Trying not to lie can be very hard work

Isolation is a kind of gravity, at least for an addict

12 step recovery communities have a lot of what-you-might-call sayings - fortune-cookie-sized chunks of language that get repeated a lot and tend to be a clear tell that someone’s spent time around sober people. These sayings are things like “one day at a time”, “it works if you work it”, “fake it ‘til you make it”, “we’re as sick as our secrets”, etc. They might be said a lot because they contain deep truth for lots of people, or they might be said a lot because they’re just noises people make to assert that they belong somewhere. 

Either way, they’re everywhere in recovery, and I’ve come across a lot of them. “Fake it ‘til you make it” in particular impacted my recovery journey, in a bad way. Taken charitably it’s a suggestion to get into action even when you don’t immediately feel willing to do so, a suggestion that the rewards for working a program await you even if you can’t conceive of them yet and even if you feel deeply convinced that they don’t exist. I can see that meaning now, with years of sobriety behind me, but early on I took it as an endorsement of lying. I figured that all I had to do to get sober was to look sober, to go to meetings and have the best-sounding shares and to present as if I had no problems or challenges at all. Who goes to recovery meetings to try and impress people? I did! I was an atheist (and remain so, though it has become softer and more complex), so the capital-G God word generated a ton of friction in me that I never shared with anyone, since I wanted to fake it ‘til I made it. Eventually it became clear (to me, and almost certainly to others) that I didn’t actually want to stop drinking so much as I wanted the consequences of my drinking to go away, and then I figured that if I could lie about believing in God then I could lie about not drinking too. And so for some time I was drinking and going to meetings, figuring that I could have it all if I just drank in total isolation and made sober-sounding noises to everyone in my life, which was isolating in a profound way that’s very difficult to understand if you haven’t lived something like it yourself. 

What got me out of that, sort of, was another of the sayings mentioned above, “we’re as sick as our secrets”. At the core of my alcoholic misery was isolation, which drunkenness deepened even as it brought me temporary relief. I was drinking alone to relieve the pain of being a lonely drunk! One of the core drivers of my drinking was a need to feel in control, of my feelings and of other people’s perceptions of me, hence all of the intoxication and deception - the only way out of it was to relinquish the control I was seeking, to feel what I didn’t want to feel and to share what I wanted to hide. 

Mercifully, 12 step programs exist and helped me tremendously in being able to share my feelings with people uniquely positioned to understand them and being able to communicate what I had to communicate even when I thought it made me look bad or might in any way lead to a result I didn’t desire. I don’t really have secrets anymore, at least not in the way that I once did - what does tend to happen is that the old tendency to sit on unfavorable feelings kicks in and I find myself frustrated and resentful and tired seemingly out of nowhere because I haven’t acknowledged what I need to acknowledge, within myself or between me and other people. Speaking it out loud, sharing what is really there for me deep down, doesn’t so much release the truth as much as release me - it releases me from the burden of trying to hide something and deal with it by myself. 

I don’t wish addiction upon anyone, but the recovery part of my life has brought me riches and peace that I wish everyone could have, in at least some version. One core thing that I want to offer to you here, as a piece of hard-won advice: no matter what you’re feeling, no matter what you’ve done or what you think you deserve, always always always make sure that at least one other person out there knows exactly how you feel.