‘I perfected deception’: My secret life as a relapsed alcoholic | Meghan O'Gieblyn

Everyone knew about my years of addiction, the dangers I had put myself in. The second time around, after 11 years sober, not even my husband knew I am finding it very hard to write about my return to drinking. This is unexpected, given that I spent more than 10 years identifying as an alcoholic and narrating, from the podiums of church basements, the most shameful and unflattering moments of my life. The story of how you initially fell into addiction is comparatively easy to tell, because it’s widely understood that nobody chooses to become an addict, that it’s something that sneaks up on you and takes hold gradually, usually when you are too young to know better, and that quitting is an uphill battle against denial and the difficult work of coming to admit to yourself that there is a problem. It’s much harder to tell the story of how you convinced yourself to return to a habit that you had already pushed to its limit, a habit from which you’d been free for more than a decade. Continue reading...