Recovering: a newsletter from Holly Whitaker
TL;DR
The newsletter is called Recovering. I chose the name because I believe that everyone—and I mean everyone—should have what me and my friends who are in recovery from chemical and behavioral addictions have, which is self-care as a baseline, recovery as a way of living. I see the world through the lens of our collective and individual addictions, and the world—as we all know—is on fucking fire, and so it follows that I see the solution to all we are facing through the lens of a shared recovery. Whatever I publish here won’t necessarily be constrained to the subject, but recovery will be the thread that sews what I write together.
NOT TL;DR
I stopped drinking on April 14, 2013 and I started writing less than a month later, on May 11, 2013.
Not drinking afforded me a way into recovery. Writing gave me a purpose, a way to make sense of it all and do something with what I experienced.
The first blog I ever started was called Little Miss Surrendered: Rocking Out Rock Bottom; it was anonymous and lived on Wordpress. I started writing because one of my friends handed me Glennon Doyle’s first memoir and I knew after reading one essay that I, too, was a writer, and that I was supposed to write about addiction. Days after reading that book I wrote my first essay ever (it is very, very bad), and over the course of 2013 I wrote just a few more essays, all published under a pseudonym. I broke anonymity in February 2014, when I got angry about the internet’s reaction to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s overdose death, how everyone was talking about him like he was some outlier instead of what he was, which was our genuine representative.
In response to his death I wrote an essay called The Faces of Addiction: Mine. Then I posted that essay to my Facebook and LinkedIn account. Overnight, everyone I knew—every boss and former boss, co-worker and former co-worker, all of my friends, ex-boyfriends, relatives, etc.—learned all my dark secrets. Over the last decade it’s become normalized to talk about our mental health struggles or addictions; it wasn’t normalized when I published that essay. Publishing that essay and sharing it widely and letting everyone know the depth of my fucked cost me a lot. It also saved me.
After that Wordpress account I started a blog called Hip Sobriety, and for years I published my writing there. That blog eventually became the basis for a sobriety school (Hip Sobriety School) that few thousand people used to stop drinking; that sobriety school eventually became a venture-backed start-up (Tempest) that provided an early form of decentralized, personalized digital recovery from AUD; and eventually that organization was acquired by another organization. During that time, I wrote a New York Times best-selling book, Quit Like a Woman (Penguin Random House 2019), which so far has sold about 350,000 copies and been translated into six languages. I stopped working for Tempest in 2021; I’m currently working on my second book (PRH, 2024). This is a very condensed biography of a stupidly weird decade of my life, but it’s mostly my way of telling you it started with a terrifying, costly essay about recovery, and it will probably end that way too.
I absolutely believe the key to our collective freedom and our way out of this current fresh hell is our individual paths to healing. Not our self-optimization; not wellness. But true and genuine recovery, accessible to all.
This is not a newsletter to give you one more thing to do or one more way to fix yourself. This is a newsletter dedicated to reminding you we are not supposed to adapt or self-optimize through the end times. This is a newsletter that means to remind you that we won’t get there from there, that we have to start here, and here is so very, very good (promise).
