Why I'm Still Writing About Addiction After Six Years

I've been writing about sobriety for far longer than I ever planned.

Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash

It’s been almost exactly six years since I started writing about addiction. I quit drinking at the very end of 2016 and began blogging about my sobriety near the end of 2018.

My very first post was about how I had procrastinated getting sober for years. Even though part of me wanted to get sober, every day I managed to find a new excuse to keep drinking. I always had myself convinced that I’d quit “tomorrow,” but the next day I’d end up drinking again.

I had originally planned to only write that one post, but the experience was so cathartic that I ended up writing a second post just one week later. Then I wrote a third and a fourth, and somehow I kept going for another six years.

There were times when I blogged about sobriety every single day, and other times when I went a month or so between posts. For the most part, however, I’ve stuck with a consistent schedule of publishing a short essay about sobriety once each week.

And, after six years of this, I still have no plans of stopping.

Why have I kept up this habit for so long? There are a ton of benefits to writing about sobriety, but in today’s newsletter I’m going to focus on the two that I think are most important: It helps other alcoholics, and it keeps me accountable.

Paying It Forward

I realize that this first point is a bit self-aggrandizing, and I hope you can forgive me for that. However, the truth is that I think the single most important reason to keep writing about my sobriety is because it can help people who have recently quit drinking.

When I first got sober, I spent tons and tons of time reading sobriety forums, blogs, and newsletters similar to this one. Those resources were absolutely invaluable to me.

Reading about other people’s sobriety helped me understand how to deal with the problems that I was going through. When I was worried about withdrawal symptoms, or unsure of how to deal with a difficult emotion, I could find answers in the stories of people who had gone through the same thing before me.

Even more importantly, reading those posts made me feel less alone. I began to understand that many of the issues that felt so specific to me were actually widespread among alcoholics. I could see that I wasn’t facing unique unsolvable problems; I was working through the same challenges that tens of thousands of other people had already successfully navigated.

Now that I’m sober, I hope that by continuing to share my recovery story, I will help other recovering addicts feel less alone.

I’m not an expert on addiction and sobriety. I’m not reinventing the wheel or providing secret formulas to quit drinking without any effort. I’m just sharing my story. And yet, I know from being on the other end of it that there is something extremely powerful in doing this.

Over the years, I have heard from people who said my writing helped them to stay sober through hard days. If I’ve changed the life of even one person for the better, that makes this writing worth it to me.

Accountability

As fun as it is to pat myself on the back, I have to admit that writing about addiction isn’t a purely altruistic hobby for me. I’ve also kept up this blogging habit because it’s been an incredible tool for supporting my own sobriety.

By writing about my sobriety on public platforms, I build a system of accountability. I know that I have tons of people reading my posts, some of whom have followed along with my sobriety journey for years. There are even a few people who have stuck with me since the very beginning back in 2018.

At this point, if I were to relapse, I would feel like I was letting down all of you who are reading this. That’s a powerful reason for me to stick with sobriety.

If I ever were to go back to drinking, I’d absolutely feel the need to come clean about it in this newsletter. Imagining how awful that would be provides me with a great deal of motivation not to ever drink again.

I’ve sometimes joked to my friends that a relapse would create great content for my writing. It’s a bit of the classic gallows humor that recovering alcoholics are known for, but the truth is that it couldn’t be further from the type of content that I want to create.

I don’t want my newsletter to be driven by the drama of a relapse. I want it to be a place where I can demonstrate the joy of living in long-term, relapse-free sobriety.

This newsletter certainly isn’t my only form of accountability. I think that all recovering addicts should also build accountability with friends, family, and recovering peers. However, with that said, I believe that blogging about sobriety truly was instrumental in keeping me going for so long.

I’d encourage anyone who is recovering from an addiction to give writing a try. It’s been an amazing tool in my life, and I hope it can help you just as much.

Thank you all for reading and for keeping me accountable for six years and counting!