Chrissy Teigen Might Drastically Shift Your Stance On Alcohol Addiction
The model and cookbook author may be out of touch, but her struggle with sobriety is awfully relatable
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Can you accidentally order a $13,000 bottle of wine at a restaurant and still talk about alcohol in a way that feels refreshingly down to earth? Model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen, 35, is proof that you can. Earlier this year on Twitter, Chrissy revealed to her 13 million followers that she and her husband, musician John Legend, once got duped into ordering a bottle of Cabernet that carried a five-figure price tag.
Naturally, Twitter went mad, with fans hitting out at Chrissy for being hopelessly out of touch during a pandemic that has left millions of Americans unable to pay rent. Then, just a few months later, Chrissy’s reputation took another deep dive when bullying accusations surfaced against her. Now, I typically struggle relating to someone who sends hate mail to a teenager and orders things off a menu without first looking at the price. But lately, I find myself warming up to Chrissy for her fiercely honest account of alcohol abuse.
“Today is my 50-day sobriety streak!” Chrissy wrote in a recent Instagram post. “It should be nearly a year but I had a few (wine) hiccups in the road. This is my longest streak yet!”. It’s not the first time Chrissy has opened up about her drinking. In 2017, she told Cosmopolitan she “can’t just have one drink,” revealing that her heavy wine habit and tendency to drunkenly embarrass herself at award shows was taking a toll on her mental health. “I used to think it was kind of nutty to have to go totally sober, but now I get it. I don’t want to be that person. … I have to fix myself,” she said.
Chrissy is known for sharing raw, painful moments of her life on the Internet, like the heartbreaking miscarriage of her son, Jack. While her decision to open up about her alcohol abuse is a brave one, what’s perhaps even bolder is her willingness to acknowledge, without any shame, that she didn’t get sober on her first, second, third, or even fourth try.
Over a third of people who quit drinking will relapse within their first year, according to a study by The Recovery Village, a rehab clinic based in Florida. For many of us, ditching the booze is a long process of trial and error, where we unpack the reasons that drive us to drink, identify triggers, and gradually learn ways to cope with our emotions without reaching for that bottle of rosé.
In Quit Like A Woman (a book that Chrissy says influenced her decision to quit drinking), Holly Whitaker reflects how in a culture that otherwise celebrates failure as a prerequisite for success, people who struggle with substance abuse don’t get much sympathy when they slip up. Failure in recovery is a sign of weakness, evidence of a lack of willpower — so the thinking goes. Of course, that’s a terrible misconception. “Quitting drinking, like anything else on this earth we attempt, is an undertaking, a practice, an endeavor, and if it were an easy thing to even try — let alone succeed at — there wouldn’t be an entire rehab industry devoted to it,” Whitaker writes.
By referring to her slip-ups as “wine hiccups” rather than fuck-ups, Chrissy is helping normalize sobriety as a journey full of ups and downs, rather than a goal you’re supposed to achieve on your first try. In doing that, Chrissy is also challenging outdated beliefs about alcohol addiction. Typically, society has grouped drinkers into so-called “normal” drinkers, who can drink as much as they want, and alcoholics, who can’t drink at all. But despite an abundance of “Am I an alcoholic” quizzes on the Internet, there’s no official test, scientific or otherwise, that will tell you which of the two categories you decisively belong to.
And while the term “gray area drinking” — which effectively encompasses anyone dependent on alcohol who doesn’t fit the stereotype of the middle-aged man who downs shots of vodka in his cubicle — has now entered the discourse, it’s unclear what gray area drinkers are supposed to do about their alcohol intake, besides try to “moderate” or self-identify as alcoholics.
And so I was glad to see that in her latest post on sobriety, Chrissy conveyed that you don’t need to fit into any specific category to decide that alcohol isn’t working for you.“I still dunno if I’ll never drink again but I do know it no longer serves me in ANY way.”
