Can Social Media Keep You Sober?

If you were watching my Twitter account closely—as probably only me and my most loyal reply guys do (Hi Fred_badger2)—you would know exactly when I got sober. There was a gap between when I quit drinking and when I decided I never wanted to drink again, but in that gap, in the Spring of 2019, I simply stopped tweeting about drinking.

Before that, I tweeted about it a lot. A lot. I crafted a personality as a drunk mess, and I’d earned laughs as such. Now that I was off the juice, should I tell my followers? Was there a benefit to being public about sobriety online? What if they didn’t buy into my new narrative? Should I even tell my friends? I hadn’t yet. I don’t think it was a silly deliberation. The very act of telling a story changes it.

Pre-sobriety, I played down my drinking problem. I never wanted people to worry. I have many siblings, and as a child, I didn’t want to take up too much space. As a teenager, I began struggling more openly. I went to see a psychiatrist, and I was quick to take his suggestion to start Zoloft, an antidepressant. I told everyone. I wanted them to know I was getting fixed—no need to worry about me further!

My reticence about public struggle extended into adulthood. I wanted to quit drinking for years but never formed the words. I was a stand-up comedian at the time; I could tell an audience of 50 strangers that I was bad at giving head (and I am), but I couldn’t tell my best friends I was struggling with booze. I continued with the narrative that I was doing well, and from the outside, I wore the right costume.

After I stopped drinking, I was still nervous to share. For one thing, I didn’t know if I’d stopped for good. I didn’t want to fail publicly, even if it tied into my narrative as a lovable mess (or as some liked to call me, “a regular mess”).

Furthermore, I worried about calling myself an ‘alcoholic.’ It seemed odd to define myself by a self-diagnosed marginalization. It wasn’t a medical descriptor; I’d chosen it. Besides, I still don’t really think of myself as an alcoholic. I think of myself as retired; I just made good financial choices.

Instead of labelling myself, I found excuses around booze. I’d order a drink and dump it out in the bathroom, coming full circle from the days in which I’d hide in the bathroom to drink. I’d say I had a cold. At one point, I even carried a pill bottle for my UTI medication around to show people that I was on antibiotics, and hence could not imbibe. Mostly, though, I just stayed home. It was easier to pretend everything was fine when there was no one there to ask me.

I don’t feel like a victim, and I don’t think it helps me to tell myself I am one. At the same time, I don’t want to pretend sobriety is easy just so I don’t look like a complainer. I struggle with the cognitive dissonance—I consider myself a person with a substance abuse problem, but I don’t feel oppressed. Does this statement lead logically to the conclusion that I don’t believe addicts are oppressed? I don’t think so. The only thing I know is that the other privileges life afforded me have aided in my sobriety. But that’s just me.

Eventually, after enough sobriety, I was ready to share—to bring sobriety into my personal narrative. To abandon the story of a fun, drunk, party girl, and to instead come out as a sad, sober lady. I’m not sure what changed; maybe sobriety is so boring that it somehow made even the dull act of writing feel exciting. Three months sober, I wrote about it on my Medium blog (this was 2019, before I met my lovely Substack community).

Before writing anything too personal, I find comfort in reminding myself that it’s unlikely anyone will read it. Medium is the wrong place for this, because it gives you specific statistics on exactly how many people have read it. Unfortunately, so does Twitter. And Instagram. And Substack. And most news websites. I wish websites would let you input exactly four names, and they’d tell you which of those four people had read your article. Now that’s a social media product I could get behind.

I published the piece. I had accomplished my goal. I had gone public with my sober narrative, and I’m happy I did. Social media has been integral in keeping me accountable to my sobriety. Posting about sober-versaries online feels self-congratulatory, but then again, all my Instagram posts are self-congratulatory (In my last one, I bragged about getting a parrot to bite me). Besides, I’ve worked hard for my sobriety. I’d argue it’s one of the more reasonable things to post about. Everyone else on Instagram is just like “I love my kids blah blah blah” like, shut up, Sarah. No one believes you.

After I went public, I couldn’t drink in front of people again—at least, not without explaining myself. I had created social pressure for myself to stay sober, which is ironic, because in my earlier attempts to stop drinking, I found myself falling off the bandwagon because of social pressure to continue drinking. In declaring myself sober, I was inviting judgment from others if I slipped up. This probably isn’t recommended, but it worked for me.

I’m not sober to save face. I don’t abstain from drinking to prove to people I’ve stuck to the path I publicly announced I was on. But I’m a shallow, imperfect person, just like everybody else. I don’t want to be judged. I don’t want to look like a failure. Sobriety is hard; I’ll take all the motivation I can get.

I shape a narrative around everything I do, online or not. For example, in some of my relationships, I’ve preferred tweeting about having a boyfriend to actually having a boyfriend. When I was drinking, I obscured the particularly upsetting parts of my life —that was my narrative. Sarah Hepola writes in her book, Black Out, of, “the troubled drinker’s sleight of hand—dividing your confessions among close friends, but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.” I would dip my toes in to see how far I could go with my truth-dump, and I’d pull back the moment the other person started to worry. I wasn’t merely drinking too much; I was generally losing control. At one point, I told one friend about booze, one about abusing Adderall, one about cigarettes, and one about sleeping pills. If I developed another drug habit, I would need to make another friend.

The internet is not real, but also, it is (said Hegel). I’ve staked my livelihood on navel-gazing. Being a “person on the internet,” as I consider myself, requires me to commoditize my own experiences. To attach labels to myself so others can find me. I’m a female comedian. I’m a white comedian. As I became sober, I commoditized that, too. I’m a sober comedian.

The narrative flipped in sobriety. Well, I flipped it. I was now performing sobriety—performing recovery from a drinking problem—so there was no further incentive to tell a story of a woman who was fine. Quite the opposite. I wanted to heighten my story to make it worth telling. I wanted to defend my choice to be sober—to prove that my drinking was “bad enough” that I was allowed to quit it altogether.

When I met other alcoholics, I was quick to jump in with the craziest thing I did while drunk. I defended my choice as an easy way to bond with them, but truthfully, I thought I needed to earn my admission to their club. I’d offer proof of the relationships I soured, the life-threatening situations, the totaled bikes (I didn’t know how to drive). How hard it had been. How destructive I was. How hard I’d made it for everyone else.

Now, you’re essentially reading a drinking story from a woman who just admitted to deceiving you about her drinking story. And that sucks for you—I’m sorry. But hear me out. I didn’t lie about drinking (although, yes, I’ve lied about many things. I’ve told at least six men on Hinge that I liked football). Stories have angles, and I chose to make the angle “look at this crazy thing I did.” An isolated incident of very bad behavior.

As Ernest Becker writes in the introduction to The Denial of Death, “One of the ironies of the creative process is that it partly cripples itself in order to function…to turn out a piece of work the author has to exaggerate the emphasis of it, to oppose it in a forcefully competitive way to other versions of truth.” To make it worth telling, everything had to be horrible, I thought. The alternative was that everything was perfect. I lived in the dichotomy between fine and damaged. An alcoholic or a healthy, normal human. As though anyone is fine. But Twitter allots you 240 characters (or, um, did). I had to choose a side.

I don’t do this anymore. I fear overstating the worst parts of my sobriety narrative may dissuade others from quitting. People have asked me how many drinks I had each week, hoping I would give an answer higher than their own so they’d have an excuse to keep going. I know that’s what they were doing, because I did it myself.

I don’t mind if others define their addiction narratives by rock bottoms. That’s their right, and it may also be their most honest narrative. I stopped focusing on the most shocking parts of my sobriety story because they just weren’t my truth. Bad things happened, but they weren’t the main story. I didn’t quit drinking because of them. I wish I had—in many cases, it was scary that they didn’t serve as louder warning signs. But I quit drinking because I woke up one morning and realized I wouldn’t get the life I wanted if I kept going. I quit drinking because I didn’t think I could ever find happiness if I didn’t. I quit drinking because I didn’t want to anymore.

A narrative is nothing more than a framing of a choice. Anyone who’s ever successfully interviewed for a job knows how to string together seemingly disparate experiences to make their choices seem consistent (recall the resume gap meme). Anyone with a stylish haircut will tell you all the unflattering ones they had to try before they got the right bob. Anyone happy in a romantic relationship will find a way to frame each past relationship as a stepping stone to their current joy. Even when they later dump their current partner to get back with their ex. And then dump that partner to get bad with the original guy. All of us have done this, hundreds of times. It’s all a journey.

I’m a writer, so I’m contractually obligated to believe in the value of stories. Just kidding—I’m a freelancer, so the only thing I’m ever contractually obligated to do is hit 800 words by Wednesday. We build our self-esteem around our stories, and mine is the story I told online. If you don’t like where you are in life, a narrative can help frame your position in terms of a greater purpose. If you can see how you got there, then maybe you can see a way out. My narrative about drinking—the labels I’ve given myself, the identity I assume online, the stories I share with friend—has helped me maintain my sobriety. So for that, I give Twitter some thanks.