Answer Addiction

Tag: sean mahoney

  • How I Stayed Sober Through the End of My Marriage

    How I Stayed Sober Through the End of My Marriage

    I cried at Starbucks, I cried at fancy bakeries, I cried on public transportation. But I didn’t use or drink.

    I climbed the stairs to one of Portland’s iconic bridges. The sun was out, the sky was pink, my outfit: perfect. “Goodbye to You,” a classic eighties kiss-off anthem, was playing through my overpriced earbuds, the care of which has become something of a part-time job. This was how I pictured the end of my Diane Keaton-style rom-com about a lonely heart hurt by an ex who finally finds herself. Except I wasn’t Diane Keaton, hell, I wasn’t even a woman, and this wasn’t a movie; more than that, my heartache was far from over. Don’t roll the credits. In fact, that was just a fleeting moment of freedom. I still felt horrifically shitty. 

    See, how I spent my summer vacation was lying by the pool, getting a tan, and watching my marriage and my life totally fall apart. 

    I Had To Be Present

    “There’s not enough White Claw in the world,” a pool-going companion replied when I was whining about how at least the white girls at the pool could drink their problems away all summer. He was right. What I couldn’t do while my marriage collapsed was get loaded. I had over 10 years sober. No man, nothing was screwing that up. Therefore, I was going to have to be present for the entire horrible, heartbreaking, and humiliating thing. How delightful. Diane would only do this part in a montage with a Carly Simon song playing in the background. I had to do it in real time. 

    The night my ex told me that he wanted to date other people was the day my book came out. It was also a day in which I had some category five diarrhea. I’ve always had incredible timing. All I could think about all day at my day job was getting my bowels under control and celebrating the fact that my book had finally been released into the world. 

    He blurted it out while lying in bed. I mean, he could have at least paced back and forth or looked sweaty or had eyes filled with tears. Instead, it was the same tone and urgency that you’d say something like “I think I want Thai food tonight.” I had to leave and quickly shit my brains out for the 50th time that day and then return to the conversation which basically confirmed what I’d known for months and months: it was over. I pointed out his shitty timing, literally. As my ass and my life both exploded at the same time, I thought “This will be really funny someday.” But not that day.

    My Sober Support Network 

    Over the next three months, I unraveled. I cried more than I ever have in my life. I got over diarrhea only to get the worst flu of all time. But what was most painful was the heartbreak. I stopped eating and I didn’t really sleep. I had sex with random weirdos just to feel something other than dread. If this was a Diane Keaton movie, then it was the worst one ever. My phone blew up hourly with messages from sober friends like: “I’m thinking about you”, “Do you need anything?” “Can I come and hang out with you?” I took days off just to cry and hang out at the pool. I did everything and felt everything, but I didn’t freaking drink or use. 

    My soul was shattered and even though I completely knew it was the right decision, I couldn’t do anything. I needed people to tell me it was okay to not feel okay. I talked weekly to a friend who was also sober and was also having a terrible summer. We told each other every time we spoke that we weren’t going to drink over this, we were going to get through it, and we didn’t have to do it alone. 

    My best friend, who got sober the same time I did, was also going through a divorce. He sent me texts daily and somehow knew exactly what I was going through at every turn. My 15-year-sober sister, who also got a divorce in early sobriety, called me weekly to check on me and let me cry. I cried at Starbucks, I cried at fancy bakeries, I cried on public transportation. But I didn’t use or drink. 

    I also fought. Not with my ex; that ship sailed. While my smartass brain had some preloaded choice zingers to fling at him, it would have served no purpose. We fight for stuff worth saving, someone told me. There was no fight left in either one of us. No, my fight was to feel the grief and move through all the emotions I was experiencing. And it was horrible. 

    I am not one of those people who can face things head on and “feel my feelings.” It’s the opposite, actually. My avoidance of emotions made me an excellent drug addict and alcoholic. I once totaled a car in a hit and run with a poor unsuspecting chain link fence and went home and took a nap. I can avoid some shit like a boss. But this was unavoidable. The emotional pain I felt was crippling, but I fought through it with the help of my therapist, who did a great job of simultaneously supporting me and pointing out how codependent I’d been for years. Thanks for that, homie! 

    Naturally, my sponsor and sober friends did a lot of the heavy lifting. Only other sober people know exactly what you need when you’re in pain and I leaned on all of them like Diane would Goldie and Bette. 

    It’s Not Fair

    Forced to live together as our condo was put on the market, the ex and I tried to become respectful divorcing strangers and we failed routinely. As I became aware that he was actively using drugs and had taken on a new boyfriend, keeping my anger in check was as much of a one day at a time practice as staying sober. Sure, drinking a bottle of tequila and telling him off seemed like a great idea in my head, but it would’ve been absolutely devastating in real life. 

    Thus I was again forced to lean on the support I had and move through it like an adult and not like a human substance trashcan from yesteryear. I whined to my therapist that it wasn’t fair that my ex got to do cocaine and have a new boyfriend instead of dealing with all of this. He reminded me that by doing the hard work of walking through it now, I wouldn’t be avoiding it and having to face it in the future. 

    Now, four months later, the divorce is not finalized and we are still stuck in our living situation. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like. I still need to take breaks in the bathroom at work to cry. And I still don’t have a Cape Cod-inspired kitchen or a romance with Jack Nicholson like Diane. What I do have is this crazy, beautiful, badass life of sobriety that has given me the gift of being able to deal with whatever comes my way. 

    So cue the music, roll the credits, and get ready for the sequel. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Social Media Algorithms as Triggers: Wish-ing for a Meth Pipe

    Social Media Algorithms as Triggers: Wish-ing for a Meth Pipe

    Imagine if Spencer’s Gifts from the mall in the 80’s smoked crack, got skyrocketed into the future, and became a Black Mirror episode. 

    Working in the digital world, publishing online, and playing the whole social media gig, there are certain things you have to make peace with as a sober person like myself. For instance:

    Every day, Facebook will ask if I want to stroll down a memory lane of old updates, many of which feature me with a red bloated face and a pinched hammered look in every picture. Hard pass, FB! But thanks for asking! Ditto I have learned to live with my Instagram feed being filled with people I follow but might not really know (or like, for that matter) as they endlessly post about White Claw or rosé all day. 

    Is It Possible for Targeted Advertising to Go Too Far?

    Then there are the ads and accounts for weed enthusiasts, microbrews, and wine tours that follow you on Twitter based on a few tweets that happen to have the words booze or weed in them, regardless of context. Oh social media, you’re so delightful. But is it possible for the algorithms and targeted advertising to get out of control and maybe cross a line? Can a company be so far off base with their social media ads that people in recovery can even feel triggered? In the case of the disaster that is Wish.com’s Facebook marketing strategy, I would emphatically say yes.

    Listen, with a decade plus of sobriety, I try to accept the things I cannot change and the many problematic aspects of Facebook fall squarely in that category. Name something about the social media platform that is awful and troublesome and I will totally agree with you. Yet I still use the damn thing, mainly because as a writer it’s super useful. Also, I’m an addict and maybe mildly hooked on the instant approval I receive every time I post something funny. Regardless, I’ve leaned into its ridiculousness so it takes a lot to make me notice how insane it can be.

    That is, until a few months ago. I was scrolling endlessly, as one does, and stumbled upon a Wish.com ad for bullets. Not bullets for guns, but bullets as in the little plastic canisters that hold your cocaine. For people who didn’t share my affinity for that substance or other sniffable powders, bullets were a handy, very 90’s way to keep your blow on you and do it without going to the bathroom to cut lines on the back of gay bar toilets, as glamourous as that all sounds. 

    Bullets, Meth Pipes, Sex Toys, and Poppers

    The ad featured the bullets in a variety of colors and they were only a dollar! What a bargain! I naturally took a screenshot of the ad and turned it into one of those aforementioned hilarious posts. Mainly, it was just so jaw-droppingly blunt that I felt like it needed to be laughed at and shared. Like, really? This is where we are, Facebook? Ads for the new Mindy Kaling movie and Dove Bars alongside cocaine bullets? I mean, talk about spot-on algorithms, but good lord. Obviously, I’m an open book (to a fault sometimes) and I have shared bluntly on Facebook about my drug use. Therefore, I get the ads appropriate to what I talk about. Still, this one felt a little too on the nose, as it were. 

    Thankfully, I have been sober for a long time, so it didn’t trigger me. But the sheer wildness of the ad was hard to get out of my head.

    A couple of weeks later, a friend posted a Wish ad for meth pipes, poppers, and sex toys. A former meth addict and gay man himself, his post expressed amazement at the brazenness of the items and basically called out Wish.com for providing all the tools for a relapse on his timeline. The comments from other sober folks echoed his shock, expressing disgust and anger over such garbage thrown carelessly in someone’s ad feed. 

    Yes, of course, you can block Wish. Yes, you can report them and take them out of your timeline. However, you don’t get a choice in the beginning. These ads just show up on your page uninvited, regardless of what’s happening in your life and in your recovery. 

    Days after that post, another gay male friend in recovery shared a similar status about Wish and their ads. Obviously, I was far from alone in my reaction to the inappropriateness of the ads. In fact, there are entire Facebook groups devoted to how insane Wish.com is. Oh, it’s not just drug paraphernalia. It’s everything from magnetic weight loss bracelets to weird teeth-whitening lasers. Oh and don’t even fall down the rabbit hole of all their wacky apparel and sexy underwear like this writer did if you at all value your time. It’s like if Spencer’s Gifts from the mall in the 80’s smoked crack, got skyrocketed into the future, and became a Black Mirror episode. 

    How Well Do You Really Know Me, Facebook?

    Of course, for Wish, none of these ads are personal. They have a whole bunch of crap and they want to sell it to you. Wish doesn’t know I had an epic drug problem nor does it care. Again, I get it. While vast and certainly random af, Wish’s inventory is not the problem. What seems more problematic is that a platform like Facebook has zero regulation or even a thought process about what’s being advertised to the people who use their service. You’d think in a country with an exploding meth epidemic, ads for glass pipes would be off limits, algorithms be damned. Their refusal to address this seems odd, since Facebook takes great pride in how accurately it can read our minds, suggesting who we should be friends with, what pages we should like, and what we should buy. So the fact that someone like me, who very much lives and breathes sobriety out loud on social media, can still get these kinds of ads proves maybe they don’t know us all that well at all. 

    Besides, shouldn’t we draw a line somewhere prohibiting certain things from being advertised? Meth accessories might be a good place to start that line.

    Also not fantastic is what seems to be the blatant targeting of these kind of products to gay men. In a community with a higher rate of addiction, death, and mental illness, it blows my mind that alcohol companies still sponsor pride festivals, travel companies shill drug-soaked vacation packages, and social media platforms suggest products used in practices that are literally killing the population they’re targeting. 

    This is an advertising hat trick as old as the game itself: market to the folks who use it the most. But like cigarettes or alcohol billboards plastered all over economically depressed neighborhoods, it feels like a cheap shot to push this stuff to gay men who innocently log on to Facebook. 

    Yet at the end of the day, it’s a drinking and using man’s world so I’m sure very little can be done. If I am in a good spot emotionally in my sobriety, I can go to bars, walk down grocery store wine aisles, and even look at meth pipe ads. But what about people new to recovery, fresh off their last run? Or someone in a vulnerable place and craving their drug? There’s a reason they tell us to stay away from bars or other using-associated cues in early sobriety. 

    Maybe if enough of us block, report, and unfollow, something will happen. Or is that too much to Wish for? 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Secondhand Drinking: When Your Alcohol Problem Becomes Everybody Else's

    Secondhand Drinking: When Your Alcohol Problem Becomes Everybody Else's

    Types of harm from secondhand drinking included being pushed or hit, feeling threatened or afraid, being a passenger of a drunk driver, marital problems, family problems, and financial problems.

    In my vast and storied drinking career of 20+ years, the damage to others was minimal. I mean, I was never in a drunk driving accident, I never even got a DUI (stumbling home on foot from dive bars solved that problem); the drunken brawls I was in usually happened at home with my ex, and there weren’t any arrests due to my insane behavior. The only person I was hurting by getting sloppy, blackout drunk seven days a week was me.

    Or at least that’s the story I like to tell myself.

    In reality, there were countless people affected by my drinking. From the landlords I didn’t pay and the employers I worked for while intoxicated to the innocent cashiers who had to help my slurring and sloppy ass at grocery stores and liquor stores and the cab drivers I would harass from the backseat, there were a slew of people taken down by my tequila-soaked tsunami. When you add those people to the list of family members, friends, coworkers, roommates, and neighbors who all suffered some sort of emotional fallout due to my drinking, the damage doesn’t look so minimal. It looks like a small town after a tornado.

    Studies Show Impact of Alcohol’s Harm to Others

    So when a new study came out last month about secondhand drinking, I could certainly identify.

    Nearly 9,000 participants answered questions from two surveys, the 2015 National Alcohol’s Harm to Others Survey and the 2015 National Alcohol Survey. They were asked if they had experienced any or all of 10 different types of harm caused by someone else’s drinking. Coming from an alcoholic home and being an alcoholic myself, I feel like I could answer, “Hell, yes!” to all of these questions without even seeing them. Causing other people harm is the only way I’ve ever known alcohol to work. I am not from civilized red wine sipping stock. For the record, the types of harm included being pushed or hit, feeling threatened or afraid, being a passenger of a drunk driver, marital problems, family problems, and financial problems, all caused by another person’s drinking. A staggering one in five answered what I would have answered: Hell, yes, they’ve been affected by the drinking of others.

    Researchers believe the number is probably even higher, given the study only asked the participants about the last year of their lives. Personally, this also checks out. I couldn’t even begin to come up with a total and comprehensive list of folks affected by my drunken douchebaggery over the years.

    According to the study, 23% of women and 21% of men reported experiencing at least one of those harms during the last year. Not surprisingly, women experienced the fallout of someone else’s drinking in marital problems, financial problems, and being the passenger of drunk drivers. Women were more likely to be the victim of violence, sexual assault, and harassment from someone who was drinking than their male counterparts. Men, on the other hand, felt the reverb in the form of property damage, vandalism, and harassment, in addition to drunk driving woes. Folks 18 to 25, the study found, felt the effects of alcoholism the worst, which makes sense as alcohol use disorder is on the rise in that age group. Children were not interviewed for the study but as a kid who grew up in an alcoholic home, I experienced the ill effects of secondhand drinking on a regular basis. All the things the survey mentions — personal violence, damage to property, feeling unsafe — that’s all part of daily life when you grow up around alcoholics.

    Advertising Normalizes Drinking, While Alcohol Destroys Communities

    Beyond the super relatable numbers and findings, the study packs an additional punch. The very framing of the study — calling it “secondhand drinking” — is somewhat revolutionary. By labeling it this way, the folks behind the study are emphasizing that drinking doesn’t just hurt the drinker, but it also affects the people around them akin to secondhand smoke. Sure, those of us in recovery who’ve had to write inventories or make amends are well aware of how we’ve effed up the lives around us. But for the rest for the world, drinking is fun, readily accessible, and not as bad as, like, heroin, right? Advertising agencies and big brands have worked really hard over the last decade to normalize drinking in every possible setting — airports, movie theaters, office meetings, and more. Initiating a conversation about how drinking messes up entire communities, economies, and the personal lives of innocent people feels like boldly bucking the system.

    This study in fact tells the truth of what people in recovery have known for years: the world is a safer and less shitty place if we stay sober. Beyond the loved ones who have to clean up our puke or the fender benders caused when we’ve had one too many, drinking — or more specifically alcohol use disorder — is destroying lives at an alarming rate.

    In addition to being a writer, I also work at a hospital on an addiction medicine team as a recovery mentor. Daily, our emergency room is filled with people brought in by the negative effects of drinking. Yet in a society where drinking is no big deal, these faces are commonplace and will be replaced by new ones the following day.

    “It’s Not That Bad…”

    Last summer in the hospital, I met a nice lady. She had a good life: She owned a successful business, she had beautiful and talented teenage daughters, a doting husband and concerned friends. Everybody lives next door to this lady. Your mom is friends with this lady. Hell, maybe your mom is this lady. And when they brought her in because of the negative effects of her drinking, she reported that it wasn’t that bad, she only had a few glasses of wine a night.

    Later, I shared my interaction with a doctor on her team. “Unbelievable!” he said. He told me that moments before I saw her, her medical team showed her detailed pictures of the damage that drinking had caused her brain. During her stay, I got concerned calls from her best friend and her daughters, all of whom had heartbreaking stories of how this woman’s drinking had negatively impacted them. It didn’t matter that she was white or successful or a nice lady. Drinking was ruining her brain, her life, and the lives of the people around her.

    In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the discovery of the effects of secondhand smoking changed how we thought about tobacco and nicotine. We started talking about how smoking was making the people around us sick, too. We changed how we smoked in front of children, in front of friends, and in public places. When we talk about secondhand drinking, we’re hoping for the same consideration and results. We’re saying it’s not just the alcoholic affected. It’s everybody around them, too.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Sober Curious" or Literally Dying: When Saving Your Life Becomes Trendy

    "Sober Curious" or Literally Dying: When Saving Your Life Becomes Trendy

    It’s not my intention to minimize what sober curious folks are doing, but let’s not lose sight of actual alcoholism or addiction either.

    Somewhere in the drunken mess of 2002, I was curious to try the combination of vodka and Klonopin. Ditto, I was a curious little kitten when it came to what could possibly happen if I took acid and ecstasy at the same time! I was curiouser and curiouser about everything, from trying heroin to trying to buy cocaine instead of paying my rent. That’s the sort of curious that kept me in trouble for the better part of two decades, but curious to quit drinking because I just needed a break from partying and how it was affecting my life? Uh, not so much.

    Trendy, Cool, and Not Dying

    If you don’t know what the “sober curious” movement is, you haven’t been paying attention to “sober influencers.” Those phrases actually cause my eyes to deeply roll and my head to shake like a bitchy old neighbor watching you try to parallel park. Look, I don’t know anything about being an influencer unless we’re talking about the fellow teenagers I influenced to take drugs and come to the mall with me in the 80’s. I also don’t know about sobriety being trendy. I didn’t get sober to be cool, I just got sober to stop dying. But I do know that this sober curious movement is an actual thing.

    We (and by that I mean people like me who write about recovery) like to latch our collective wagons to sobriety buzzwords and trends. This summer, the world cannot stop talking about “sober curious.” The term, taken from author Ruby Warrington’s book by the name same, has popped up on every media outlet over the last few months.

    “Sober curious,” for the uninitiated, describes:

    • Folks who don’t need to get sober but who can see the benefits of cutting down or cutting out alcohol completely.
    • Mainly younger people who want to relieve the pressure to drink heavily at social occasions.
    • Folks who are concerned with hangovers and how drinking is affecting their social and professional lives.
    • Whimsical nymphs who want to hang out with their friends but not get loaded.

    In short, the sober curious ain’t me.

    When Alcohol Is Mildly Inconvenient

    See, these folks can take or leave drugs or alcohol. They don’t identify as having a problem. Alcohol is mildly inconvenient for them; it’s like your aunt Linda who eats chicken vindaloo but forgets it gives her heartburn. Fundamentally, I do not understand this way of thinking. The way I’m wired, I like to do substances in amounts that will numb me out completely. I didn’t care if work was going to be hard the next day or if my health was going to be affected. Hell, I needed tequila and cocaine just to get through six-hour shifts waiting tables.

    I mean, why casually use drugs or drink alcohol when you can implode your whole existence? This is a level of insanity that probably isn’t familiar to the “sober curious.” Nevertheless, they’ve decided to rally together and say “We’re just going to stop drinking and it’s okay if you do too!” It’s more like giving up carbs for a trendy diet than, say, being placed on dietary restrictions because otherwise your diabetes will kill you.

    As a movement in and of itself, it’s harmless. I see no problem with people whose brains are very much not like my own who can say, “Maybe I should cool it with the booze for a while.” The fewer people stumbling around, barfing in Ubers, and screaming at each other in Taco Bell at 3 a.m. can only be a good thing for society. The annoying trendiness notwithstanding, sober curious has at the very least made people examine their relationship with alcohol.

    However, I don’t see a lot of “sober curious” folks in the ER or ICU.

    At my day job as a recovery mentor on an addiction medicine team at a busy urban hospital, I see far more people brought in because of the effects drinking has had on their lives than nearly anything else. As devastating as the opioid crisis continues to be, there is a continuous influx of people with alcohol-related health problems. Sure, sure, the emergency room sees a handful of bachelorette party attendees who drank too much and fell down a flight of stairs who show up needing TLC for a busted ankle. But mainly, I witness patients who are way beyond curious.

    They come in broken, in desperate need of medical and psychosocial attention due to their relationships with alcohol. Despite winding up in the hospital, sometimes in terrible condition, many of them think it’s not that bad or that they can just cut down. I certainly identify with this thinking. For decades, I fooled myself into thinking I could outrun it, or that the handful of people I knew who were heavier drinkers meant I couldn’t possibly be that bad.

    This is where the Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) diagnosis comes in handy. Used in our hospital (and around the country), the diagnosis quickly separates the sober curious from people literally dying. Some NIH assessment questions for AUD include: “Have you continued to drink even though it was causing trouble with your family or friends?” and “Have you experienced craving — a strong need, or urge, to drink?” This sounds wildly different than the interns at the office who decided to cut back on Rosé because it was making them feel icky. It’s not my intention to minimize what sober curious folks are doing, but let’s not lose sight of actual alcoholism or addiction either. Marginalization, ignoring, and minimizing have never done substance use disorders any good.

    If You Drink Again, You Will Die

    For the people I see in hospital beds and for people like me, it’s a matter of life and death.

    Beyond that, this idea that younger people are drinking less and buying less alcohol doesn’t jibe with bigger, more staggering statistics of alcohol-related deaths among millennials. A study from earlier this summer found that folks between the ages of 23 and 38 were dying the most of “deaths of despair”, meaning suicide, overdose, and alcohol-related deaths. Furthermore, additional data shows that from 2009 to 2016 there was a significant increase in cirrhosis-related deaths among millennials, which researchers say was driven by alcohol-related liver disease.

    Over the last year, I have personally worked with a handful of patients under 30 who have the kind of alcoholic liver damage usually only seen in people twice their age. From my position at their bedsides, it certainly doesn’t look like a generation that has this booze thing all figured out. It looks like a group of people being killed even faster than the generation before them. This is a story not buzzword-worthy or even really noticed. About a month ago, I had the honor of sitting with a 28-year-old while he processed the news that if he ever drank again, he’d die. Heavy news for a kid whose friends are all still happy hour-hopping and swilling the latest craft beers. This young man didn’t have the option of being sober curious.

    Yet, as different as Ruby Warrington and I are regarding alcohol, we’re doing the same thing: We’re talking about how much we drink. What if someone reads my stuff and says, “Well at least I don’t drink like that guy!” Likewise, the plethora of sober curious articles might make a reverse light bulb go on for someone. They might seek help after reading about this new trendy health craze and think: “sober curious, that ain’t me.”

    View the original article at thefix.com