Your Addiction is Nothing to Be Ashamed of
When we collectively challenge the stigma, we weaken it.
For a year or two, I daren’t write about getting sober.
I didn’t even tell most of my friends and family for a while, let alone start publishing stories on the Internet.
Writing about it would mean revealing that I had previously had a problem. It would mean admitting how essential wine had become to me in the first place.
And yet something inside me wanted to talk publicly about it. The unexpected gifts of sobriety, following the secret shame of being stuck in the booze-loop, left me intensely inspired. I was compelled to share what I’d found. To show my fellow drinking folk what was behind the curtain.
So what stopped me those first years?
A few things. My alcohol-positive upbringing, for a start. I was nervous of being accepted as a teetotaller. Everyone I knew growing up drank too much on a regular basis, and it was fairly normal for adults to stagger around drunk. I was worried my abstinence would make people uncomfortable.
A general lack of understanding on the topic of addiction in many circles put me off too. Comments like: “but you never had a problem!” or “you can just have one though, surely?” were liable, in the beginning, to throw me back into a headspin.
Questions, like: “were you really bad then?” (asked gleefully) or “how will you be able to enjoy a nice dinner without a glass of wine?!” (more horror-stricken) made me question my decision to quit all over again.
Then there was the pity.
“Oh, poor you!” person A would say, pouring themselves a large glass of whatever lovely drink had been offered, and which initially you hadn’t wanted but now felt deprived of.
Sobriety, which typically, you felt proud of — hard-won as it was; fulfilling as it had turned out to be — would become, yet again, limiting and pitiable. Defending it, in that context, only made you seem more broken.
All of these responses triggered the shame that I still carried, very close to the surface.
They underscored the idea that there was somehow something wrong with me because I couldn’t drink ‘normally’.
And for some reason, at the same time as I received untold unhelpful comments, I felt a huge responsibility not to call anyone else’s drinking into question. As though, it was permissible for me to quit, so long as my whacky decision didn’t impact anyone else’s enjoyment of drinking.
I’m not sure where I got this idea. Lately, I’m reconsidering it.
Where did I pick up the idea that it’s my responsibility to make sure everyone feels okay? What happens if I drop it? (Party time.)
This is precisely the kind of thing that led to me drinking so hard in the first place. This insistence on taking the blame. Not causing a disruption. Being accommodating to unaccommodating people. Putting other people’s comfort before my own. I mean, sure, consider others. That’s a lovely thing. But you have to consider yourself too.
Because the truth is that I don’t have a problem with alcohol.
Maybe I never did. Society, however, has a huge problem. Pockets of our country are chockfull of normalized alcohol abuse, and I came of age within one of these pockets.
I’m tired of all the mental gymnastics I have to do to avoid simply laying this truth out. I want to protect the heavy drinkers that I love, but do I really do that best by enabling their problem drinking?
Lately, it feels uncanny to say that I, the person in the pub who has dealt with their unhelpful drinking habit, am the ‘alcoholic’.
This feels a bit more accurate: I grew up in a society that encouraged me to drink, and through repeating that habit, I became addicted to a highly addictive substance.
And this: I lived with an uncle who was a chronic alcoholic and almost constant weed smoker, a lovely dad who was a nightly drinker, and an older brother who loved ‘recreational’ drugs, and so my metric for understanding substance abuse was warped from the start.
And this: All of my heroes loved to get high. It has taken a long time for me to rid myself of the desire.
And it’s sad, all this escapism because the world is such a psychedelic trip anyway if you only train yourself to pay attention.
I’m not saying I walk around in a state of wondrous presence all the time. Far from it. I still read a lot, and binge-watch TV shows and overeat on occasion (every day).
But all of the things I was afraid of — sobriety, intimacy, responsibility, consistency, commitment — have turned out to be the most beautiful things life has to offer. More beautiful, even, than daytime drinking in an Irish bar on a rain-sodden day.
And I don’t want other people to miss out on these more meaningful life-treats, because they have fallen for the relentless advertising campaign of booze. Which may or may not have been partly passed on in the actions of their most beloved family members.
And I don’t mean to blame my upbringing for my choices. Nobody made me drink all of those Supertenants/gin and tonics/bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. But ‘alcoholism’ doesn’t develop in a vacuum. And if us puny individuals shoulder full responsibility for our affliction*, do we lower the chances of a deeper societal change?
So if I struggle with people’s reactions to my abstinence from alcohol, why do I write so much about it?
Because I hope that by sharing my experience the dominant narrative will begin to change. I started Beautiful Hangover because I wanted to join a conversation that I believed to be important. For years, alcohol had caused me to suffer unnecessarily and for what?
Water retention, debt, regret and occasional hours of feeling a bit more comfortable at pubs I didn’t really want to be in.
Why?
Because I’d believed the promo. Beer helped me to relax (true), it made me more attractive (hard false), it made me more fun (true if you like your gentle friends loud and lairy).
And I wasn’t the only one. Many of my pals, before I got sober, celebrated alcohol to a point approaching worship.
My fragile new abstinence allowed me to see them and their choices afresh, and I noticed the extent to which they prioritized drinking above most other things. Honestly, those first months were like waking up in a dystopian nightmare.
Booze was everywhere, doing its damage, and nobody cared or noticed except me. This is why I stay sober with the support of a group, because of the insanity I see on the subject of alcohol, and because of my past susceptibility to that insanity. (Could it really come back?)
Because while we’d been dazzled by the promotional material we’d forgotten to read the small print. And our symptoms were various: anxiety, insomnia, relationship problems, depression, recurrent thrush, low self-esteem, poor digestion, weight issues, sexual dysfunction, chronic under-achieving, severely arrested development, etc, etc.
I’m still sheepish about sharing these writings, but I’m growing braver all the time. Because the stakes are high. It’s the people I love that could be lost. It’s the people you love.
Does writing about it help disperse the shame?
Ultimately yes. Though occasionally it seems to exacerbate it. This is because I suffer from pathological embarrassment. Officially known as shame.
“the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging — something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” — Dr. Brené Brown, shame and vulnerability researcher.
I push through the ‘intensely painful feeling’ in order to stop hiding from myself. To crush perfectionism. To remember what my drinking was really like. To keep moving towards something different. To strengthen my own voice and my ability to speak for myself.
It took two and a half years of professional therapy and intensive peer support, plus finding a healthy and nurturing romantic relationship, to feel capable of owning my story. I started the blog long before I was ready, and I’m still finding my way with it.
But just when I feel certain that I’m shouting my worst times into a void for no good reason, someone emails or Instagrams, and I remember why I’m bothering.
I loved your post. You described how I’ve been feeling. I just did a long period sober and want to try again. Thank you for sharing.
And this is why I keep writing these letters. To tell you that your addiction is nothing to be ashamed of. Though it is your responsibility to fix it. I’m here to promise you, that it is possible.
Try a new approach.
Taking responsibility for your life and choices is hard, but it brings you power and autonomy. It allows you to learn the lessons your mistakes were trying to teach you. To discover how they improved you. To share your learning with others, and make it count.
“Shame cannot survive being spoken,” Dr. Brené Brown says. “It cannot survive empathy.”
So find an empathetic friend or person and start talking (in AA, they do this via the fourth step). Practice being real. Think of how you can be of service to others. Read spiritual literature. Contemplate the trees/ocean/great mystery.
Smash the dumb idea that getting drunk ever helped anything.
And let me know how you get on.
AA, Smart Recovery, Soberistas, Hip Sobriety, This Naked Mind and Recovery Elevator are full of people transforming their shame into something valuable by telling their stories. If you want, you can join them.
*Taking full responsibility is essential for recovery, but there is a much bigger picture here.
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Chelsey Flood is a novelist, lecturer in Creative Writing and truth-seeker. She lives between Cornwall and Bristol, and writes about freedom, nature and love.

