Dear reader,
The story I am going to share with you qualifies as the shittiest behavior I have experienced from another human in the last eight years of being a non-drinker. I say this with conviction because I have no other story that comes close.
As much as I love to share all the positives and feel-good stories about this lifestyle, it’s not always like that. And in order to feel good, we have to feel it all. What I experienced is the reality of what may happen when you stop doing something so ingrained in our culture, our community, and sadly, even our friend groups.
I know that this experience had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the other man and woman and their own inner workings. But when it was happening in real-time, I had trouble seeing that truth.

“Stick with the program,” – he sneered with the most demeaning and condescending tone as he stood in front of me with a look of disgust on his face.
At that moment, with those four simple words strung together, I immediately felt the shame of an entire population who had struggled to stay sober. A population that has received pushback from friends, who were isolated from their communities, who lost marriages, companionships, employment, and family members all because they were fighting a disease that had taken over their lives.
I personally have never had to fight this fight. But given the world in which I very publicly share my choice to quit drinking, I have had the honor to hear many, many stories similar of my friends, of the women I have met on my retreats, and of the people I connect with daily through my social media. I had never fully understood these feelings of shame that so many people talk about in the recovery space, and yet, with those four words, I knew precisely the heaviness of what I had only heard about.
And as fast as that feeling of shame entered my body, it disappeared and was replaced with the most intense anger I have ever felt towards a friend. Five-year-old Mia, who used to stand up for the kindergarten underdog, came out. Seventeen-year-old Mia, who spent one of her last days of high school in detention standing up for a kid who was bullied by some jock, came out. Forty-three-year-old Mia's inner sheriff, who is incapable of not calling out injustice, came out. And it was pure instinct for me to want to fight for an entire population of people who have been made to feel less than for something I think to be the most respectable thing: recovery.
Yet somehow, I mustered up enough strength to keep my composure, turn away from this tool of a human that I wanted to demolish and force myself to walk out the door of a good friend’s wedding.