I have a confession to make, and before anybody starts wondering whether this is the part where I announce I've secretly been drinking again or joined a cult or invested my retirement account in some Ponzi scheme that I want to pitch to you, relax.
It's not that kind of confession.
The confession is that lately I've become suspicious of the phrase "I'm an alcoholic."
And by lately, what I mean is this has been a tick in my brain since the early nineties.
Now before anybody throws a Big Book at me, let me clarify something.
I'm not suspicious because I think alcoholism isn't real.
If alcoholism isn't real, then I somehow managed to spend a substantial percentage of my life conducting a highly detailed research project into a fictional condition, which seems unlikely given the amount of wreckage involved.
There are plenty of witnesses.
A substantial sample of failed attempts at moderation large enough to satisfy the most scrupulous data scientist concerned about saturation and confirmation bias.
Enough mornings spent trying to negotiate a peace treaty between my body and whatever I had done to it the night before.
The evidence is overwhelming.
No, the thing that's been bothering me is subtler than that, which is a bit frustrating because subtle things are harder to explain and much easier to sound crazy talking about.
What bothers me is the way human beings seem to have this strange habit of taking something that happened to them, or something they struggle with, or some defect that keeps tripping them up, and slowly, almost invisibly, turning it into the answer to the question of who they are.
Not all at once, either.
Nobody wakes up one morning and says, "Good news. I've decided to collapse my entire being into a single characteristic and spend the next twenty years defending it."
It happens gradually.
The same way geology changes a river's course.
The same way a habit forms.
The same way a person gains twenty pounds and then one day sees a mirror and wonders when exactly that happened.
At some point the thing stops being a condition and starts becoming an identity, and once that happens it becomes surprisingly difficult to separate what is true about me from what has happened to me.
Which may sound like pointless philosophical hair-splitting until you spend enough years trapped inside your own head to notice that almost every form of suffering seems to operate according to this exact mechanism.
The depressed person becomes depression.
The anxious person becomes anxiety.
The wounded person becomes the wound.
The successful person becomes success.
The failure becomes failure.
The victim becomes victimhood.
The intellectual becomes the intellect.
Everybody seems to be carrying around some story that started as a description and somehow got promoted into a definition.
And maybe that's why I keep coming back to something in recovery that I didn't understand for years, which is that the deeper I got into the Twelve Steps, the less alcohol seemed to be the actual subject.
This was confusing to me because I arrived convinced that alcohol was the subject.
Actually, if I'm being honest, I arrived convinced that substances were the subject, which may sound obvious until you've spent enough time around recovery circles to discover that people can become almost denominational about these things.
Back in the early nineties there were old-timers I knew who could detect the word marijuana or 'dope' from three counties away.
You could be halfway through a share and casually mention that, left unsupervised, you would have happily sucked the life out of a bong being passed around a circle like a leaf blower stuck in reverse and suddenly the whole room would tense up.
Not because they disagreed that it was a problem.
Because they wanted to clarify jurisdiction.
"This is a program for alcoholics."
Not addicts.
Not dope fiends.
Alcoholics.
Which always struck me as funny because the stories sounded suspiciously similar.
The chemical changed.
The obsession didn't.
The substance changed.
The bargaining didn't.
The delivery system changed.
The lying, fear, isolation, rationalization, and inability to stop doing something that was obviously destroying your life all survived the transition remarkably well.
Looking back, I probably should have paid more attention to that.
Because even then it felt like everybody was arguing about the vehicle while something else entirely was driving.
The labels kept changing.
The machinery underneath them seemed suspiciously familiar.
Looking back, that was probably the first hint that alcohol wasn't actually the deepest subject.
Because the deeper I got into recovery, what I refer to as emotional sobriety, the less anybody seemed interested in what I had been putting into my body and the more interested they became in what had been running around inside my head.
I thought I had enrolled in a program about "not" drinking.
Instead I found myself taking inventory of resentments that had survived longer than some marriages, fears that had somehow acquired voting rights inside my head, and a level of self-centeredness so sneaky that it could disguise itself as humility whenever circumstances required.
The whole thing felt a little like discovering that the burglar you've been chasing through the house for years is actually living in your attic.
You keep hearing noises downstairs because he wants you downstairs.
The distraction is the point.
And the more inventory I took, the more it seemed that alcohol wasn't the burglar.
Alcohol was one of the noises downstairs.
What I mean is that the disease seems perfectly happy if I spend all my time staring at the symptom while ignoring the source of the symptom, the machinery underneath it.
Because underneath alcohol, at least for me, there always seemed to be this strange gravitational pull toward self.
Toward my fears.
My plans.
My image.
My resentments.
My certainty that life would finally work if everybody would just cooperate with my management strategy, which was especially impressive given that I could barely manage myself.
And this is where Christianity and recovery slowly started sounding less like two different conversations and more like two people describing the same accident from different angles.
Because Christianity never told me that I wasn't wounded.
It never told me there wasn't something bent inside me.
It never told me I could think my way out of selfishness or educate my way out of pride or become so spiritually sophisticated that the problem disappeared.
What it told me was stranger than that.
It told me the wound wasn't the deepest thing about me.
Which sounds obvious until you realize how much of life I've spent introducing myself through my wounds.
Alcoholic.
Addict.
Anxious.
Depressed.
Successful.
Failure.
Smart.
Broken.
Pick your favorite.
Human beings seem remarkably talented at confusing what happened to us with what we are.
And I resisted that idea for years because, if I'm honest, there is a certain comfort in making the wound, or success, the deepest thing about me.
Once the wound or success becomes my identity everything becomes simpler.
Smaller, maybe.
More miserable, certainly.
But simpler.
The whole universe becomes a hall of mirrors where every road somehow loops back to me. Even the parts I call humility can become another way of studying myself.
What's funny is that this can masquerade as recovery for a long time.
It sounds humble.
It sounds honest.
It sounds rigorous.
But underneath it all I'm still the center of the story.
Just negatively. or positively when my career is running hot...
The ego doesn't seem particularly concerned whether it gets to be the hero or the villain.
It just wants top billing.
Which is why I've become suspicious of the way I introduce myself sometimes.
Not because I'm not suffering from alcoholism.
The evidence for alcoholism is overwhelming.
The problem is that I'm not convinced alcoholism is the most important thing about me.
In fact, the longer I stay sober, the more suspicious I become of anything that claims to define me completely.
Because if the disease becomes my identity, then the disease gets to define the boundaries of my life.
If the wound becomes my identity, then the wound gets the final word.
If the defect becomes my identity, then recovery becomes little more than defect management.
And maybe the entire point of both Christianity and the Twelve Steps is that the defect never gets the final word.
Maybe the whole thing begins when I stop asking what is wrong with me long enough to ask what existed before the thing that went wrong.
So when I say I'm an alcoholic, I don't object to the diagnosis.
I object to forgetting that it is a diagnosis.
Maybe it explains something critically important about my condition.
Maybe it explains why I need meetings, prayer, inventory, sponsors, humility, and a Power greater than myself.
But maybe it doesn't explain the entirety of my being.
Maybe it was never supposed to.
And confusing those two things may be one of the oldest mistakes human beings make.