Paul Carr has been sober for 884 days and counting. This, despite being an alcoholic writer who, by his own admission, “forged a career – and a respectable income – from drinking too much, doing idiotic things and writing about them.” The story of how he quit boozing is predicated on one simple truth: It’s impossible to quit an addiction in secret.
So he wrote this letter, outlining his reasons for quitting and, more importantly, his desire for everyone to know about it so that he’d never be anywhere without someone itching to call him out on falling off the wagon. According to Carr, it’s since had more than 250,000 views, which is one hell of a support group.
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He’s now written a new book, Sober is My New Drunk ($1.99 at the link), about quitting drinking via social media and why Alcoholics Anonymous fails. From a great excerpt at Byliner:
Now the bad news: it is impossible for an alcoholic to quit drinking in secret. Absolutely 100 percent impossible. We alcoholics and former alcoholics have proven ourselves to be very bad at turning down the opportunity to drink. Unfortunately, the world around us is very good at offering us those opportunities—cocktail parties, dinner parties, birthdays, weddings, happy hours, wakes. It’s a rare day when someone doesn’t offer you a drink or expect you to offer them one. As an alcoholic, you will actively—if subconsciously—seek out those opportunities, and you will cave in to them.
Unless, that is, everyone around you knows that to offer you a drink would be not just a bad idea but a hugely selfish and dangerous one.
Therein lies one of my other problems with Alcoholics Anonymous: the anonymous part. What is the good in confiding your weakness for booze to a roomful of people who are sworn not to utter a word of it to the outside world? How does that help when you’re at an office party and your boss insists you toast this month’s sales figures with a glass of cold beer? Your boss isn’t psychic.
When I decided to quit drinking, and when I realized that AA wasn’t for me, I knew I’d have to find a route to sobriety that was as public as possible. I knew that the only way I’d be able to reverse my reputation as a boozer would be to tell the whole world—or at least the part of the world I lived in—that I was quitting.
That revelation is what led Carr to spread his call for help far and wide via his blog, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s not the first time social media has used to hold someone accountable, as evidenced by the scores of running map apps and the various “tweet your weight” diets. Hell, creepers aside, the first chat rooms and message boards had multitudes of addiction help areas. The Internet has long been our support group.
But what’s truly interesting about Carr’s story is his emphasis on being as public as possible. He expressly says he’s not suggesting others follow in his footsteps, but it’s food for thought.
In the current era of social media, we’re continuously more concerned with our privacy — not solely because we’re worried about our delicate information, but also because of the facets of ourselves we don’t want made public. Make of that what you will, but it’s curious to think that when people are so concerned about employers finding their party pictures on Facebook, here’s a guy whose goal was to spread his remorse of his own debauchery as far as possible because he knew that was the only way to get himself to stop.
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