Recovery in the age of context collapse
Redefining my identity inside myself, my family, and social media
There’s plenty of discussion (arguing) about what addiction really is — but maybe even more relevant to those of us trying to free ourselves from it is a different kind of question: What is recovery? What is it for the individual inside herself and also inside of the wider societal landscape? What is it at one month, one year, two years, two years and counting? I’ve long outgrown early sobriety. And the most easily accessible sobriety content focuses on the early days, making sobriety stick, navigating the ‘firsts’ of everything. Now I’m navigating my ‘third’ everything. It’s dramatically different in ways even more difficult to describe.
My son’s birthday is in January; he just turned 26. I always host dinner for his celebration, and this year was the third time I’ve done it without drinking. That sounds impossible to me. And also, the alternative — that I could still be drinking now — seems impossible, too. If ever I felt more disoriented inside myself, I can’t remember it. My dad brought a bottle of wine to share with the table at my son’s birthday dinner. As he poured a glass for everyone but me, I felt a strange mixture of all kinds of feelings, all swirling together. I didn’t say anything. I just sat there with myself noticing how it felt to be the only one. The one not drinking wine. The one for whom wine is not fun, celebratory, joyful, relaxing, or insignificant. The one not joining in on the collective narrative. By choice. And they made their choice. And it was fine. But also it felt like disbelief inside of me. How could this be happening? How could I not be drinking? How could they all still be? Why is this okay? Is this okay? Am I okay? Are they? What does this mean? Does it mean anything? Am I overthinking this? What are they thinking? What is the big deal? Why does any of this matter? Does it matter?
When I first got sober, I was more careful around alcohol. I thought long and hard about each event, whether or not I’d participate at all, and then if yes, I’d figure out my parameters and plan accordingly with protecting my sobriety as priority number one. Staying sober is still my priority number one, but it’s wildly unlikely I’ll drink by accident or cave or whatever. I’m not timid (remind me to tell you about how I stared down a bartender recently because I wanted my tonic-no-ice-green-olives and I didn’t care in the least that my order made him so uncomfortable he actually laughed and blushed and rolled his eyes??). I know exactly what I’m about now and I’m on solid ground with myself about that. But now it’s like real life is starting to creep in. Real life where I sit at small dinner parties and people around me drink wine and leave me out of it with no acknowledgment whatsoever. It’s weird. It’s the collective non-acknowledgment that’s weird. I feel like a bit of a pink elephant. (But also, I love that about me. That I am willing to be the pink elephant. It reminds me I’m alive and I’m an individual, albeit perhaps a goofy one.)
None of this is anyone’s fault, of course. And I have no idea what any of my family really thinks about my sobriety, nor, ultimately do I care because it’s none of my business. So I guess that makes it monumentally strange, too. Like almost to the point I want to laugh or scream because it’s like: This alcohol that you all are sharing is the thing that was killing me. The wine that you are drinking all around me is the liquified version of my crippling trauma response. It’s like everyone is toasting in cheer with a glass of the fallout from what hurt me the most in my whole life. From the moment I started drinking, I drank to blackout. I did it for 22 years. Not in front of family. I could control that part.
When I used to read those quizzes online about ‘Is my drinking dangerous’ I would always be stumped because it seemed like every questionnaire was trying to discern if I was ‘either’ a ‘daily drinker’ or a ‘binge drinker’ and I was like, Okay but where’s the category for a person who is both at the same time and always has been? At least one thing was crystal clear: I had a problem. There wasn’t a question about that. I was firmly inside AUD camp. Took the guesswork out, anyway. It made it fairly straightforward for me to write-off dicking around with ‘moderation.’
If this post feels all over the place, I truly apologize. I have been laying low from writing for a few weeks not by choice so much as by instinct. I have started and trashed at least a few dozen posts since my last one because I just couldn’t get traction inside the words. Which is hugely disorienting for a person who writes in order to interpret just about everything in my world. I write to understand how I feel, what I’m learning, and to explore my insides. And I journal absolutely every single day to meet these private, intimate needs. But to pick it all up and put it out in public, I’m thinking longer and harder about that now. I am examining why I feel the need to (or used to feel the need to) share so many things about my personal life. What are my motivations now? What do I want to share and why?
I keep hearing people say they are ditching Instagram to come to Substack. A few months back, everybody was ditching Instagram to go to Threads. But none of this mass migration across platforms has solved what’s really eating at me when it comes to creating and sharing my writing and my recovery. What’s really gnawing at me is that it feels like everything has to be done with mobs of people all around. That the bigger the mob, the more successful the endeavor. Every piece of art, every share, every little sentence and thought comes with heaps of commentary by strangers. Everybody wants to create, write a book, build an online community, offer a program, a course, a certificate, whatever. I’m disillusioned by the culture of the mobs that roam across everything now. It isn’t inviting to me to hear that someone’s collection of tens of thousands of humans have migrated to a new platform.
And I don’t know how to share so much of my private life and thoughts inside what increasingly feels like an endless sea of so-muchness-that-it’s-nothingness. It’s like all this massive amount of content, coupled with the massive amount of ‘community’ ‘feedback’ and commentary, has caused complete context collapse in my mind. I’m having trouble understanding what matters and what doesn’t, to whom, and what on earth for.
And to be honest, that scares me if I think too hard about it. Because if recovery has taught me anything, it’s that the only way my recovery can work is if I don’t lose touch with myself. And right now, as I am in my third year of recovery, I haven’t found the new touchstone where I can share and still feel safe inside myself. I have spent time over the past few weeks collecting all of my essays and writings together in one place, and since I’ve gotten sober I have written and shared nearly 1,000 pages worth of thoughts, confessions, ideas, and the like. But I don’t know what it adds up to. I look at my past shares and think, My god, I said that? I hardly recognize that woman who was so elated and enthusiastic and driven to put it all out there. (Good for her, I think, though.)
Maybe that’s what is actually meant by “One step forward, two steps back.” It’s not so much about progress but about perspective. I’ve taken so many public leaps into sharing what was going on with me. But for all that forward, outward push, I now feel a pulling back that’s twice as strong. Not to regress, but to refocus my vision on what’s actually in front of me. I don’t have any lesson to share. Just that this is what it is — what recovery actually is in real life and real time — for me now. I am getting really good at pausing for as long as it takes to get re-centered inside myself again.
I didn’t say anything about my feelings or thoughts when my family drank wine and I didn’t. I haven’t said much on Substack or Instagram about what this recovery path has felt like for me recently. But inside, explosions are going off all the time. Insights, epiphanies, realizations. Questions, new ideas, new perspectives that are — or seem to be — at odds with perspectives I had just months ago. And part of me feels disconnected from writing about all of it. It’s too massive, too big to get my arms around, or words around, so to speak. And some part of me keeps asking, like they ask that age old question: If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it, did it make a sound? If I am experiencing so much right now that I feel unable to share about it, does it “matter” that it’s happening to me?
I’m inclined to believe that the answer to that question isn’t nearly as significant as the fact that I’m asking it at all. And that to recover my identity inside these three distinct places: inside my re-integrating self; inside my family where I feel a bit like an outsider; and inside a land of social media where gobs and gobs of people never stop chattering, sharing, packaging, positioning and selling — will each require their own kinds of awareness, perspective, and protection.
Allison Marie Conway is a published author (Love Me Sober, 2023; Luminae, 2018), addiction recovery coach, mentor, researcher, and advocate. Allison currently lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with her husband, John, of seventeen years. Follow on Instagram: @allisonmarieconway
I don't know that I've read another piece that captures recovery in the way you do here. I'm at the very beginning of my third year, and like you, it's not new, but I continue to work through things. It's incredible, really.
Also, your commentary on where we are culturally with sharing all this stuff hit me hard too. The lines between myself and the outside world are more blurry every day, but I'm told it's dangerous to disconnect from my world.
Whatever you do, please keep writing--if only for you.
It is hard living an examined life. The benefits are that once you gaze inward the view changes on the outside. Your perceptions and your context all expand inclusively. The only thing that’s left on the outside is alcohol. Poor alcohol 😢
I had a I-thought-he-was-a-friend once say to me “I don’t trust someone who doesn’t drink.” I giggled and said “C-Ya”