#76: Reflections On Letting It All Hang Out

Since launching this little blog and then announcing it on Facebook, I gradually went about outing myself as a boozehound on the path to recovery. After some oblique references to AA meetings, I went head-first in this post.

So now, if you are one of my 188 friends on Facebook, you can at least find out I'm an alcoholic if you click over here. And if you don't know me but just found this blog, you know that some guy in Oregon named Dan is an alcoholic. Maybe you know more than that; I'm no fool about how the internet works.

I'm cool with it, or I wouldn't have done it. It led to some welcome words of direct support from friends, some of whom piped up that they, too, are recovering alcoholics. And I hear "I like your blog" a lot. I take this, at least some of the time, as a polite way of acknowledging the elephant on the blog and giving me encouragement.

It was a "fuck it" moment, although I thought it over for days before fucking it. A counselor I've seen told me about his choice, one year, to put his alcoholism in the annual family Christmas letter to 150 friends and relations. I guess I've done the 21st century equivalent. The purpose is to add a layer of accountability - a WHOLE MESS of new people who are watching - and also to live up to one of the root tenets of AA, a commitment to rigorous honesty.

Hiding my problem wasn't helping me. So, might as well do the opposite.

But there is another root tenet of AA, right in the damned name: "Anonymous". The idea is that if you don't want to let it all hang out as I have done, you can still be completely honest within the "tribe" and have some expectation of confidentiality and privacy. Your anonymity is only yours to give away, as I've done.

If only it was that simple. Since committing more heavily to AA after my last relapse just before Christmas, I've had a couple of experiences that suggest otherwise. First, I chose a sponsor who, we quickly learned, is an old family friend of my current boss. Fine, cool beans, whatever: my alcoholism is no secret at all from my boss, to put it mildly. (And that's a whole 'nother story about the fragility of alcoholic anonymity. If you've got it bad enough, soon you're the only fool who still thinks nobody knows.) So I went and shared this info with my boss, with my sponsor's blessing, and now everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows. A connection made, a circuit completed, another tendril of accountability.

Then, the other night...well, back up. One day last week, one of my sons was going on a field trip. So that night, I'm at one of my favorite meetings, and after we stand to do the closing prayer, the person to my left squeezes my hand one last time and says "we had a great time today."

Wait, what?

"We had a great time on the field trip today....You know who I am, right?"

Uh...

Well, I do now! One of the folks who works with one of my sons at school is a recovering alcoholic, and now I know about this person and this person knows about me, outside of AA.  And that's great! Another connection is made, a circuit completed, another tendril of accountability. In this case, maybe for both of us.

We all have worlds and compartments in our lives. Sometimes we may have to, but I'm learning maybe not. When I "came out" on social media, I was voluntarily inviting several of my worlds to collide. But at the same time, those worlds are colliding on their own, and it seems they would have even if I resisted.

Guess I won't, then.