Hello, my name is Jen and I’m not an alcoholic.

 

I’m not an alcoholic because I don’t believe that there is any such thing as an alcoholic; at least not in the way that it’s commonly understood.

Identifying as an alcoholic is a personal choice, and it helped me in some ways when I was brand new to sobriety a few years ago, but being labelled an alcoholic by others, and referring to myself as one now, is a different matter and it’s something that I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with.

Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not in any denial whatsoever that I used to have a serious addiction problem with alcohol. My addiction rendered me desperately ill and utterly miserable. It wreaked havoc in every area of my life. I lost many valuable things through my alcohol addiction. It left me heartbroken, my family worried sick and it almost killed me in a thousand different ways over many years.

I firmly believe that I had to stop drinking completely. I tried in vain for years to moderate my drinking and I never could, not with any degree of reliable success. In fact, on the extremely rare occasion when I managed to stop drinking before I blacked out, it only served to lull me into a false sense of security, making the next binge even more dangerous.

I never really had control of my drinking, it nearly always had control over me. Isn’t that the definition of addiction? A destructive compulsion out of control.

 

I knew that I had to find a way to overcome my addiction entirely and learn brand new healthy behaviours in order to live happily without it. This took a great deal of failed attempts, trial and error, effort and discipline, but I’m sat typing this having just celebrated two years since I last drank alcohol, when at one point I couldn’t go two minutes, so I know I’m doing something right – but more about that another time.

An all too literal interpretation of somebody who is on the rocks.

Apparently, I was an alcoholic, and once you’re an alcoholic, you’re always an alcoholic. Allegedly, according to many people, I’ll be an alcoholic until my dying day, even though I haven’t touched the stuff in years and even if I live to be one hundred as a happy toothless teetotaller. Well, I’m sorry, but fuck that for a game of soldiers.

I stopped drinking so that my life wouldn’t continue to be defined by drinking, but the second I stopped, I started being defined by that fact that I didn’t drink.

 

I used to be addicted to smoking too. For some time, I smoked most days and I smoked even more whenever I drank or if I was stressed out. Since I overcame that addiction I haven’t been slapped with a negative stigmatising label. I’m not a ‘cigarettic’.  It’s just something that I used to do and now I don’t. That’s that. I’m a non-smoker. Nobody questions it, I don’t feel obligated to go to meetings for the rest of my life because of it, nobody judges it, nobody pressures me to smoke ‘just one’ cigarette, nobody has ever tried to convince me that I didn’t used to have a smoking addiction, nobody ever feels the need to justify their own cigarette addiction to me all bastard night long.

Alcohol appears to be the only substance that when you stop using it (or abusing it, as the case may be) you can get defined by that choice for the rest of your life.

 

Realising that you have a destructive relationship with alcohol (or with anything at all) takes a degree of self-awareness that most people don’t readily possess.  Getting help with addiction takes courage. Overcoming it takes enormous strength, determination, discipline and perseverance. Building new patterns in lifestyle, behaviour and thinking in order to maintain new choices takes time and a colossal amount of effort and energy. It is often a huge undertaking that is worthy of respect, support and admiration.

Is it any wonder that, having achieved all of that, a growing number of people who have overcome their alcohol addiction, are outright rejecting a belittling and misunderstood label that is freely bandied about as a derogatory insult?

We think not.