A year before my memoir came out, my former partner published a personal long essay in which he mentioned my addiction and recovery. The essay was not a surprise to me but I was still uneasy about someone else revealing my biggest secret. With my memoir, I was able to not only control the narrative of my addiction better, but I also outed myself and there was a great liberation in that. Having to hide my addiction and later my recovery has always been a burden and now that it was all public knowledge I no longer had to stress about getting outed. What was the worst that could happen? I already lived through that worst and I controlled it–to an extent. A friend who published her own essay on being addicted to opiates–also while taking care of children–agreed, “There’s such freedom in owning your addiction No one can use it against me anymore.”
This implies, of course, that addiction is a shame others can threaten you with. I saw it in my private life, I’ve seen it within recovery circles–just consider the name Alcoholics Anonymous–and after my book came out I experienced the full brunt of its stigma. Calling someone an “addict” or “junkie” or an “alcoholic” is an insult; owning those labels means, we, lowly addicts, can finally reclaim our shame and turn it into strength, a testimony of survival and resistance; a triumph. Secrets exist and fester in the darkness; brought to light they lose their power.
As for the idea of flaunting vulnerability, 10 years later we live in the world where vulnerability, shame and stigma have been turned on their heads, where public confessions are lauded and applauded, where flaws are seen as attributes and where it’s the bullies who suffer true shame.
Drunk Mom would’ve been received differently in 2022 than it was in 2013; I cannot imagine journalists commenting on my appearance, or my romantic relationship and especially the sexual-assault anecdote in the same snarky, judgmental way they did 10 years ago. Even the way we think of addiction is different now with people readily and publicly admitting to their struggle with it, taking pride in becoming sober and publicly telling the same “war stories” of shameful behaviour (drinking around babies, losing careers, going to jail…) formerly reserved only for the rooms of AA. Admitting to your worst behaviour is for many a way to get support and sympathy–social media brims with accounts of objectively despicable confessions that many navigate by making light of, or defending. Paired with overcoming the Look-how-I-fucked-up is the most powerful and relatable story; we revel in displaying our shame and conquering it by making it public. No, we haven’t become immune to public shaming but we have turned shame on its head in many ways; we have made shame into a source of pride. Converting shameful behaviour, and posturing our vulnerabilities gives us a sense of ownership–we cannot be hurt by others because we were first to get to the place of shaming. We take away that power, we regain control.
In 2022, it would be uncouth to judge a nice young mom for having the guts to come out with her story of addiction. Shaming this nice, young mom would not align with our worship of overcoming adversity; it would reveal you as a bully, insensitive and outdated with your thinking. I would be deemed “brave” universally, a term with which I still feel so incredibly uneasy about, just typing it is making me cringe (so much cringe). Because for me the only advantage of a decade difference is that being coerced to love the story of Drunk Mom would also perhaps compel people to bow to the blinding genius prose in which it was written. And that would be a worse outcome than being flogged in the media by a few cranky pearl-clutchers: I could never be sure if the book had any literary merit.