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When Your Addiction Recovery Stories Backfire
A recent Medium post of mine about “dry drunk syndrome” helped trigger a relapse.
Last month I wrote a story about my recovery from alcoholism and the subsequent mental health travails entitled “My Year As An Angry Ex-Drunk”. In my capacity as a writer and Medium contributor it was a smash success, garnering nearly 11,000 views as of today and over 3,400 claps.
As a human being, however, the article was an unqualified disaster for me, as it — either by way of correlation or causation — seemed to coincide with a renewed slide into debilitating anxiety, depression, and all manner of cerebral detritus that only month prior I was confident I had overcome.
At the very least, the experience taught me to be much more careful about what I commit to writing, or at the very least the way in which I go about it.
It should have been a dead giveaway for me that even within the first few days of posting the article I was getting multiple comments commending me on my sobriety and recovery, while at the same time noting that my tone in the piece “still sounded angry,” which in retrospect it most definitely did. It should also have set off alarm bells that my reaction to these comments was, well, full of rage. “What do you mean I still sound fucking angry??” was my go-to response to said commentary. Kind of…
