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Please Like and Share My Recovery
How sharing my rehab journey on social media helped me stay sober
In the 17 years since I began regularly abusing alcohol, I had turned the act of concealing my addiction into a dark science. By all outward appearances, I was an open book — relatively emotionally adept, always game to discuss with close friends any issues I’d faced in my family and relationships. I prided myself on being the kind of person people could open up to, expecting the same level of transparency in return.
But there was one thing I successfully hid from everyone, without exception: Every night, I consumed most of a bottle of wine (or its equivalent in beer), interspersed with 10 to 12 shots of vodka. (Along with, when I could get ahold of them, painkillers and sleeping pills.) If that sounds like a lot of booze, that’s because it is. But a person’s tolerance is capable of truly amazing feats when they carry on like this for half their life. Intellectually, I understood that I had a big, big problem — it’s impossible to down a dozen shots of vodka every night for years on end without understanding on some level that it isn’t normal behavior. (I always found vodka disgusting, by the way, but I appreciated its ability to fuck me up fast while also possessing a scent that was very easy to mask.) Yet I hid it from everybody — my family, my…
