Mythologizing Rock Bottom

Supporting multiple paths to sobriety.

Before we get started – this post focuses on recovery from addiction. I believe it’s an incredibly important topic that we need to discuss far more – and with far more nuance – than we do today. But I don’t want to pretend that I can do justice to the tremendous and wide-ranging impacts addiction has on all of us. I can only share my story, and what has worked (and hasn’t) for me.

It was winter of 2022, and in a few days I was going to head out to Minnesota to spend Christmas with my family. None of them were fully aware of the extent of my drinking, and the holidays were traditionally a time for some pretty serious consumption of alcohol. 2022 had mostly been a good year for me in my long journey towards sobriety. I had cut back quite a bit, and had stopped entirely for a few months. But between a bad breakup and my fortieth birthday, the end of the year had been a struggle, and I needed a reset. So I wrote my family a simple email, saying I wasn’t going to drink while visiting, and got just the response I needed. No questioning of my decision, no telling me why I was actually fine, just friendly acceptance and accommodation. That ended up being my first sober Christmas.

This story wasn’t the crucial turning point in my journey with alcohol. This wasn’t the moment when everything became clear to me and I finally saw the error of my ways. This wasn’t even the moment I stopped drinking for good. But it was the last major hurdle I needed to clear to prove to myself I was capable of sobriety. One of dozens of hurdles I had been overcoming over the last four years, from the time I first said out loud that I wasn’t happy with my relationship with alcohol.

We tell a story that alcoholics will hit rock bottom, see the light, and choose to never drink again. This is a true story for many, but is by no means the only story¹. I never had a rock bottom moment. I never had a moment of suddenly seeing the light. I spent years learning how to stay sober, and the moment I finally really quit, eighteen months ago, felt like the natural cumulation of a lot of sustained, hard work.

I needed to learn quite a lot before I could reach sustained sobriety.

I worry that by mythologizing the rock bottom to instant sobriety story, we don’t leave room for supporting those taking a different route. I needed help, accountability, education, reassurance, mentorship and generally to be seen in my struggle. But I was so afraid that if I said publicly that I was struggling, but didn’t also immediately quit drinking, I’d be branded as a failure who should be ashamed of himself. (Hardly a feeling I needed more of in my life at that point.)

Foundation Building

I had an entire personality, an entire life, built around alcohol. I had no clue how to live without it, and was terrified at what a sober life might look like. To quit, I first needed a foundation on which I could rebuild myself.

I needed to learn to:

• See alcohol not as a helpful companion but as insidious and manipulative.

• Talk to myself in a kind, compassionate, accountable way.

• Reveal to my closest friends that I was struggling, and learn to accept their help and reassurance.

• Recognize the deep impact my drinking was having on the relationships in my life.

• Understand that stopping drinking would not mean a total end of my social and dating life.

• Fully accept what my life might look like in twenty years if I continued down this path.

• Become comfortable with telling others, from strangers to family, that I was not going to consume alcohol at their event, and be able to discuss why.

• Find other, more healthy, methods of stabilizing my mood.

Many of these took years to learn, and most are still a work in progress. Some required what felt like an entire grieving process for my prior life, as I had to come to terms with how things would be different going forward.

Most of this foundation I built alone, or with help of a therapist or one close friend. I wish I had asked for more help, instead of stumbling through it, making mistake after mistake. I wonder if I could’ve shrunk that five year process down to something much shorter, and gained the immense benefits of sobriety that much sooner.

I wish that admitting I had a problem hadn’t felt akin to setting my entire life on fire while yelling, “Hey I know you think I’m strong and reliable, but I’m actually a terrified little kid who’s lost control and doesn’t know what to do and could really use some help.”

External Support

Imagine you’re an adult who never learned how to cook. You’re ashamed that you’ve managed to get this far in life without this skill, and even the thought of attempting it causes a spike of anxiety. But you decide to finally give it a try, starting with frying some eggs. You crack the first one into the pan successfully. On the second egg, it makes it into the pan ok but a big piece of shell falls in there with it. Imagine a group of onlookers in the kitchen with you, silently staring as you attempt to salvage the meal. You can hear their whispers, the mixture of disappointment, pity, and derision in their voices.

I got a lot of shell in my eggs as I was learning how to quit. Most often I was in the kitchen alone, afraid of letting anyone in to help. I was so afraid of the potential for pity or disappointment that I shut myself off from desperately needed encouragement, validation, and support.

If you’re in the kitchen with someone struggling with addiction, or you know they’re in the kitchen alone, trying to figure things out, here are a few ways in which you may be able to help:

• Know someone who tried to break an addiction, made it a few months, and then started up again? Engage them in a conversation about it. Tell them how awesome it is that they made it through two months. Ask them, kindly, what triggered the addiction to resume. Ask how you might support them next time they give it a try.

• Have a friend who did something really annoying or dangerous while drinking? Have an honest conversation with them about it, being kind but also holding them accountable for their actions. Aim to strike a tone of “I’m being honest with you about this because I deeply care about you.”

• Or just bring up the potential for addiction and any concerns and thoughts you have about it with the circles you interact with. Normalizing this as a topic of discussion can make it so much easier for someone struggling to actually start talking about it. Somehow as a society we’ve normalized drinking more than we’ve normalized talking about the potential costs of it.

And a few things to avoid:

• The silent treatment. You’re frustrated with someone’s addiction, especially now that they’re back at it after managing to quit for a few months. They’re not acknowledging it, and so you’re avoiding engaging with them. I completely understand the inclination to do this, and have been guilty of it myself at times. But this person is already filled with shame about their relapse, and piling on additional shame is not going to help the situation.

• Treating the person working through their addiction as a delicate glass sculpture, extremely fragile and needing to be treated exceedingly carefully. While understandable, I always found this approach extremely frustrating. I needed people to talk to, people I could be honest with, people who weren’t scared of having a discussion about what was and wasn’t working for me. I needed to be treated like an adult going through a rough patch and in need of some support and guidance, not like a little kid incapable of tying his own shoes.

There’s a recurring theme in all of this: honest, vulnerable, kind, and accountable conversations have an immense power. For most of my life I wasn’t able to even have these conversations with myself, let alone others. I felt isolated, misunderstood, deeply lonely, and that fueled my drinking. Only as I was able to open up to myself and others could I begin feeling welcome and accepted, and see a world in which sobriety felt possible. 

Resources

If you’re either struggling with addiction (especially drinking) or just looking to learn more about it, I found the book This Naked Mind to be incredibly valuable. I’ve read it several times, and I credit it with rewiring the way my brain thinks about alcohol.

Thanks as always for reading, we really appreciate all the feedback we’ve been receiving (both through the comment section and directly). Every ♥️ and share helps expand our audience, so please keep those coming. I’ve found the encouragement especially helpful as I tackle these more vulnerable topics and dive back into some harder parts of my history.

1. There is quite a wide range in the amount of time or attempts it takes to recover from an addiction.