I quit drinking in August of 2025. After just a few days, I knew it was one of the best things that had ever happened to me, and that my sobriety was something I would go to any lengths to maintain. The experience of quitting drinking was thrilling, profound, and totally unexpected. I knew I would write about it. 

I also knew about the 11th tradition, which states: “Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all of our traditions. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.” 

I didn’t think the 11th Tradition meant anything other than what it said. It was pretty simple: According to the 11th Tradition, I was not supposed to publish a work in which I identified myself by name and said I was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I knew I was probably going to do this anyway.

I will say that I had been in Al-Anon before, which has the same tradition, worded the same way, and I had written about that, but it had been for The Small Bow, so mostly for other people in recovery. I knew I would write about A.A. for a wider audience, for “normies” (a word I don’t like, because I honestly don’t think alcoholics are less normal than anyone else, even though they probably like to think so), but I think it’s useful to get at the more insular, more self-protected nature of A.A. 

At first, writing about A.A. was something in the vague distance. I was just getting used to A.A. itself, going to meetings, not drinking, doing the 12 steps with a sponsor. I heard the 11th tradition when it was read in meetings and was aware of it as personally significant and problematic. I certainly heard those words in it a bit louder than I heard words like “our service centers may employ special workers.” But I wasn’t worried about it yet. I was just not drinking, one day at a time.

After I’d been sober around nine months, the article I knew I would write started to come to me.  I would talk about all the ways I tried to convince myself I wasn’t an alcoholic because I didn’t get drunk every time I drank, and how I had grown up thinking alcohol was just necessary to a fun adult life. I wanted the reader to understand that alcoholism had disguised itself as both just “drinking!” and a perfectly fine idea, actually mentally super healthy,  but then, at the ripe age of 55 after over 35 years of steady drinking, revealed itself as a deadly disease that was separating me from my mind, body and all living things. I wasn’t going to try to make readers see themselves in me, but I figured they would. 

I have a relationship with The New Yorker, so I sent it off, and it was accepted, and the ball began to roll. It takes a while for that ball to roll all the way, and at various points, I thought about how I was about to break the 11th Tradition. At various points, I did not think about it at all, or when I did, I told myself to forget it, because when I weighed not publishing my article against publishing it, I always landed on the side of publishing it.

*****

I take pride (oh no! who smells trouble) in the idea of myself as a rule-following person, particularly when it comes to rules that affect others. I would never cut in a line, for example. You should also know that I’m not very keen on letting other people cut in line, and if you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who has ever tried.  

I also had enormous respect for A.A. and everything it had done for me. I bristled when people diluted it with outside issues or non-program literature. When people disparaged the program, I rolled my eyes. Maybe they thought they had a better solution? Well, they should give it a go. I was firmly in the “last thing I wanted to try, only thing that worked” crew, and I felt deeply that the success of A.A. was down to its structure, that great care and thought went into writing the Steps and Traditions. 

I knew I would be better off following the steps and traditions than interpreting them, and this included the 11th Tradition. I understood that when the founders were writing the 11th Tradition back in the 1930s, they did not want one person’s view of what A.A. was to then to lodge itself in people’s minds as some kind of blanket reality. Nor did they want individual members to become stars. It is written in the second-to-last sentence in the chapter on the 11th Tradition in the 12 and 12 that “Personal ambition has no place in A.A.” 

So now that I was about to break this tradition, now that the article was making its way through the editing process, I really had to scramble to convince myself, somehow, that I wasn’t actually breaking it. So I started telling other A.A.’s what I was doing so I could hear some of them tell me, “No, it’s ok, that’s not really what the 11th Tradition says, it’s more about other people’s anonymity.” I knew this wasn’t true, but I didn’t argue with them because I liked what they were saying; I liked that people thought this. I liked that it allowed me to preserve my image of myself as not breaking a rule even as I was breaking it. Plus, my sponsor supported what I was doing, so it must be the right thing. Right? 

I would convince myself that I had enough reassurance, but then, of course, I wanted more. Who doesn’t want more of a good thing? So I recited to myself, often, and sometimes even aloud, every syllable a bulwark against my shame, all the A.A.s who had famously and decisively broken the 11th Tradition before me: David Carr. Mary Karr. Leslie Jamison. Brad Pitt. Anthony Hopkins. Bill Wilson himself. Yeah, this was the 11th Tradition, and it was read at almost every A.A. meeting. But it seemed like it wasn’t really a thing anymore, at least not to all the people who had broken it. 

Cutting in line, for example, was universally understood to be a bad thing that you weren’t supposed to do. But everyone did this. Also, cutters benefit no one but themselves. People who wrote about A.A. were breaking the rules but they were spreading the message and people had reconciled themselves to this already, so I didn’t have to, right? Right? I kept reciting the names to myself. I also Googled to find others. There was an article in the New York Times over ten years ago by an A.A. who said it was time to get rid of the 11th Tradition. Wait . . . it was fine. 

And yet I had to come back to the fact that the 11th Tradition was still a tradition! Still up there on the wall, right between Tradition 10 and Tradition 12. No one had gotten rid of it yet. No one was even talking about it. It was the 11th tradition, for christsakes, not the word “Eskimo.” (Which will more than likely be removed in the upcoming 5th Edition of A.A.’s Big Book.) 

*****

By the time the article was starting to come out, the voices in my head telling me I was bad were getting quieter. I had made the right decision. Plus, I wasn’t just breaking 11th Tradition in just any old publication. A  lot of people read the New Yorker, and a lot of those people would identify, and maybe some of them would get sober, and just think of all the people they might influence. 

And so it came to pass that two days before my article was going to come out a good friend of mine in the program who appeared by name in my article told me he was fine with being in the article but he did want to remind me of 11th Tradition. This annoyed me. I did not need reminding! Didn’t he know I had already boxed this up and put it away? I could have just said thanks. But I had to defend myself. I did not want him to question me, I wanted him to be on my side. I said, well, so many other people have already broken it, and once the words were out of my mouth, I was questioning myself again, reminded that all the ways I tried to justify myself to myself hadn’t fully satisfied me either. My friend kind of laughed at me. Now I had a resentment against him. How dare he remind me of something that I was already wrestling with? 

I called my sponsor, who had the audacity to tell me that since the last time we talked she had deepened her understanding and respect for the traditions. She’d had an experience where following through on a tradition instead of acting on her own will had led her to have a deeper experience of the program. She wasn’t telling me what to do but that was her experience. 

All I heard was, “If you do this, you are a bad person.”

My article was coming out the next day, and I was now very upset, and nursing two big resentments and countless more against anyone I imagined agreed with my friend and sponsored them. Why were they making me feel so bad about myself? Why were they telling me they were mad at me? Well, they weren’t really mad at me — they just disagreed with what I was doing. But that was close enough to being mad. 

I should have predicted that although I had kept it at bay until the 11th hour (ha) I was eventually going to be on the precipice of a giant mindfuck because every time I do something that I am not fully ethically or morally OK with, I start going through all kinds of maneuvers to make it OK rather than facing the fact that I am just going to have to make a decision and live with the consequences. My resentments were really just the anger I felt because I couldn’t manipulate the universe to become a place where I am going to both do what I want and have absolutely everyone agree with me, like me, and approve of me. (This includes me.) I knew I was mad at my sponsor and my friend for disagreeing with me because I just want to do what I want and then I want everyone to like me, but I was still mad. 

I stewed and felt bad. I never tried to pull the article, but I didn’t sleep very well for the two days before. I was going to get in trouble. People were going to hate me. I was going to be shunned from A.A.

None of this happened. The article came out and seemed to be well-received. People I knew wrote me to tell me they saw themselves in it. Random strangers wrote me and said the same. Many of them mentioned my attempts to look at a wine bottle and to tell myself I’d only drunk half of it when I’d clearly drunk three-quarters, and how looking at that wine bottle, studying it, lying to myself, was addictive behavior equal to finishing it, or going out to get more. 

No one complained about the article to my face, but I did look at Instagram one day, on The New Yorker’s feed, and saw comments about how I had no right to write about sobriety because I was so new to it. I didn’t get upset. I thought it was interesting, and expected that people had these opinions. 

*****

Can you respect a tradition and still not really respect it? Apparently you can. I have someone inside of me who gets that what I did was self-serving, even if it was also, arguably, of service. But that’s what I think. 

How do I feel? Well, on the one hand, how I feel always has a lot to do with how much trouble I think I am in, and if I am in trouble for breaking the 11th Tradition, I have a lot of company. I think of all the writers and other people who wrote about A.A. years ago as being at the center of a cake that’s being frosted with blame. I’m way at the edge of this cake. By the time the frosting gets to me, it’s not very thick. That’s my self-interested answer. And while we are on the topic of self-interest: A friend of mine who was nice enough to listen to me complain about my friend and my sponsor “making me feel bad” by telling me their views on the matter said to me when I brought this up, “But you’re not doing this for your ambition, you’re doing this to help people.” Adorable!

The simple truth is that I couldn’t write about not drinking anymore without writing about Alcoholics Anonymous and also that I couldn’t keep writing about my life without writing about not drinking anymore. If I couldn’t write about my life, I would lose my favorite reason for being alive. 

Would I have broken the 11th Tradition if I were the first person ever to do it? Probably not. Second? Again, no. I’m not trying to be cute here, but I think maybe the magic number for now many people would have to break the 11th Tradition for me to be one of them is eleven. And we are well past that. I am at least the eleven hundredth, if not the eleven thousandth. 

And if you’re going to write an article about being sober, some people are going to tell you that’s great, because you’re helping people, and you’re sharing your story, you’re carrying the message. And some people are going to think you’re an asshole who is breaking the 11th Tradition. My job is to be able to handle the fact that in the eyes of the world I am both of those things without using alcohol to smooth over how this makes me feel.

*****

Sarah Miller is a writer living in Northern California. She is the author of a Substack called “The Real Sarah Miller.”