Why Do We Love Sober White Women?
Society loves our stories of triumph, but we risk minimizing the real effects of addiction
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I know my addiction story so well I could recite it in my sleep. When I was 22, both my dad and stepmom were diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer. I quit my job as a newsroom reporter and moved back home. After a long day of taking one or both parents to the oncology clinic, I could slip into a Trader Joe’s Scotch–induced stupor while watching HGTV late into the night. For a short period of time, the booze burned away the terror of potentially losing two parents. But I couldn’t outdrink the fear. I developed agoraphobia that left me terrified to drive on the freeway or in the left lane, stand in line, fly, or travel more than five miles from my home.
The preceding paragraph took two minutes to write. The pain, however, is permanently seared into my brain.
Even though I got sober at age 26, I didn’t come out as a teetotaler on social media until 29. My close friends and family knew I’d put down the bottle, but I was terrified of the stigma associated with addiction. One day, I pushed those fears aside and shared on Facebook an essay I’d written about my recovery. I shook as I hit the Post button and waited for a deafening silence to confirm my fears. Instead, endless love and support flowed in. People told me I was courageous for sharing my story. They expressed their pride and love. I’m still in awe of their response.
Our society loves to hear stories of redemption, but we also love to hear about women struggling — just not too much.
As I read through the comments, though, I couldn’t help but wonder: Would their reactions be different if my parents didn’t have cancer? What if I started drinking just because it was, like, fun? What if I used an illegal substance that society frowns upon? And, finally, what if I weren’t a white, middle-class, cisgender woman? My story isn’t about the hell I slogged through; it’s about the fact that I found a life on the other side of addiction. At the end of the day, that’s every addict’s story.
Our culture loves sober white women, especially if they are thin and able-bodied and fought a thirst for booze. There’s Glennon Doyle, writer of Love Warrior, who literally went from drunkenly weeping on the bathroom floor to laughing with Oprah in her backyard. Caroline Knapp’s memoir Drinking: A Love Story remained on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks in both hardcover and paperback editions; it’s still a cult classic, with a four-star rating and more than 15,000 reviews on Goodreads. There’s Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, Mary Karr’s Lit, and pretty much anything written by Anne Lamott. The list of memoirs chronicling women’s love of booze is seemingly endless.
Don’t get me wrong. I love these women too, and I’ve read all their books. I think one of the main reasons people pick up this recovery literature, though, is to scratch a voyeuristic itch: How bad did it get? What did rock bottom look like? And, perhaps most notably, How many men does she regret sleeping with?
Our society loves to hear stories of redemption, but we also love to hear about women struggling — just not too much. The story of a white woman overcoming her alcoholism is perhaps the most satisfying story of all. She endured trauma, she drank, she slept with strangers, she drank some more, she got sober, she wrote an inspiring memoir. Hey, maybe she even lost some weight when she dried out; talk about a fairy-tale ending.
In my senior year of high school, I developed anorexia, which eventually resulted in a hospitalization during my first year of college. As an avid reader, I was constantly seeking out books to help me through my recovery; stories of similar women who knew the obsessively myopic hell of finding self-worth only on the scale. Yet I found these stories just fed — pun absolutely intended — my eating disorder. I felt an adrenaline rush whenever I read about how many miles they ran per day, or, inversely, how few calories they consumed. Ultimately, I had to put down these books to focus on forgetting the thrill of hunger.
I don’t talk about my anorexia much, because in the grand scheme of my mental health journey, my descent into starvation was relatively brief. As Hemingway famously described in The Sun Also Rises, it was gradually, then suddenly. I bring this up because it touches on an omnipresent theme in recovery: comparison. I was never thin enough, never disciplined enough. If another woman with anorexia was thinner, she won.
My story is the same as everyone else who has ever attempted to recover from an addiction: I grappled with such terrifying demons, the only way to survive was to drink.
A year before I got sober, I went to a few 12-step meetings. In a church basement with a moldy water fountain, I heard stories from men who drank far more than I ever did, and often on the way to work. When I shared how much I drank, they smirked. They seemed to view me as a wannabe alcoholic. I left the meeting and went straight to the bar.
Here’s the thing: It didn’t matter how much I drank. What mattered was that I needed to drink, and I needed to do it daily. I can’t begin to describe the insanity of fearing the left lane so much. I couldn’t make left turns; I’d constantly circle around a block until I found a way not to have to make a left turn because my life was an endless hell of right turns looping and looping and looping, even though I so wanted, so desperately wanted, to make a left turn. This made me hate myself. I hated myself because I drank. And I drank to ease the self-loathing.
Our society perpetuates two problems: We encourage women to drink — think mommy juice, #RoséAllDay, and other gendered marketing—and we infantilize women who drink. In fact, you can drink your Franzia straight from a juice box. These compounding problems have led to a larger issue: Alcohol use disorder among women in the U.S. increased by 83.7% between 2002 and 2013. Still, we don’t take women’s alcoholism that seriously. I will never forget the church basement where fellow addicts treated me like a young girl who drank a little too much juice. Thanks to this single interaction, I spiraled deeper into my drinking for an additional year because hey, the guys at the 12-step meeting told me I was fine.
That last year drinking was the worst of my life. I won’t tell you the details. I’m not here to entertain you with my most traumatic memories, even if they are as juicy as a glass of Beaujolais.
The other day, I watched a man wake up in a public park and finish a fifth of vodka at 8 a.m. I have no idea what he has lived through. I do know, however, the desperate guzzling to quiet your brain, if only for a few moments. My body ached as I watched him; I could still feel the pain of poisoning myself to survive another few hours. He happened to drink from a plastic bottle in the park at sunrise, and I happened to drink wine on my couch at sunset. Society views my behavior as more acceptable, but his addiction should elicit no more judgment than mine. At the end of the day, it’s the same disease, just in different contexts.
When I stopped drinking, I would lie awake each night terrified I’d stop breathing or choke to death on my own tongue. My panic attacks worsened to the point that I consulted my local university’s psychiatry department page and read every biography until I found someone who specialized in my exact issue: agoraphobia and drinking. I dragged myself to 10 terrifying sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy, where I learned how to retrain my brain and was forced to do activities I thought would kill me, such as driving in the left lane for one mile. There are millions of tiny, tedious steps on the journey to recovery, but it’s not as scintillating to hear about my endless notes rating my terror in the car. Still, that’s where the real work lies.
My personal sobriety is no more valid than anyone else’s. Sure, I almost lost my parents to cancer. Sure, I still haven’t traveled more than 336 miles from my home over the past several years. That isn’t my story, though. My story is the same as everyone else who has ever attempted to recover from an addiction: I grappled with such terrifying demons, the only way to survive was to drink. This fueled such intense self-hatred, the only way to bury it was to drink more. The cycle continued until one day, I knew I couldn’t go on like this. And so, no matter how terrifying the demons seemed, I put down the bottle.
My addiction wasn’t less real because I’m a woman. I’m no braver because I faced agoraphobia, or because I was a caretaker. I’m brave because each day, I consciously choose to stay sober. Every time I see someone drinking, I think, “Not today.” Those two words encapsulate every sober person’s story, regardless of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, ability, or socioeconomic status.
Not today.
