Welcome to the Normal Newsletter.
Hello to my readers and subscribers old and new. This is a brief guide to enjoying Normal and a quick intro to who I am and what makes me “qualified” to write on these topics. In sober groups, we say a “qualifier”’ is one where we share our drunkalogs. Where we qualify ourselves as being alcoholic with some of our most horrific tales.
It’s not necessary in most cases; instead, we are encouraged to share our experience (in a general way), strength, and hope. I’m going to do a bit of both here. To qualify and to share my experience. My wish is that you find strength here. That you find hope in our shared conversations about normality.
I’m Jade. This is my newsletter.
I heard someone say in a sober group once, “Not only did I not want to be real and regular, but I didn’t want to be special and weird.” That’s me in a nutshell. That’s how I’ve felt for as long as I can remember.
I’m alcoholic. I’ve been working on not making my alcoholism my entire personality. Which is difficult because it took me twenty years to admit it. It took me twenty years to embrace that I might be different than other people. Admitting my alcoholism to myself and others saved my life. It gave me life. So I often feel like screaming my gratitude from the rooftops and exclaiming that I’m alcoholic in the most enthusiastic way. I’m a cheerleader for recovery. I love recovery. I love that I’m the person not drinking at the party now, and it took me a long fucking time to get here.
The way I drank was not considered normal by societal standards. I find this to be incredibly ironic in a culture that consumes alcohol at every social event. That encourages shots of liquor and boos when you don’t participate. That pressures us into drinking and then shames us when we get too drunk.
A society that has very little knowledge of substance abuse as a mental illness and has for so long turned its back on people that can’t seem to manage their consumption. It’s normally the fault of the person, right? Why can’t you just enjoy a couple of drinks without getting hammered? Blackouts aren’t real and are just an excuse for not taking responsibility for how you acted when drunk. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you manage your life?
I’ve been on a journey for the past five years to answer those questions and more. And in turn to discover what makes me oh so normal in my issues. One thing I’ve learned to be true is that someone may not be alcoholic but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a troubled relationship with alcohol. I think most of us do. I don’t think that many of us our normal in our use. This newsletter is not just about substance abuse or my alcoholism. As I mentioned, I don’t want to make it my whole personality. However, I do want to explore with you our oddities and commonalities. What makes us the same? What makes us real and regular? What makes us feel special and weird?
I spent Christmas 2017 in a psych hospital in New York. I remember sitting in my first sober meeting after having been released to my mom and escaping New York to get sober in California, and I sat there feeling so dang special and weird. I couldn’t wait for my turn to share with the group that I had been drinking so much that I couldn’t stop and that I wanted to kill myself. When I would drink I would have visions of throwing myself in front of a subway train. I would get so black-out drunk that my sober self didn’t trust that my drunk self wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t wait to share with the group how fucked up I was. To really qualify. When it was my turn to share and I laid out my story waiting for the horrified ooohs and awws.
The look of shock and terror I was expecting from the group of strangers that sat around me didn’t come. It still has not and I’ve been sharing my story in those rooms for almost five years. Instead, they looked at me with peace coming from a place of identification. They could relate. Some of them had been there, too. Not that exact hospital or situation but most of them had been in a psych hospital or had been so hopeless in their drinking, that they too wanted to die. I was not alone and I was not abnormal. I was real and regular.
I struggle with a mental illness that wants to make me separate from you. It tells me that I’m different. It tells me that I’m not okay. Sometimes it tells me that I’m more okay than you and that I don’t need your help. Sometimes it tells me that I’m unique in my thinking, in my struggles, in my depression or loneliness. That I’m unique in my greatness. My ego loves to feel unique. My ego loves to feel other than. For my survival in this life and in order for me to thrive at living, I have to work against that by finding commonalities, finding balance, and finding a level playing field. It’s important for me to know that I’m not unique in my illness and that I’m not alone.
A brief guide to Normal
If you are an email subscriber you can subscribe to a section. Substack is the platform I use and it allows for me to organize the email into sections.
Home is where you will find my free posts. Every Wednesday morning a free post from the Normal Newsletter will hit your inbox. This may be divided into sections at some point to eliminate too many emails or help my subscribers choose what they want to receive.
Normal conversations will be my musings, thoughts, questions, and experiences on mental illness, substance abuse, societal norms, and normal life stuff.
*Free posts are my gift to you. (A lot of my readers are paid subscribers because they want to support the newsletter. Paid subscribers do get a lot of value from their subscription and I’ll detail that below).
Dear Normal is an advice column and is also free. You can submit your questions to Dear Normal by using this anonymous form.
To All the Jobs I’ve Had Before is for paid subscribers only. I am serializing my debut memoir here, exclusively via the Normal Newsletter. It’s a book about reinvention and self-discovery through fucking up and failing a lot. Every Sunday paid subscribers will get a chapter to the book or additional conversations.
Paid subscribers will also get access to audio recordings of each chapter, behind-the-scenes conversations on the writing process, career paths, jobs, and more.
Here’s how to manage your subscriptions.
If you log in to Substack, you should see your account and profile icon in the upper right-hand corner. Click that and you’ll see “Account Settings” in the dropdown. Click there and you’ll see this part of your settings, which lists your subscribed newsletters.
This is where you can choose what emails you would like to receive.
If you use Gmail and have your Gmail inbox divided into sections. Make sure to look for Normal emails in your Promotions tab. I would suggest dragging the email to your primary inbox and clicking “yes” when asked if you want all future Normal emails to go to your primary inbox. That way you won’t miss a post.
I write and will be posting a lot. Many of you that have been with me for a while know that my dream has been to be a writer for my whole life. I am a writer now, I know that. But I’d love to make a living from it. I’d love to publish books and write films and write this newsletter and have writing be my day job. This is my best effort towards that life. I thank you for reading, subscribing, sharing and commenting, and engaging with me and with my work. I hope that this newsletter adds some value to your life.
Thank you for being here.
Jade