Excerpt of Sober Is My New Drunk by Paul Carr

Drinking problem? Skip the AA meetings and seek sobriety through Twitter, Facebook, and the Internet. Or so argues bestselling writer Paul Carr, a former drunk who found salvation through social media. Now that the majority of readers have left, safe in the knowledge that they don't really have a drinking problem, it's just us—the screwups for whom quitting drinking is not a lifestyle choice but an urgent lifesaving requirement. Welcome, friends. I've already given some good news: it's possible to quit drinking without attending meetings and pouring out your darkest secrets to a group of strangers over tea and cake. You don't have to begin each morning reciting the Lord's Prayer in a freezing community hall before watching a succession of dry drunks collect their "one month sober" poker chips. In fact, it's possible to spend the rest of your life sober without ever having a face-to-face conversation about your addiction. Now the bad news: it is impossible for an alcoholic to quit drinking in secret. Absolutely 100 percent impossible. We alcoholics and former alcoholics have proven ourselves to be very bad at turning down the opportunity to drink. Unfortunately, the world around us is very good at offering us those opportunities—cocktail parties, dinner parties, birthdays, weddings, happy hours, wakes. It's a rare day when someone doesn't offer you a drink or expect you to offer them one. As an alcoholic, you will actively—if subconsciously—seek out those opportunities, and you will cave in to them. Unless, that is, everyone around you knows that to offer you a drink would be not just a bad idea but a hugely selfish and dangerous one. Therein lies one of my other problems with Alcoholics Anonymous: the anonymous part. What is the good in confiding your weakness for booze to a roomful of people who are sworn not to utter a word of it to the outside world? How does that help when you're at an office party and your boss insists you toast this month's sales figures with a glass of cold beer? Your boss isn't psychic. When I decided to quit drinking, and when I realized that AA wasn't for me, I knew I'd have to find a route to sobriety that was as public as possible. I knew that the only way I'd be able to reverse my reputation as a boozer would be to tell the whole world—or at least the part of the world I lived in—that I was quitting. Fortunately, we live in a time when it's easier than ever to share our secrets with friends and strangers alike. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter and blogging and video sharing and all that good stuff, a decision to give up drinking can easily be publicized for all to see. Which is precisely what I did. I fired up my laptop and wrote an open letter on my blog, explaining that I had a serious problem with alcohol and asking for the support of those around me. My aim wasn't to encourage all my friends to congratulate me on my decision or rally to my side clutching six-packs of Diet Coke (although many did). Rather, I wanted to create a situation in which, no matter where I was—a cocktail party in San Francisco or a dive bar in Madrid—there was always a chance that someone had read my blog post and was waiting to catch me with a drink in my hand. Of course, I was lucky. I had a reasonably well-read blog and a few thousand Twitter followers. After writing my The Trouble With Drink, The Trouble With Me post, roughly 250,000 people clicked on the link to read it. That was a major incentive to stick to my promise. But you don't need anywhere near that kind of audience for public quitting to be effective. Posting on Facebook or Twitter for just your friends to see will have almost the same effect as posting on a blog. If you're worried about your professional reputation if you "come out" as an addict, you might want to consider sending a group e-mail to a dozen or so people you trust. Believe me, word will get around. The key is for people you encounter on a day-to-day basis to be aware that you have a problem and are trying to fix it. Those people—not a group of well-meaning strangers in AA—are the ones who will be your greatest allies in quitting. I'll accept that there are some people for whom it's absolutely impossible to quit drinking in even a semi-public way: elected officials; airline pilots; followers of religions that ban alcohol; those for whom drinking has become so dangerous that they no longer have any supportive friends. For those people, I will grudgingly admit that seeking discreet professional help might be the best path to sobriety. For the rest of us, though, quitting in public beats alcoholic anonymity, hands down.