Rally2Freedom

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For years, if you’d asked me to describe myself, “addict” would have come out somewhere in the first few sentences, and not as something I’d struggled with, as something I was. Not a person managing a problem, but a problem wearing a person’s clothes. I said it about myself before anyone else ever got the chance to. Even in my support groups, we did it on purpose: you’d open your share with your name and what you were, sex addict, alcoholic, whatever it was, like a label you had to check in with before you were allowed to talk. We weren’t just describing a struggle. We were building an identity out of it, one meeting at a time. I think some part of me believed saying it first, and saying it harshly, was a form of honesty. Looking back, it wasn’t honesty. It was a life sentence I was handing myself, and it’s a lot harder to build a different future when you’ve already decided who you are.

This isn’t just about which version feels nicer to say. Clinicians who work in addiction and recovery have noticed the same pattern for years: the way people talk about their own behavior actually shapes whether they can change it. Identity-based framing, “I am an addict,” tends to make the behavior feel fixed, like a trait, something you either have or you don’t. Behavior-based framing, “I struggle with this, and I’m working on it,” leaves the door open, because a struggle is something you can be in the middle of, something with a before and an after. One version locks you into the label. The other treats the label as a chapter, not the whole book. I lived both versions, and the difference wasn’t subtle once I started paying attention to it.

This isn’t about pretending the struggle wasn’t real or letting yourself off the hook for what it cost you and the people around you. It’s about getting the sentence structure right. You did this. You’re working through this. You’re recovering from this. None of that requires making it your identity, and none of it requires denying how serious it was either. The addiction was something that happened in you and to you, something you were vulnerable to and shaped by, but it was never the deepest true thing about you. Underneath it there was always a person who wanted better, who kept getting back up, who is still here reading this.

The shift I’m describing doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It happens in small corrections. Every time you catch yourself defining your whole self by your worst chapter, you get a chance to choose a truer sentence instead. It shows up in small places: the way you introduce yourself in a room, the way you talk to yourself at two in the morning when nobody else is listening, the story you default to right after you fall short. The old sentence was this is what I am. The one I try to use now is this is what I’m working through, and I’m still here. You are not your addiction. You are the person who is doing something about it, which is a completely different sentence, and it’s the start of a whole new story you’re building, one that actually leaves room for who you’re becoming.

Spencer