Being "Clean"
My messy, jumbled thoughts on the matter.
Words are weird. They hold a lot of meaning, power, and potential for both great things and terrible things; and at the same time they don’t mean anything. Just sounds we’ve assigned meaning to. Yet one word that I still feel my skin crawl to hear people use is the word “clean” when referring to the abstinence of drugs and alcohol.
It’s understandable why it’s in so many people of the recovery communities’ lexicon, between 12 step groups and the widespread habit of referring to the results of a drug test as either dirty or clean. It’s so common that people outside of the recovery communities are used to using such vocabulary, most likely not even thinking twice about it. The word “clean” is obviously used in plenty of different contexts – but the common thread is an undertone of a sense of purity. Referring to someone’s background, STI status, or using the word as a synonym for innocent.
Having a clean criminal record, a clean drug test or STI status, a clean driving record. These are all frameworks that set the expectation of cleanliness and purity as standard, and anything less than that deems someone as being less-than. Dirty.
I’m not here to say the word clean is a bad word or that it should be replaced in all of these contexts. I’m here saying that continuing to use the word clean when we really mean abstinent is only further perpetuating the stigmatization of drug use and people who use drugs. When people do achieve abstinence, there can be a self-imposed expectation or desire to achieve additional levels of abstinence, purity, and cleanliness. And ironically, this expectation that a totally clean slate is supposed to be The Goal can be a significant factor in driving people away from achieving abstinence—it would have been a lot harder for me to commit to quitting heroin if I didn’t know I still had cigarettes as an aid.
What ultimately ends up happening in people in an abstinence-based recovery (whether or not they use the word “clean” to refer to themselves) is that they start to look down on the version of themself that does use drugs. And then that ends up spreading to other people and they begin feeling a sense of superiority over others who do use drugs, or even over the thought of using drugs. The thought, the action, the person, the urge, all becomes deemed as bad, tainted, dangerous, unacceptable. Oftentimes, making this adjustment in someone’s thinking is used as a tool to assist them in maintaining their abstinence; by completely condemning and abolishing any thought of something like a positive drug test.
It confuses and frustrates me, yet I also get it. As someone who is in an abstinence-based recovery, as someone who referred to themself as “clean” for the first couple years, as someone who had to swing the pendulum a bit to the extreme in the beginning in order to find a place of security, I understand that the shutting-out of drugs and all things drug-related can be the easier, softer, most immediately effective way. And there’s nothing wrong with that being part of the path someone’s on.
One could make the point that the notion of cleanliness and purity being The Goal is something that has very visible and easily traceable ties and correlations to other expectations of the superiority of purity. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole…but it’s something to think about.
Identifying as “clean” doesn’t resonate with me anymore. I don’t like that it insinuates that I was dirty while I was using–just because I was using. I don’t feel like the alignment of myself with some quasi-pure cleanliness is accurate. I do a lot of shit that could be labeled as dirty–as we all (yes, even the people who call themselves clean!) do. I only broke my nicotine addiction very, very recently. I heavily rely on a drug (called caffeine) to get my days started. A significant amount of the food that I eat is processed. My hair is dirty way more frequently than it’s washed. I turn to salty and sugary snacks when I’m stressed, I watch porn and I hop the local Muni busses without paying a fare. And I love, cherish, and value every part of the version of Cheyenne that used drugs; regardless of how dirty or grimy they or the things they were doing were.
While it is unfortunate that recovering addicts and alcoholics referring to themselves as clean contributes to the reaffirmation that drugs are a bad, dirty and shameful thing, they are all still perfectly reasonable in their decision to continue referring to themselves as so. The same way that a lot of us had to go through the trial and error of finding the drug that worked best for us before we landed on the right one, we can go through a process of trying on different terminology and ways of defining our recovery before we land on the right one. And then that may change as time passes on, as we can–because that’s the whole point of this, right? To change, morph, evolve into different versions of ourselves? Recovery, what it looks like and one’s relationship to it, is a fluid thing; ebbing, flowing, and morphing like the sand at the bottom of the salty and occasionally grimy sea.