The Other Runaway OJ

As the holidays near, alcoholic tension is beginning to rise.  I follow a lot of sober people on a lot of sober platforms and most days it fills me with comfort and a sense of community.  That being sad, there are A LOT of different attitudes and opinions coming to a head right now over a recent ad produced by Tropicana.  I was going to call it “OJ Gate,” but apparently that sounds like a reference to another event- something about a Ford Bronco and a Kardashian?  Idk.  The ad in question basically exhibited that one method for getting through the holidays was to drink mimosas in a closet.  And some sober people lost their tea-totaling shit. 

There is an abundance of opinions in any room where more than one adult resides, but that is exacerbated in a room of sober people.  Thanks to recovery programs, sober people gather every single night of the week in more than one location.  Oddly enough, the difference of ideas in those rooms rarely become a controversy or outward argument because we know to place our principles before our personalities.  On social media, however, there is some wiggle room for personalities to prevail.  It doesn’t mean that principles are lost- it means that people get to elaborate and defend their own experience of being an addict in a world that conflicts with sobriety in many, many ways.  Since I am neither politician nor public school principal, I will happily put my completely unqualified two cents into this debacle.

First of all, everyone’s experience of getting sober and staying sober is different.  Every alcoholic’s experience with alcohol before, during, and after active addiction is unique.  The only experience I can speak to is my own and based on the stories I hear from other addicts, mine lacks a lot of the common threads of others’ stories.  The variances don’t make us better alcoholics or worse alcoholics, they just make up our individual backstories.  In fact, the diversity among us is our very first test.  When you walk into a meeting and you are unsure of whether you need to be there or not, you can here a story that sounds exactly like yours and you become metaphorically glued your chair.  Or, you can hear a story that is nothing like yours and you can leave thinking, “I’m not like that, I must not have a problem.”  False.  Sit down.  You’re drunk right now.

Not everyone who drinks heavily, drinks alone, or drinks at all has a dependency.  If that were true the world would be full of unemployed people with slack ties and broken stilettos, stumbling down vomit-covered sidewalks above storm gutters full of mardi gras beads.  They’d bump into each other, immediately start crying and hugging about how their fathers never loved them and then check into a motel with an hourly rate (there’s one on every corner in this dystopian world), and have terrible sex that neither one will remember, and wake up with cotton mouth in a wet patch of urine and not know which one of them it belonged to.  Utter.  Mayhem.  But that’s not the world and, luckily, us addicts are the minority- which is why I am not enraged by Tropicana and the direction they took for, what was intended to be, a humorous holiday advertisement.  To be fair, orange juice just took a huge blow to their relevance.  For years they banked on the human need for vitamin C and its overall health benefits- specifically to keep your immune health in great shape during flu season.  Then BOOM- pandemic.  Face masks help, handwashing helps, shields help, six-foot radiuses help, but orange juice?  Match on a fire.  It don’t do much.  So, they made a joke for a specific audience, it fell flat and offended people of a small demographic.  I’m not surprised alcoholics weren’t considered by Tropicana, we aren’t considered at all by most people.  Not even by close family and friends.  I understand why alcoholics are mad at Tropicana.  It was a big, tasteless slight to us.  However, I think there is a bigger problem exhibited by this incident and it has nothing to do with being fresh squeezed or from concentrate.  It has to do with alcoholic mentality.  Hear me out. 

There is one complaint that I hear from the sober community quite a bit, and it’s a complaint that I cannot stand.  “Big Alcohol.”  Its supposed to be the booze equivalent of “Big Pharma” but it has no semantic similarities- finger-pointing alcoholics just aren’t that clever when it comes to giving nicknames to their enemies.  “Big Alcohol” references the abundant and constant shoving of alcohol down our throats and into our minds via advertising.  Alcoholics are upset because they are sweating and shaking trying to be sober while the television, radio, and magazines are telling us “weekends are made for whiskey,” and you must have Tanqueray to “let the evening begin.”  It is frustrating- the sheer amount of overlap of society and alcohol.  However, it is not Barcardi, not Beefeater.  It is neither Corona nor Coors.  Budweiser, Cuervo, Jack, and Jim are not to blame.  Addiction is 100% your problem.

 Overcoming the taunting and the temptation of “Big Alcohol” is part of recovery.  A very, very important part.  I’m not saying that Tropicana’s ad wasn’t tasteless or provoking; it was.  It sucks that “Big Alcohol” is comprised of more than enough booze companies, and now a juice company has crossed over into enemy territory.  That feels like a personal offense, I get it.  I also understand that its not just an issue of the juice company joining with our nemesis’, but an issue of how they “normalized” alcohol abuse.  When we saw parents #takeamoment with champagne in secret, something clicked within us and it irritated the nerves that are still raw in regard to the way that we used to be.  The problem is that the defensiveness is sending two different messages to the rest of the world.  One message is: don’t normalize alcohol abuse.  Great.  I agree.  The second message says: your ad makes non-alcoholics into alcoholics and allows people teetering on the edge to break.  Not great.  I don’t agree.

I speak a lot about the difference between being sober and being in recovery.  Being sober means that you aren’t drinking or using.  That’s all.  Being in recovery means that you are undergoing a full mental transformation that includes repairing the broken parts of your psyche that made you think you needed to drink or use.  I don’t want non-addicts to get confused and put sober people and people in recovery in the same box.  My concern is that the backlash over a stupid juice ad makes it look like people in recovery are one televised mimosa away from blowing all of their resolves and years of clean time.  That’s not how it works.  If you are truly in recovery and working every single day toward the ultimate goal of being a healthy, happy, stable individual then you aren’t going to fail because the side of truck told you to “find your beach.”  Don’t break your sobriety and claim that it happened because Coors makes seltzers now.  Blame is weak, especially when it’s put on alcohol itself.  If people in recovery can get through trauma, loss, and misery without picking up a drink, you can get through a White Claw commercial.  If you can’t, alcohol is not the problem- the problem is you. 

Recovering alcoholics already have enough working against us being taken seriously as human beings again without society thinking we are one magazine page flip away from a gutter nap.   I understand the offense put to our group by Tropicana.  I just think there is show of strength in not reacting.  Let the “mommies who drink wine and swear” laugh about it, while we take a breath of relief and be thankful that we no longer need to drink champagne in the closet to feel capable of surviving the holidays.  Or Wednesdays.  Or any days.  Yes, it sucks that alcohol is everywhere and that it is seemingly being forced upon us.  Unfortunately, alcohol isn’t going anywhere.  Our mentality about it, however, can sprint passed great bounds and constraints to a higher plane of thinking and living.  The perk of overcoming alcoholism is a resilience to the things that slow other people down because they don’t see them as a problem.  We bypass little hurdles like blame and waking up with hangovers to get a head start on a day that we will rule, rather than just survive.  If you are drinking mimosas in the garage, then you are just surviving.  I don’t feel bad for me having to see that commercial.  I feel bad for those people still having to live it.