Hiromi_X

It depends on whether the person you're telling has battled with his or her own demons and lived to tell the tale. It also depends on the culture you live in, the social circle you move in and a great number of other things, I guess, such as whether the moon is in conjunction with Venus in the twelve house in Pisces.

I'd strongly advise avoiding confiding in a born-again religious crazy. Otherwise, you simply cannot know until you do it.

twelfth

Soz.

Who knows? But why say it unless you have to do so. First, there is a risk: a "religious crazy" might be the sort that would vocalize disapproval, but many, many others might claim to be understanding but in reality never approach you in the same way. That's just life.

And in terms of work, it is our national disease that people can't seem to stay strictly professional; I would *strongly* urge you to say little in the work setting, because you may ultimately be betting your livelihood that your colleagues will be understanding.

This is an anonymous and rather confessional blog. But you can't ever lose sight of the fact that this, however therapeutic, is not real life.

But my reservation about this extends beyond addiction. It goes for most personal details. I have no problem with someone being a recovering alcoholic (my brother is one) or addict. My problem is with people I know socially only in a superficial sense telling me intimate details about themselves. To me there is something slightly off-putting about that.

I have a friend who's a recovering alcoholic, and that's never put me off - I think it's good to know so I don't commit the faux pas of offering him alcohol. (I also have a best friend who's on again off again recovering and an Aunt who's clearly an in-denial alcoholic. I don't hold this against any of them. I just hope for them to conquer it.) However, I think Peter might be right that it's a bit awkward to hear these sorts of things from casual acquaintances. I'd be wondering, "Why are you telling me this?" While you have every right to be proud of your achievements, others might not see it that way.

In my experience, when offered I say "no, thanks" with no explanation, and that's it. Whenever the subject of my not drinking at all comes up, and I explain that I used to drink but had to stop, the person I tell invariably says something like "That's cool, I admire people who can do that."

I don't know about fundamentalists or right-wing crazies, because I have the good fortune not to have to interact with any of them (other than family), but most people know at least one person who has struggled with addiction so they can relate a little to what you're going through.

That being said, TMI rules always apply. You don't bring up your addiction at inappropriate times or to just anybody, just like you don't pipe up at a client meeting with "Say, did anybody else get explosive diarrhea from the company dinner last night? I think it was the fish."

It's not a faux pas to offer a person a drink if you don't know they're a recovering alcoholic, and most drunks are used to it. Part of our ex-drunk-fu is having a set of practiced responses for when it happens.

Depends on the group of people, I reckon.

My brother is an alcoholic. He tends to keep it to himself generally, but most friends of the family -- even the friends of my parents who tend to be uptight -- seem to accept him. Addiction is common in this day and age. Any intelligent person knows that ... and it is to be admired that someone has the courage to face their particular challenges.

I used to be a meth addict. Does that make me scum?

What ever happened to 'No thanks, I don't drink'? Then if asked, "Why not" or something stupid like that, you can say "I spent X years of my life being drunk. I'm done with that, I'm better than that. No thank you."
I've told people 'No thanks, I don't drink' before at parties. Only the really rude assholes who think it's 'fun' or must be had for a good time are the ones who press the point.

But why say it unless you have to do so.

Because she wants to. I think everyone is missing that point. I say if you feel okay saying it, and you're okay if the reactions aren't all predictable, then just go ahead, if that's what you feel like doing. The whole "TMI" thing...I understand the pressure of that, but I've grown to be wary of it. TMI is about taking care of other's emotional needs before your own (and assuming you know what their emotional needs even are, which you don't). If they're uncomfortable, it's their responsibility to tell you, not your responsibility to project how they might feel and act based on that potentially faulty assumption.

I get Ray's point about social appropriateness, but chances are one wouldn't feel comfortable volunteering some information in some contexts, such as the example he gives, and that's when one shouldn't.

Anyway. You know my perspective on how I think most people would respond to being told you're not drinking because you're an alcoholic. But because you think I'm too liberal (heh) to be a good sample, I asked a slightly more conservative co-worker who pulls the "TMI" comment a lot about other stuff. I asked her if we were at a work and she offered a co-worker (i named one) a drink and he said, "No, thanks, I don't drink, I'm an alcoholic," what would she think about the person. She said it wouldn't bother her at all, that she would just think, considering the person was saying they were NOT drinking, that they were successfully tackling their condition and therefore to be praised.

I asked her if she would in any way secretly think less of the person and she said no, that in fact she would probably be impressed.

Personally, I think it's like someone with nut allergies turning down peanut butter, and explaining it's because he/she has nut allergies. You wouldn't think that implied they were scum. They've simply got a medical condition they need to behave a certain way to manage, and they're doing so. I'd think they were stupider if they said yes than no and why.

Anyway, I'm not saying you *should* share it with everyone. Just when you feel like it.

If you were swinging around a bottle of tequila, shouting, "I'm an alcoholic!" at the party, that's another thing. But an alcoholic turning down a drink...they're probably more trustworthy a colleague than a number of people who ARE holding drinks and are secretly alcoholics.

This is sort of off-topic, sort of on-, but I just wanted to tell you that I've always appreciated the insights about your experiences that you've shared with your readers. I know they've helped me understand what I've been going through. For what it's worth, and all.

I think everyone is missing that point.

I don't think everyone is missing that point at all, they're just not saying it in so many words.

I think the bottom line is that you should say as much or as little as you feel comfortable with, because by and large the person you tell is not going to judge you.

I understand your desire to tell people. And I understand what Syl is saying about "TMI" being lame for various reasons.

But. I don't think the first reaction you'll get from most people would be "scum." But it might be pity (though you don't want any). It might be overwhelming and awkward for them, they might not know what to say, and they also might feel extremely guilty for offering you a drink in the first place, though they had no way of knowing. There may also be disbelief that you are truly recovered, and trigger unnecessary worry/prying in the future.

Not saying this should dissuade you from sharing. But I guess my question is, what reaction are you hoping for? And how will you feel if you get a reaction that is different from what you wished for? Is this a form of approval-seeking, or just something you feel is important for others to know about you to really know you?

Like Ray and Darkneuro said, I'm not sure people can politely ask you "Why not?" when you tell them you don't drink. Isn't that like asking someone who's had surgery which organ was operated on ?

And I think I'd look at someone who hasn't encountered a dried-out drunk before, or who isn't sure how to interact nicely with one, the same way I look at people who've like, never met a Jewish person before : They're sheltered. And not a way that makes you charming or sweet.

Bottom line, if you said, "No thanks, but I'll take a Perrier, if they have any," when offered a drink, that's cool. And if you said, "No thanks, I recently quit drinking. In fact, I'm really proud of the person I've become," that's also cool, and totally not TMI.

I think you're reading too much into what I meant by the "TMI" comment. Lame? All I meant was that certain levels of sharing are appropriate for certain social situations, and I gave a pretty concrete example of what I meant. Maybe everybody attaches some baggage to the term "TMI" that I don't.

Like Ray and Darkneuro said, I'm not sure people can politely ask you "Why not?" when you tell them you don't drink.

I never said any such thing. Sometimes people do ask, and I generally don't mind and I explain why I don't drink. And invariably when I do explain, they express admiration.

Well, my impression is that the average reaction would not be so good. In the other hand, it's a good way to detect morons quick and neat.
If people ask, You could simply respond: "I used to drink, but no more, better for my health."

As for me, I would not tell such things to anyone but friends.
"Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés." ("To live happy, let's live hidden.") ;-)

Miss Syl,
With respect, I'm not missing the point. Taking your sentiments and mine as a whole, I think that in the end my relatively more cautious position derives more from a greater sense of pessimism about people. For instance, I'm sort of skeptical of your exchange with your colleague. You write "I asked her if she would in any way secretly think less of the person and she said no, that in fact she would probably be impressed." What did you expect her to say? "Why yes, I secretly do feel that way, revealing me to be a superficial liar in terms of what I had just told you a moment ago"?

I think caution is always a good thing. My personal sense is that people reveal far less about themselves, particularly their prejudices, than is the truly case. Prejudice is not the exclusive preserve of a few right wing nuts. Period.

This is a tough question. I'd be wary about telling anyone about an addiction, based on the responses I get to my refusal of alcohol. I'm a lifelong teetotaler, and for some reason that seems to annoy people at parties. It's as though their new purpose in life is forcing me to have my first drink. All I can imagine is that they somehow take my choice as an affront to their choice. I mention this because there's a possibility that your sobriety may attract people who feel they must convince you to drink again. You've fought hard for your sobriety, and I don't believe you are a pushover for such people, but consider whether you want to put up with this persistent pressure...

I think The Kindly One makes an excellent point. People who are themselves active alcoholics may in some cases feel threatened by Hiromi's success, resulting in a predictable sort of pressure. I've actually seem an analogous kind of thing in a social situation with someone who quit smoking.

Let me stress this though: whatever the reservations or lack thereof amongst us about transparency in a social setting, this sort of thing should definitely not be brought into the professional setting. By revealing this in a professional setting one has little to gain and potentially lot's to lose (remember, Miss Syl may be right, but one would essentially be betting their professional standing that she is...is that worth it?).

I think what I've done is a *true* accomplishment. Personal transformation and getting healthy -- these things are huge achievements to me. These are POSITIVE things -- how can POSITIVE things be TMI??????

While I don't for a second deny (and couldn't anyway) that your accomplishment is nothing but laudatory and cause for personal celebration, I don't know that I can agree with the notion that any 'positive' achievement, as defined solely by the achiever, is by definition always appropriate fodder for disclosure.

"I just learned how to cum - I've been inorgasmic for years, but now I'm like a 15-year-old boy!!"

"My colostomy bag doesn't leak anymore, since I figured out how to rig this gasket around the aperture."

"I just got removed from the list of active sexual predators - finally!"

I'm using obviously extreme and absurd examples, and I'm not saying that what you've done is the equivalent of these reductios ad absurdam, just illustrating the point that 'positiveness' is no guarantor of appropriateness.

The setting and the likely effect on the feelings of others must, I'd argue, be taken into account in making a judgment about personal disclosures of this sort. In some settings, no matter how positive you may feel about it, your personal achievement may indeed constitute TMI given the setting and the likely effect on the feelings of other people. For example, at the funeral of a person who died of alcoholism. That would be a bad time for you to celebrate your achievement and I'm sure you never would.

In my case, I'm a sexual deviant (S/M, nothing terribly exotic these days). I don't disclose it at work, but some people invariably figure it out somehow from things I say or do and approach me and ask. I figure that's OK, and I live in a liberal area. It was definitely a positive thing for me to get OK with my sexuality (it took years to reconcile my sexuality with my politics), but it just wasn't/isn't the sort of thing I was going to drop casually into conversation. Took me years to tell my mom, and she is the hallmark of cool mothers to whom anything can be told.

One other point: there is a dynamic to the urge to disclose. When the breakthrough is relatively fresh, you want to tell everyone. This urge dissipates with time, so my advice would be not to do something you might regret later (workplace-related, most likely).

When in doubt first time through, you might want to err on the side of not disclosing, see how it feels, then if you still feel like it's denying a central truth about you and who you are, there will be other times to make that truth known.

When I was drinking, I wouldn't have been impressed, I would've been DEpressed -- "Jesus...not another drink EVER???"

Heh. But of course I was asking someone who does drink, but is not an alcoholic.

In terms of everyone's comments about mine re TMI and all: the concept of "TMI" is all about YOUR projection of what OTHERS think is TMI. You can not know what others' TMI is. There IS no standard. So the standard should be, what feels like uncomfortably TMI for YOU?

Re professional ruin: Personally, I can't imagine any case were saying you are a recovering alcoholic who does not drink wouild RUIN one's career. It implies the situation is under control and the person is handling it; there is no cause for alarm or ruin. And anyway, in fact, I've actually known addicts NOT in recovery whose workplaces were the ones who sent them to recovery clinics--ANd kept them employed afterwards.

And to Peter's What did you expect her to say? "Why yes, I secretly do feel that way, revealing me to be a superficial liar in terms of what I had just told you a moment ago"?

I expected her to be honest with me, like she has been about many other things in the past where her opinion was not necessarily "PC." It was specifically why I asked *her* rather than anyone else at my workplace.

Living life assuming everyone is lying and not saying what they *really* mean is a painful place to be; I know this first hand.

And she wasn't lying.

God, I always forget you've repurposed the "" tag.

Also, forgot: Hiromi, in your comment to me above you say it looks like most people here wouldn't think badly of a recovering alcoholic. But in the comment above it to Ray, you say you wish society at large didn't think these things were TMI.

Couldn't one of those statements totally contrdict the other one? Maybe?

It's interesting to me that a lot of the comments here seem to be implying "Well, *I* wouldn't think you were scum...but watch out for all those OTHER people who will." I find some irony in this. Maybe there just aren't that many people who would and everyone just ASSUMES a social norm exists that doesn't. This kind of thing does happen, often, in group think.

I don't think you need to announce why you don't drink to all and sundry. Think of it like any other disease, like diabetes for instance: you may or may not feel like discussing your blood sugar levels with a relative stranger. For that matter, do you go around discussing your dress size or weight with people you meet at parties?

I'm not saying not to do it, just that it isn't necessary, but let your own feelings be your guide about the situation.

On another note, speaking as an evil capitalist boss, you can't be fired for admitting a substance abuse problem at work. It is considered a disability just about everywhere. You can be forced to take a medical leave if you don't address the problem, especially if you work in an environment (i.e. factory, truck driver) where your problem could cause severe harm to yourself or others. I have had to deal with more than one instance of this problem in my career. My first priority has always been to get the employee help while preserving their privacy, however it usually is no surprise to the addict's co-workers--addicts are usually not as clever as they think they are about hiding their abuse.

P.S. -- Hiromi, you are smart and witty and self-aware. I couldn't possibly think ill of you.

Ugh. That should of course have read, "...don't for a second deny (and couldn't anyway) that your accomplishment is anything but laudatory..."

Joe,
You do not have blanket guarantees against termination in all settings once a substance abuse problem is revealed. After I took the manager training on this at my organization, the law still seems sort of unclear to me. Nonetheless, I think the greater danger is that, having found out about this, you'll gradually be placed at a professional disadvantage. You can usually fix it so that you can get rid of anyone.

And Miss Syl: First, I owe you a debt of gratitude. Somehow my immediate thoughts about your comment regarding trust reminded me of a great quote I had forgotten for years from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Rich Boy.

I think the course Hiromi is apparently going to take represents a pretty reasonable compromise. The fact remains that neither of us can prove we are right. There is a certain probability that either of us could be wrong. But this means that the expected potential loss from taking the course you advocate is non-zero (the fact that you could be wrong makes this so by construction). The expected loss from my route is zero (since I advocate taking no risk). What gain do you offer in the face of that risk? It still just isn't clear to me. (Obviously, my course offers no gain, meaning that one's net position would be unchanged.)

There is one other consideration that we must all bear in mind: we are, by dint of commenting to this blog, probably not a random cross-section of America. We are classic selected sample. Our personal views probably are only of limited guidance in these matters in terms of inferring the average person's reaction to such a revelation. Remember Bruce, from a few posts back? I wonder how he, for instance, would react (though admittedly, he did comment to this blog, wrinkling somewhat my sample selection argument).

To clarify to all about my use of the concept of TMI and it's "lameness"- it reminded me of a bit from Margaret Cho's "Revolution."

The gist is that she'll be talking about her messy life and someone in polite dinner conversation will freak and say, "TOO MUCH INFORMATION... Don't go 'there!'

To which she replies, "I live 'there.'"

And then she's continues to talk about how she needs to share her "herstory" and that she shouldn't have to censor herself. And I agree. Which is why the idea of TMI is lame, but very real.

Yes, I get that. The trouble is that society often has its ways of hitting back. And hard. What is the saying from Japan about nails that stick out?

The difference between you and Margaret (among other things, I suspect) is that she isn't really doing anything that brave: her diatribes are launched from a vantage-point where she has little to lose within her personal context (let's face it, her best shot at conventional celebrity along the lines she initially pursued came up short). She is admittedly very funny (I actually laughed wine out my nose the last time I saw her) but she lives in a place beyond mortals like us, where normal rules and consequences do not apply.

Look, at the risk of sounding patronizing, what you have done is an incredible achievement. Protect the coming fruits of it. Doing otherwise isn't crazy: it's stupid. And you know that.

And no more talk about Foucault. You'll get me too excited.

Nevertheless, I think my desire to make recovery, which is a very positive achievement, something I can disclose without fear is a valid one. Hiding that fact out of fear of what others might think is not really how I want to live.

At the risk of beating the point into the ground, what I was trying to say in my earlier post was that there might be considerations other than the fear you speak of and the sense of accomplishment you rightly feel. We're intersubjective beings and taking the feelings of others into account isn't always motivated by fear - sometimes it is, but sometimes it's more about sussing out a situation and making a choice from a position of strength.

I guess what I'm saying is that it might mark another milestone when you can calmly _choose_, without any consideration of fear or feeling of anger/resentment, exactly when and how to disclose what to whom. Feeling neither compunction to conceal nor compulsion to disclose, I guess. Maybe too zen, I don't know.

Examples of fruits:
You have often alluded to a great sense of financial unease brought on by high debt and the spillover to your career of spending your Twenties lost. I have no doubt that in the less chaotic and strained life you are building you will have much greater scope to focus on your career and thus the potential to make a hell of a lot more money in the next decade than you did in the last. And (and I don't give a crap what others think of me for saying this), all other things being equal, its better to have money. Give yourself that opportunity (though, to be sure, it certainly seems like you are indeed exercising caution in this arena).

You will find someone again someday. For some reason that is the only thing I'm pretty confident about viz you (I just know very little about you, even with the confessional nature of this blog). But other people have a story too, and they probably need the chance to discover you on their terms to a certain degree (just as much as you should have the right to meet them as people at your pace and in your own way). I'm just saying that I hope you don't ever short-circuit a great thing that comes your way because you more focused on "herstory" than "herfuturehappiness". In the end, you get what you give.

This comment isn't meant to be heavy or obnoxious or patronizing. It's meant to be honest.

Anyway,...

Oh, I missed your last line "I truly resent that we disorderly people can only be marginalized."

As well you should. But at the same time, the world is what it is. You are marginalized perhaps because of the reality of the insecurities of the "ordered people": how thinly woven is the fabric of their happiness. Life is kind of like a giant asylum, and ordered people probably are too a certain extent unnerved because the "dis-ordered" are a reminder of the chaos that lies just beyond the fragile walls they have built around themselves.

You can't change that. But I think you can feel a great more confidence in where you are simply by seeing through their eyes for a moment, and thus recognizing that their behavior too is motivated by a kind of craziness (in the sense that your being disordered really does not change their reality, but it does for some inexplicable reason threaten their perception of it).

My dad, the ultimate analytical mathematician, always used to say that "the world is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think". He is right, of course. Yet, at the same time, the older I get the more I realize that the kind of patient condescension behind this remark was probably simply a crutch for a man whose fears and sadness were probably just barely contained behind an edifice styled after the age of reason.