As my interest in becoming involved in the field of substance recovery spiked, I began discussing my ideas with a past user, who in present day is an active participant in AA (let us call her Amy). I spoke of my personal experience, how I went from overindulging, mainly with alcohol, to drinking moderately. I spoke of my experience in retrospect, I had come from believing that I suffered from something that I couldn’t control, to having what I see as full control. I was an alcoholic, I am not an alcoholic now. Unimaginable in common speak; impossible.

I was no stranger to the discourse of disease (for a long time I lived my life by it) but I never truly considered what it meant for alcoholism to be labeled a disease, until my conversation with this past user. She stated what wasn’t present for me before (not word for word, but quotes for simplicity), “My brain is wired...

We live in an age, where we work more on our presentation of self, than we do on self as it stands alone. We hide behind social media, creating put together, smiling faces, when underneath it all, we suffer. As we look upon the images of our friends, or of those we have lost contact with, we compare and instill in our minds that we suffer alone. And yet, we are not ignorant. We know, we know, that others deal with things we can’t imagine, that we are left only to imagine. Social media out of the equation, we present in life as we do on a computer screen. We hold it together as we walk through space. No use in involving others into the doom we have set upon ourselves. We walk on, we beat the demons that raise arms to us, and then we carefully hide their corpses. But to who, do we grant this favor?

In creating Choice Over Disease, a friend asked me what has led me to open up...

At thirteen, I experienced my first buzz. I recognized, at age thirteen, that I had a relationship with alcohol that was different from those around me. I cried because I loved it, I cried because I was scared of how much I loved it, I cried because I felt that what was going on within me was different from everyone around me. At thirteen I stepped onto a road that would lead me close to death. Maybe that was the day I became an alcoholic. Maybe. Or maybe that was the day I chose to be an alcoholic. In either case, that was the day that my profound relationship with alcohol began to rule my life.

At sixteen, my best friend, called me an alcoholic. This did not come from anger, it did not come from spite, and it did not come from ignorance. My best friend lived with a mother who drank daily, and in excess. My friend learned, from a young age, what it meant to be in alcoholic...