Beauty, Alcohol, Vulnerability, Growth — What if we’re wrong about everything?
by Beth Kelly
Beth Kelly is someone’s weird aunt living in New Mexico. She learns everything the hard way.
Sometimes I like to read sober literature. I click headlines like ”What Adele’s month off of drinking says about us all.”
You have to admit, that’s a good headline — a perfect archetype of the clickbait genre. What does it say about us all?
But I wouldn’t know an Adele song if I heard it, so what really makes a story like that irresistible to me is the opportunity to glimpse insight into how others navigate alcohol.
After nearly two years of looking closely at my relationship with alcohol, in a moment of unusual and profound clarity, I concluded I no longer need alcohol to have fun.
That was only six months ago so still I continue to find new revelation in this freedom from constant (but previously unacknowledged) chatter related to alcohol.
Do we have wine at home? Do we have enough? Did I drink more than I needed last night? Should I drink less tonight?
I have come to see alcohol for what it really is: The known klepto among the invited guests — always taking something from me, and yet always invited back.
In fairness, for a long time it really did give me more than it took. Drinking — and my upbeat approach to it — made me a very compatible person with a great many people and opportunities. It was very much part of my success at making friends, lovers, accomplices and connections. I wouldn’t change anything.
A self-proclaimed “bartender’s daughter” my reputation and identity is built on a mythology of cool girl.
I am your friend who plans the party, orders the bottle of wine and the next round of drinks. It’s me who pre-makes the mixers that line the festival cooler, I’m the team captain who schleps the beer to the softball game. I’m the friend who manifests the concierge bar service that ensures alcohol is waiting for us when we arrive to our vacation destination.
“The drinking wasn’t the issue. I was. I didn’t love myself. I didn’t respect my own power. Today I do… I am free.” - Jessica Simpson
Is it my innate logistical skills I owe credit to for this area of deft execution? Or is it my abiding need to stay several steps ahead of the anxiety over alcohol scarcity?
Yikes. I never considered that before.
It’s probably both. And I can love all those parts of me. I’m a problem solver and a party time hero — and I’ve outgrown that particular articulation of my personality. Other people have it harder than this. I know.
So yada yada yada here I am this morning clicking on a story titled “What We Can Learn From Jessica Simpson’s MIND-BLOWING Picture of Herself Before Giving Up Alcohol”
The author — a “top writer” on Medium for “health, life and addiction” — is offering commentary on the clicky news circulating on the social internet around Jessica Simpson’s post of a photo meant to illustrate her journey away from a destructive relationship with alcohol.
The position this author takes is that Jessica’s willingness to share this unflattering photo could prove useful as a tactic for others to stay sober.
At length the author marvels at just how shocked he was that this image really was Jessica — he could see no semblance to the Jessica he supposes to know.
In examination of her brave act of sharing this photo he says: “This definitely wasn’t the most flattering picture that she has ever taken, so there could be no thought that this was taken with any intention of sharing it with others at that time.”
We can all learn from Jessica’s example, he says, to live with our shame as a way to remind us of what we should never choose for ourselves again.
“Documenting your journey is helpful to remember how far you’ve come.”
But also, he says, to never forget just how bad your dark sickness really was, so as to never forget the depths of that misery and slip into “faded effect bias.”
Fine. But have we really addressed the heart of this issue?
I found myself compelled to make this note in the comment section:
“This article — and this entire phenomenon of interest around her “before” photo — speaks just as much to our collective obsession with what women should, and should not look like, as it does about alcohol recovery and vulnerability seen as strength.”
And then I switched over to my notes app to flesh this thought out further.
Without diminishing Jessica’s feat of genuine self-love and recovery, what I see is a candid snapshot of a woman in her late 30’s wearing an ugly sweatsuit, set aside a photo that was taken two decades(?!) earlier when she was 1) younger (duh); 2) yes, thinner but also 3) highly stylized and posed by a team for a professional photographer.
By Hollywood standards we are meant to see her sharing this photo as brave and vulnerable, and if you accept the paradigm of insisting on women looking a certain way, sure, the case for calling this brave and vulnerable may stand.
But what if the conceit doesn’t hold? What if we reject the notion that we have to disparage her (or ourselves) to appreciate a journey or find value in progress.
Here’s the ground I’m staking: Shame is a challenge to sustaining any growth. A ritual of shaming is an indication you’ve coded one self-hating habit (problem drinking) as “bad” and another self-hating habit (shaming) as “good.”
Genuine growth is made rock solid only when we make the remarkable choice to love every part of ourselves, past and present — even especially the parts of our personality or history that are most painful.
When you truly love yourself you do not fathom to poison yourself — not with excessive drinking and not with shaming words.
