#2 Any press

This week, there was a large feature on me and Tempest in The Cut, titled “Girl Power Gets Sober” and that’s what I want to talk about. Because what I had to say turned out to be Very Very Long, I’ve split it into parts and the rest of it will hit your inbox next Friday. (A cliffhanger!)

p.1. THE BACKSTORY

For the first however many years of doing this work, getting any attention from the press was a complete pipe dream. No one fucking cared about alcohol and addiction, not in the way we do now, and talking about it was talking to the handful of people that somehow found you in a Google search or were friends with you on Facebook before you got annoying about booze. I sent endless submissions, I used every resource I had, and no one (and I mean no one except maybe Emily McCombs from XOJane) wanted to hear what I had to say. Alcohol and addiction were incredibly unsexy or untouchable topics. The end.

Part of the reason I raised venture capital in 2018 was to gain some kind of credibility, have this work and myself be taken seriously. It made sense at the time (and probably still does to people not burned by that system) that other people's money validates your vision. When I raised my first round from investors to grow Hip Sobriety, I was stupidly certain that it would esteem my work, or at least make it noteworthy, and immediately move the conversation I was trying to have about addiction and alcohol into the mainstream. It didn't* (*at first). Back then, the closest I came to any mention in the press was when some assclown from Tech Crunch interviewed me, spent weeks promising me that the article would publish in "tomorrow's feed" until he finally stopped responding completely. The TC landing page almost burned itself into my phone from the amount of refreshes I did for over a month, and that article never appeared. I thought back then any press is good press, and mostly because it eluded me.

In late 2019 my book launched, and things changed dramatically. Maybe it was the timing, or the title, or maybe it was because I was a good writer, or maybe it was all of those things plus my editor's connections. Who knows. Suddenly my name and book and company were everywhere; Vogue and Time and Newsweek and The New York Times and The Washington Post. People applauded, wowed, omgd, and so did I. All that recognition I'd been working for for how long finally come to pass. Never mind that my Times op-ed sent previous co-conspirators after me with knives or unintentionally positioned me as some kind of profiteering AA basher; never mind that I simultaneously wanted to disappear entirely from my body and scream a listicle at everyone enumerating the ways they misunderstood me; never mind that I couldn’t eat for a month and I disassociated and my fucking hair fell out. It was lots of press. And any press is good press?

I learned to live with it, and by that I mean I learned to suffer in a specific way we aren’t allowed to talk about because it’s a complete dick move to complain about (a) something you hustled for and/or were entirely complicit in, (b) something that we observe collectively as opportunity and privilege, and (c) something that has sold books which means something that has accomplished its intention (which is, to help people). I guess I should say, I learned to bypass the fuckery because I'm supposed to be, and actually am, grateful for the spotlight and its fruits. 

Over the past few years, and thanks greatly to Chrissy Teigen, I have accrued more attention in the press than I could have ever imagined. An embarrassment of riches if you will, so much so that when I see my name featured in yet another article I cringe. It hurts. Even the good stuff. Especially the good stuff. And that’s because I didn't get into this to be famous, or become the focus. I created a personal brand and used Instagram and my own story because that was a means to an end. I used myself because that was all I had; I rubbed the two sticks I had together like everyone else did and I followed the 2014 guidebook to building a movement which was basically the same one the Kardashians used. I never meant to become the story, or maybe I never anticipated what becoming the story means for a person; its hollowing reality, the way it turns you into a two dimensional piñata.

Any press is not good press.

p.2. THE ARTICLE

If we're being honest, and we are, here's my hot take: I didn't like The Cut article.

On the whole, the article was net positive. It definitely sold books, I’m sure it did Tempest a solid, and on the "what actually matters" side of things: it furthered a real, actual movement of millions of people, and made not-drinking or not-drinking as much that much more accessible; and that stuff is huge. Excessive drinking increased by 21% during the pandemic; we have more addiction, more death, more liver failure, more shattered lives, and we still have a complete dearth of resources. The article sat above the fold on The Cut website; it was featured in Apple News. It made a dent, somehow, somewhere, in the Universe of Recovery. The writer was fair and generous. She supported the work I've done and the work that so many of us have done. 

Most of my friends sent the article to me and said "this is good!" or "this is the same version of every article that's been written!!" or "congrats!!!" or even "I love it!!!!" One said something like, "the writer was salty but you know, good press." 

And yet: I didn't like it. For starters, I'm tired of people thinking that critique of AA, which is what informs all of our recovery systems and every single person that struggles with addiction (the same way the protestant church affects what it means to be an American) is AA bashing. For the record: I don't think AA should be burned down and I didn't create Tempest to "compete" with a free resource—I created it to reduce the cost of rehab, which is not AA. I created it to bring an alternative or a complement. I created it because even with this great free resource we’re all supposed to love and be forever grateful for, fractional amounts of people get meaningful, holistic help. Conflating criticism with a take down is exhausting; criticism is what allows for people to have voices in spaces where they feel they cannot. So that part. I'm so tired of that part.

I also didn't like what was an unnecessary and cheap shot on my gender; I titled the book Quit Like a Woman, not Quit Like a Girl, because I'm a woman not a girl, and inserting the word girl in front of your catalog of work is infantilizing, misogynistic, reductive and dehumanizing. The article title, "Girl Power Gets Sober" trivializes something that is actually deadly serious—alcohol addiction. People fucking die from this shit and even if they didn't, even if this was a soda business or whatever, hurtling the #girlboss bomb at women who try is tired and subtly toxic. As Shonda Rhimes recently told Time magazine, “‘I think the girlboss archetype is bullshit that men have created to find another way to make women sound bad.’ The word girlboss, as Rhimes sees it, is ‘a nice catchphrase to grab a bunch of women into one group and say, ‘This is what women are doing right now.’ Nobody ever says, ‘This is what men are doing right now.’” 

Except no man I know has ever called me a girlbo$$. A woman wrote this article, and in my experience, it’s been women that cut down other women with it.

I could go on and on but this is a groaning complaint about something I should be happy about. And I think that part—that we are supposed to be happy with things that hurt our hearts and souls and make us feel terrible because all press is good press, or platitudes like my friend Jordan gave me a few days ago ("Fans don't boo nobodies!")—is what makes it worse. 

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I do remember starting out and believing that I would do whatever it took to get my point across, suffer any consequence, be willing to be misunderstood, get bloodied in the arena, all that shit. I wonder though, if by accepting that it has to hurt in this specific way—that we have to put up with things that are meant to diminish us because it furthers our mission or spreads our word and work—what message that sends, or what that does to the work itself. I do know that this week I turned down every press request, including two live TV appearances; a thing 2015 me is probably shaking her fucking head at.

Any press is not good press.

p.3. THE LESSON (to be continued)

I want to be clear that I don’t think lessons (always) have to be painful; I don’t think it always has to be such a torture fest for us to get the point. A sick society produces the levels of addiction we live with (an astronomical, unfathomable number that is only increasing), and I want to be clear that I believe part of what makes us sick is what I talked about in p.1 and p.2; I don’t think we should just learn to live with the toxic elements of society because hard experiences push us to greater clarity.

But also, in this case, that is what happened. There’s that Pema Chödrön quote that says something like “nothing ever goes away until it teaches you what you need to know,” and that applies here. Not because of what this particular article actually said, but because I’m so tired of giving my power away to other people, letting my worth ride the ups and downs of what appears in the press or my DMs or my inbox or the comments section or the Amazon reviews. And this article, for as hateful as I found it, for some reason became the tipping point of that cycle. It made me crash through the floor to an entirely new bottom, and as we know, bottoms are just the place where we begin to tell the truth to ourselves.

This is long enough already, and late, so I’m stopping here. Next Friday I’ll be talking about some of the tangential topics to all this: Worst Nightmares, fear of public shaming, giving our power away to what other people think, how to make good friends with ourselves, how to let only our own opinion of ourselves count.

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