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What Being Public About Sobriety Really Means
It’s not just about you anymore.
I wouldn’t talk about sobriety when I first stopped drinking because it seemed like I was admitting a dark secret. And that feeling would be validated often. It would cause people to stop in their tracks and visibly make an assessment about me in the moment. This caused talking about it to make me feel insanely vulnerable and equally pressured to keep up with sobriety. But it was a long time coming and I knew that even if people didn’t say it out loud, they would remember the hot mess I was when I had been drinking.
There were a few months of flirting with sobriety before I actually took the plunge. I had a fitness account on Instagram that I started following sobriety accounts and looking at the #sobriety tag in the search tab. The /r/stopdrinking subreddit was my spot to lurk and soak up all of the stories of people going through sobriety. It felt like I was exploring a piece of society that was looked down upon, I was feeling so much guilt relating to all the stories and feeling better about myself now that I could see I wasn’t alone in how I was using alcohol to cope.
The first step is the hardest
I took the plunge after a particularly horrible night of drinking. My fitness account became a sobriety account, I started posting more…
