I try not to see alcoholism everywhere I look, but sometimes it’s a struggle.

Let me explain.

You’ve all met the obnoxious evangelizer.  The person who stopped doing something that was harmful for them, and then suddenly that particular thing or behavior (say it’s drinking, or smoking, or eating sugar, or interneting) becomes the greatest evil there ever was and it is destroying everything around it and anyone still doing it needs to stop right this damn minute!!!

We all want to punch that person in the face.

Some things are fundamentally harmful and no one should do them in the first place.  But most things are pretty morally neutral, and in moderation are simple pleasures.  I try to be very clear when I talk to friends about my sobriety: as much as I’m an alcoholic, alcohol wasn’t/isn’t the problem, I was/am the problem.  I don’t want my friends to abstain from alcohol when we’re together out of some deference to my particular struggle, because to me that makes alcohol the flawed substance, instead of me the flawed human being.  (Now, if they don’t feel like drinking that night I am certainly not going to force them!)  If for some reason I can’t handle being around alcohol on a given night, I don’t go out.  That’s my choice, and I don’t think that my choices should dictate anyone else’s choices, when it comes to the boozey booze.

But every so often, when I’m scrolling Pinterest instead of grading (or instead of showering, or instead of making dinner, or instead of sleeping) I come across a picture that makes me depressed.  A fairly generic early-20-year-old girl in a Jack Daniels or beer logo T-shirt, leggings for pants, a shed load of make-up and Texan sized hair is smiling coyly at the mirror of her bedroom, phone in hand to take the picture.  Everyone has seen a version of this picture.  Every time I see this picture I can’t help pain and pity welling up inside me and all I can think to myself is “you poor stupid girl, this ends so badly.”

I shouldn’t do this.  My story isn’t every story.  And my story is much more misery-chick than party-girl, so I was never the underdressed girl looking for a good time.  There is no reason to think that just because I am in a program that every girl who posts an unfortunate picture glamorizing her drinking escapades on the internet is going to need a program someday too.  But it’s hard, when you’ve come out on the other side, not to want to protect anyone else from ever having to go through what you went through.  It takes a while to remove the “worst possible outcome” filter from your vision.

And so sometimes I am that person, who in the privacy of her own brain, screams at everyone to stop drinking right this damn minute!