It’s amazing that this morning I tweeted something based on a Facebook post by a college friend of mine and then came back to Twitter this afternoon seeing a subtweet about my tweet retweeted into my feed saying ‘don’t subtweet’.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing how people struggle to engage here. And at the end of the day, the point was still missed. Maybe that’s my bad, idk.

My point, now that I’ve spent a few hours pretty truly upset that I’m hearing folks say those struggling (like myself, right now!) should just get off their high horse, is as follows:

I’m an alcoholic. I quit drinking 786 days ago. It was hard. It’s been harder. Now, it’s the hardest. You know why? Because I’m stuck at home, unable to do all the things I used to be able to do when I felt like having a drink.

I can’t go walk around outside, I can’t go talk to a professional, I can’t go to one of my favorite places and prove to myself I can do something there other than order a drink or seven.

That’s not anyone else’s problem but mine. But now, I see 200x the tweets *daily* about getting cocktails to go to cope, making a liquor run because you’re down to one bottle of wine, ‘thirsty everyday’ posts… it’s a lot.

On a normal day, that’s enough for me to want to leave the house and go do something constructive to help work all that anxiety out. Now, that’s not an option. Again, not your problem.

But y’all… I’ve been there. I’ve been the person joking about ‘needing a drink’. I’ve been the person spending money I should have saved for food or bills on liquor instead. And it’s a much more slippery slope than a lot of y’all think. It snuck on me, hard.

Right now, it’s a lot harder for everyone in your lives to deal with everything. Period. Then add mental illness, addiction, food issues, ANYTHING on top of that, and it just compounds.

Coping mechanisms and community support are largely out the window. This place right here is one of the only ways a lot of us have a window to the outside world right now.

And when your window to the outside world is constantly inundating you with things that make your inside world even harder, it is *tough*. I want to stay connected to my friends, in spite of the shit they are unknowingly throwing my way.

Because normally, when one of my friends here posts about drinking, it rolls off my back. I can do something to forget about it. It’s few and far between posts that are drowned out by far more positive things.

But right now, that’s not really where we’re at. So I’m just asking that you consider your jokes about gaining weight, making light of drinking more (‘to cope’ or not), worried about becoming a shut-in. Consider them. Before you tweet them.

I’ve seen so, so many people I dearly respect make light of these and many more things in the past few weeks. You probably have no clue the impact it has on others. Largely because we’re ashamed to talk about how we have to navigate the world around your normalness.

But I’m here, right now, saying it bothers me and I would love for folks to respect the fact that right now may not be the time.

Everyone’s struggling. This is just out of the world hard right now. Please stop making it harder for others. At least give us a fighting chance.

(Sorry for the giant thread, but goddamn it I’m tired and upset that this is how my day has turned out after trying to spend it doing things to cope.)