a brutally accurate emotional leap: how many times have loved ones (or even “cravenly invested in one’s well-being” ones) gone from furious to terrified in the blink of an eye?

The people in our lives who are addicted to substances can be the source of so much disappointment and anger that we lose sight of how serious the condition is. But there’s the reminder—the blood on the toilet seat and bathroom floor, the head wound that won’t stop bleeding.

And that’s a best-case scenario.

Washington’s performance never allows you to forget that for drinkers like Whip Whitaker, substance use—and hiding one’s substance use—is a 24/7, life-or-death endeavor. When his co-pilot gives Whip a knowing look and asks how he's feeling, Washington flashes his charming smile and gives a carefree wave of the hand, while his eyes flash with panic and fury.

In Whip’s world, there are no innocent questions, and self-preservation is a full-time job. He’s always ready for a battle or a party, but never self-reflection or the truth. He manages to bring you inside his turbulent emotions, making you an unwitting co-conspirator. You can’t really root against him because, however reluctantly, you understand him. He is an extreme example of alcohol addiction, but, like all of us, he is also fundamentally flawed and human.

It’s this humanity that ultimately allows Whip to face the truth about himself. When he finally makes it to the hearing, once again drunk from the night before and functioning only with the help of a massive amount of cocaine, Whip is so close to getting off scot-free.

All he has to do is tell the assembled panel that Katerina is responsible for the empty vodka bottles in the airplane galley trash. High, bandaged, and sweaty, Whip’s moment of clarity comes not from losing his wife and kid, or the plane crash, or Katerina’s funeral. It comes when he stops lying. When he admits that he drank those bottles, that he was drunk that morning, and he’s drunk right now. It comes—as it does for all of us—when he stops running from reality and turns around and faces it head-on, regardless of the consequences.

*

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I’m not a doctor or mental health professional, so my advice shouldn’t be construed as medical or therapeutic. You are free to take or leave it.