Joining an online support group for sobriety
and how this rippled down to not experiencing social anxiety for once
Today was the day I did it. I joined an online community of folks trying to be or stay sober led by one of my favorite bloggers of all time, Laura McKowen.
On the platform a woman, let’s call her Mariah, reached out to me and gave me her private contact. I felt so blessed already.
I started typing and boy, I was nervous, something felt off. I felt anxious what to text and how to chat and how to make this right. My first draft said something like „hi, thanks, the weathers shitty up here“. I intended it to be light, likable. And yet my heart started racing.
Ever since Highschool, so that’s since age 13. - being in contact with people gets me freakishly anxious to the point where I scratch my face or bite my nails so bad, that sometimes it started bleeding. Pretty early on I realized that drinking alcohol could help me a ton numbing that fear (I spiraled down an addiction cycle from age 14 until, 18 years later, I knew I HAD to stop and went to an advice center for the first time. I had known my drinking was different, I did it with a different seriousness from my peers very early on. I sensed something was off when I, for the first time, had a couple of drinks before a meet-up with peers, at age 15, to numb the angst. I felt something wasn’t quite right when I established a routine of purposefully making myself throw up during or after drinking so a) the hangover wouldn’t be so bad or b) I could have a couple more drinks. I would drown an ibuprofen as soon as I got home so the hangover wouldn’t kill me the next day. The anxiety and self-hate always did anyways. Even though the self-degradation never wore off during hangover day, weirdly I still enjoyed the dullness of my mind, it took the edge off, everything outside my self-loathing was less sharp, less important, less frightening. More of a shrug with my shoulders.)
So getting Mariah’s lovely message to reach out to her whenever I wanted to chat first set of that circle of fear that had always made it so fucking hard to actually connect to people. I never showed myself, instead mostly contact was a thing that I „made“, or constructed or willed to be, but was very much from the mind and never from the heart. I guess I never even considered what I really wanted from a contact as I was just flooded by anxiety and all it’s symptoms from a racing heart, spinning my mind, sweaty palms and some kind of mental blankout.
As I started typing the message, the usual effects of being in contact with other human-beings kicked in. But today, before I hit send, I got something I hadn’t anticipated: A moment of unforeseen clarity, one, that let me pause and realize: I don’t want yet another contact that doesn’t feel like it’s got nothing to do with me. If I reach out, what would I like to know? What would I like to say? What is the experience I would like to share? And as I type away I realize there‘s so much I’ve been wanting to say, to share. I wanted to tell someone about my experience of going to an AA meeting, of feeling really weird there and even grossed out by old and you know … old white men, me being a young woman… that shit. I needed to tell someone how I felt I needed to prove my drinking was worth being at that very meeting. And how I was never brave enough to go to another AA meeting after that one bad experience. I needed someone to hear how I went to a different self-help group meeting, too, but felt I ended up in a spot where I had to explain to familymembers of addicted people (who were also allowed to the meeting) what alcohol addiction was about. How it had felt nothing like the safespace I had been looking for.
I wanted someone to know, how I was still so ashamed of my whole journey through this life that I don’t speak much about it and wanted it to become more palpable. Through me speaking about it, other people hearing about it, through conversation.
I wanted to know if people around her knew she was sober, how she talked about it and who with?
As I typed away I felt a shift. Relieve. Truth. I had told my truth. In this draft, I had not tried to sell a likable nice version of myself to others, but I had been honest.
Maybe this was going to be a way out of social anxiety: Pausing, letting myself get in touch with me, with what I wanted. And then sharing this truthfully and let go of the reaction others have to this. It’s dawning on me that just maybe, it could be possible that this is how you realize who you would like to be friends with: share your truth and find out, who is still interested/nice after that.
Mariah hasn‘t gotten back to me yet. I hope she does. But maybe it’s not as important (even though I’d love her to!) because I just leapt. I dared to speak my truth, and I think this may already be one big step further than I had been this morning, before I joined TLC.