But am I one of them?

The illusion of being part of something

I’ve noticed a tendency among some sober people to talk about their “credentials” or “qualifications” as alcoholics or addicts. I’ve heard people describe themselves as “real alcoholics” as if to imply that other alcoholics were not “real”. There can be so much denial involved with substance use that I wonder if some sober people have swung all the way to the other end of their pendulum’s trajectory, embracing their addiction so completely that they suspect others of not understanding what it’s really like to lose control, to succumb to a substance, to be powerless over the thing that enables you to escape from all your fears. This credentialing of addiction as being “real” feels ironic given that so many sober people, myself included, talk about how we felt excluded from groups and judged our whole lives, until we found our recovery community, where we finally found acceptance. 

It’s tempting to think when someone describes their own “qualifications” that they are implying judgment of others. That’s the way my brain works - always looking for how other people are sending me signals that I don’t belong. But, of course, people are not really doing that. It’s just me and the voices in my head that are telling me I don’t fit in, that I’m not like these other people, that I’m only pretending. When I hear someone talk about their experience, I instinctively compare it to my own with a judgmental scrutiny that serves either to make me feel superior or to reinforce my inadequacy, depending on my mood and the circumstances. Why do people share their experiences with one another if not to compare and judge? 

It’s possible, it turns out, to listen, to empathize, to find points of commonality and relatability, without adding a layer of judgmental commentary. One of the things I’ve learned in speaking with other people who have stopped drinking is that I have more in common with people who identify as alcoholics than I do with a lot of other people I’ve met. Never in my life have I felt so connected to people as I do around people who have admitted to themselves that they have an unhealthy or otherwise undesirable relationship with alcohol. That’s true of people whose stories are much different than mine, whose addiction took them to much more extremes than mine did. I find it easier to relate to the guy who spent years living on the streets, focusing his waking moments on procuring enough alcohol to make it through the day with no apparent regard for any other aspect of his life, than I do with a lot of my coworkers, or the people I went to college with, or the people who live next door.  Alcohol did not destroy my life the way it has for a lot of people, but I know what it’s like to obsess about alcohol to the exclusion of everything else, and it’s very easy for me to see how one could cross the metaphorical line between keeping your shit together and totally losing it. 

But am I “one of them”? For some reason this question has always hung over me, no matter what situation or context I find myself in. Am I like these people? Do they “get” me? Do I belong here? Perhaps it was this question that led me to seek out alcohol in the first place, alcohol being such a wonderful tool for silencing the voice in my head that is always nagging at me with what it imagines others are thinking about me. Many people in recovery think of this as a kind of arrogance, a relentless focus on the self, an inflated sense of pride combined with a fragile ego. Only a self-centered person could spend so much time thinking about how they appear to others. Could it be that feeling judged, rejected, and excluded by others is actually a sign of self obsessed egoism? In a way, I’m sure it is. But there’s more to it than that. 

I’ve grown to chafe at the idea of conformity. My resistance to being “part of” anything was formed out of my inability to do so. The phrase, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” never made much sense to me. I didn’t want to “beat” anyone. I wanted to join them, but for some reason I just couldn’t. Whether it was because of overt rejection, or the cacophony of internal voices screaming my faults at me and convincing me that I needed to be alone to be safe, once I accepted my need for solitude I began to develop a kind of pride in it. If you can’t join ‘em, make fun of them to try to feel better about yourself. I spent so much time feeling rejected by others that it was quite a surprise to realize that others felt judged and rejected by me. It’s hard to live in community when everybody feels that the other is judging them. And this, again, is where alcohol was so magical. Only alcohol would let me relax enough to hang out with other people, to feel like I was one of them, to have fun like they had fun, to feel they were laughing with me instead of at me.  

The hardest part of sobriety has not been resisting alcohol (the physical desire to drink subsided relatively quickly). The hard part is saying yes to things, going to dinner, participating in activities, while ignoring the voices in my head. I didn’t start participating fully in life until I discovered alcohol, and alcohol was the missing link that connected me to the rest of the human world. It’s not that I need to rediscover what life is like without alcohol - I know what it’s like. But I need to learn how to enjoy it. AA meetings are one of the few places I have found I enjoy being in the company of others without feeling the need to drink, to silence the inner voices, to loosen my nerves, to give me the illusion of being a part of something. But at the same time, even there I don’t feel fully connected, and I can’t shake the feeling that somehow I’m not really like them, that I don’t really belong. I don’t know if I’m going through a phase or if I’ll come to feel more and more attached to the community I’ve found in AA. But for now, I don’t need to know. For now, I can just keep going, be honest, and see what happens.