My struggles with alcohol finally came to a tipping point, I decided recently, and it was time to work on myself. I had what I intend to be my last drink late last month. Since making that announcement, I have been heartened by the response I have received. I was particularly struck by the volume of people my age who reached out to say that my announcement resonated with them. Unfortunately, the luxury of being able to be vulnerable in public, without fearing public harassment and ridicule, is far from being universally accessible.
As I described in a blog post two weeks back, my drinking triggered in part of me a sense that I was going through life on autopilot. As a result, I did not realize that many within my peer group were going through the same struggle. After I received dozens of messages from many detailing their own struggles, my wife suggested that perhaps something was in the air and some sort of change was coming. But I don’t believe that’s necessarily the case.
Many who have been in touch with me directly are around 30 — around my age — and I think there is often an assessment that rears itself around milestone birthdays. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don’t, but we are positioned to wonder what is going well and what is not. We ask what stands in the way of our fulfillment.
While I long faced struggles with addiction and various levels of problem drinking, it wasn’t until I read “The Shining” at 30 and found that Jack Torrance’s drinking uncomfortably mirrored my own, that I considered I had a problem. Thanks, Stephen King, for shining a light on your experience so that we readers could recognize in ourselves our own demons.
The autopilot was real, and every day will present a struggle to resist inviting that back in, so I say with confidence that the greatest outcome of my announcement was unintentional. My words were shared nearly 10,000 times, and based on what I’ve seen, they inspired in some an honest conversation about their own relationships with addiction. In the author — me — they recognized somebody who seemed familiar. Dialogue and confession followed; some offered resources and their insight.
When we are conscious of how we communicate online, we have the opportunity to share and create communities, and I was humbled to watch this occur throughout the past week.
In contrast to how my father experienced the world, our access to personal stories that resonate with us has increased exponentially as it has become so easy to share our stories with each other. Attention to addiction once began and ended with high-profile celebrity benders and racially biased police brutality with leaked video. Now those conversations continue online. The dialogue becomes more accessible when we all participate and help to paint a well-rounded account with our collective experiences. It allows us to connect over our own stories, and it is in these experiences that others are most likely to see themselves — rather than in the sometimes high-profile cases that initially triggered the dialogue.
We still have a long way to go.
Trolls — combative Internet parasites — are one thing, navigating ingrained social biases are another. I am privileged. As a white man, an acknowledgment of a problem is celebrated, not used to substantiate prejudices. Does a black man feel the freedom to do so without feeling his words will be used to underscore the assertion by many that black men are inherently thugs? Many women underwent similar blowback online when sharing their stories of surviving domestic abuse last week, accused of being dumb or weak, as did many in the black community, who were blamed for their tales of contentious experiences with police.
The phenomenon of sharing our experiences online is a double-edged sword — seamless sharing is a luxury that moves us closer to realizing our collective humanity. But vulnerability largely remains a luxury for a privileged few.
As I was afforded the luxury to do so, let us continue to listen, share and create safe spaces for those typically denied the opportunity to do the same. I am fortunate to live in a time where a propensity to share, listen and commiserate with compassion has become a norm. Those of us who are similarly fortunate must join the fight to make safe spaces for those typically denied the opportunity to acknowledge and work through their own struggles.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager and is a former candidate for the Legislature. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
