Coming Out

Coming out as an alcoholic is a scary thing. I’m still not really comfortable with the label. It doesn’t feel like me. For so long, I focused on my husband’s drinking, and just considered myself a joiner. I could quit anytime, I was only drinking because he did, and so on. I spent five years pretending to everyone around me that my husband didn’t have a drinking problem, and the same amount of time pretending to myself that I didn’t have one. When the husband went to treatment, I treated that as a sort of new beginning too. I stopped drinking, I joined in on groups with him, I did counseling with him, I read the literature. But when I talked to my parents, I didn’t tell them we had a drinking problem, I told them the husband went to rehab, and I quit drinking with him. My parents though, were way more observant than I gave them credit for. They looked and me, and gave me giant hugs, and told me how proud they were of both of us, of me. My dad talked about how worried he’d been about our drinking, how he hoped that meant they’d see more of us. A few weeks later, he looked at my face, and talked about how he could really see a difference, how much healthier and happier I already looked. When I told my sister, who’d stopped drinking about a year before, it went the same. The more I came out to other people about my sobriety, the more I admitted to myself that maybe I had a drinking problem. And the fact that they were so supportive, the fact that they stopped drinking around us and made a point to touch base and give encouragement, made me more comfortable talking about it. I built up such a stigma around it that I was sure it was going to be a big deal for other people. But most people were either really excited or acted like it was nothing. Not one person was shocked or appalled, which is what I was expecting for some reason. I started getting really comfortable with it. When alcohol would come up, I could casually say “oh, I don’t drink”. And I didn’t feel embarrassed, and no one stared at me like a freak, and not so shockingly, life went on like normal. The new, better normal that has come with sobriety. I’m still not in a place where I can really think of myself as an alcoholic, or say I am one, but I am very comfortable saying I’m sober, and that’s a start.