Among the many things I’m grateful for about my sobriety, high on the list is when I got sober. Alcohol took me down hard and fast—I was only 23 years old, and it was 2008. The 23-year-old part is nice because I’ve gotten to live through almost two decades without alcohol addiction pummeling me at every turn. The 2008 part is lucky because iPhones had existed for less than a year. Other “camera phones,” as we olds called them, were around, but the notion that we’d use them to document and share every moment of our lives was still pretty foreign.

Combined with the sad, self-imposed isolation of the end of my drinking, the visual documentation of my escapades is pretty tame. Are there a slew of pictures from high school and college where purple eyeliner is smudged across my barely open lids and a hazy where am I smile plays on my lips? Sure. Multiple snapshots of me drinking from a handle of vodka while dressed as Max from “Where the Wild Things Are?” Undeniable.

But I shudder to think of the pictures and videos that might exist if I were drinking now, when nearly everyone carries the ability to record high-definition video in their pockets. Is that hypothetical terror amplified when I think about the culture of sharing online anything the lens captures? Absolutely.

But I’m also just a random person. Other than our collective appetite for schadenfreude, there’s no reason for strangers on the internet to care about an embarrassing video of me. The same cannot be said for Hunter Biden.

The sole surviving son of former President Biden is known for myriad scandals—some fabricated or engineered by his father’s political opposition, others undeniably the younger Biden’s own doing.

If you’re worried this post will somehow relitigate those scandals, you underestimate how much I love and appreciate my readers. I would never do that to you, and I’d never do it to myself.

But, as Biden recently tweeted, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re almost certainly familiar with his substance use, addiction, and the interpersonal mess that comes with active addiction and the resources to feed its insatiable appetite. You’ve probably seen pictures of him in motel rooms with drugs, drug paraphernalia, and in various states of undress. What you have seen, in other words, is someone with an addiction to drugs in the throes of that addiction.

You’ve seen those images because they were incredibly valuable to his father’s political opposition and various media entities. You’ve seen them because of long-held societal stigma about crack cocaine and the people who use it. You’ve seen them because we delight in watching people who were born with privilege far above our own fall to depths we consider well beneath us.

Until very recently, Biden hadn’t been particularly vocal about his addiction and recovery. He wrote vividly about both in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things (which I read and enjoyed). He did some press around its publication, but in a world of extremely online people, he was comparatively silent.

Last month, Biden appeared on Twitter/X and Substack, quickly becoming one of the internet’s most-discussed social media accounts. Instead of scandal or snark—two reliable sources of trending topics—Biden’s account was making headlines for posts with much rarer qualities: earnestness, accountability, and self-deprecation.

In one of the most widely discussed interactions, a Trump supporter (or “MAGA influencer,” according to The Daily Beast) asks Biden what’s on his laptop (the source of all those pictures). Biden replies that the infamous hacked and stolen laptop has been available for anyone to peruse for years, asking if she’s been living under a rock. It’s all pretty normal Twitter fare until she replies that she’d “rather live under a rock than smoke it.”

His response was simple, straightforward, and indicative of how he’s been talking about his recovery: “Me too. It was awful.”

This is not a radical statement. Addiction is awful. Anyone who has lived through a serious addiction to substances can attest to the nightmare of living in its grip. There’s a reason it destroys families, ruins lives, and otherwise causes incalculable harm. The pictures on his laptop didn’t depict Biden as a rich party guy having the time of his life; they showed a person trapped by the all-consuming need to keep drugs in his system and his brain detached from reality.

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His response did, however, put the Trump supporter in an awkward position. What do you say when your snarky, pointed jab is simply an accepted part of your target’s everyday reality? He knows he was addicted to crack; his recovery requires a daily awareness of that fact.

If the Trump supporter’s response is any indication, there’s nothing else to do but similarly acknowledge the reality. She responds, “Well, damn, Hunter, that makes me sad. Glad you’re off that stuff. Hope you stay clean,” and wishes him good luck.

Biden has had similar interactions over the past few weeks with people who previously delighted in front-page stories about his substance use. The replies to his tweets about recovery are filled with people sharing how addiction shaped their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

I don’t mean to imply all is happiness and harmony over on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Biden’s mad about plenty and making his feelings known. There’s also some weird crypto stuff I don’t understand or care about. But when it comes to his previous substance use, Biden’s comments demonstrate several important ideas for recovery: honesty about one’s past use, accountability for harms caused, and a desire to use that honesty and accountability to emphasize the humanity of every person in the grip of addiction. He also makes fun of himself—which I think is an important part of recovery—but is probably all the more true for someone with as much media coverage as he’s gotten.

I don’t know Biden personally; I have no idea what his life is really like. But I know the most traumatic events of his life have been public political fodder since he was a child. I know the whole world has access to a laptop full of images of him in the darkest crevices of his addiction. I know that media pundits and politicians made names for themselves by mocking every detail of his addiction they could find. Given all that, it’s inspiring to see him come out with the message, Yep, that was me, and that’s what my addiction was like. If you’re in a similarly dark place, know that help is out there, and you’re not alone.

Facing this shit head-on negates anyone else’s ability to shame you for it.

When I first started writing about what it felt like to be physically and psychologically dependent on alcohol and the things I did in service of my addiction, people would say it was “brave.” The truth is, it had nothing to do with bravery.

Addiction thrives in silence and isolation; left to its own devices, it’s a weed that will choke the life out of everything around it. The more you keep hidden away because you’re ashamed to look at it, the faster that weed will grow. Sharing the things I was ashamed of removed the charge around them. Rather than being cause for concern, talking openly about how I sometimes miss alcohol or the challenges of being sober is crucial to my recovery because it’s all the same stuff I lied about when I was drinking.

Once you put words to the thing that haunts you, it’s no longer an unknown monster hiding under the bed. You may still be dealing with a monster, but now you can see it, identify it, and figure out what to do about it. If you ask, people who have lived with the same monster will help you deal with it. Eventually, you may get the chance to do the same for others.

One of the benefits of having someone as polarizing as Hunter Biden in these discussions is how thoroughly it underscores that you don’t have to like, agree, or have anything in common with someone to see their humanity. You don’t have to like their paintings, agree with their dad, or know anything about crypto. You just have to know that no one chooses addiction. Someone may choose to use drugs—plenty of people do for a variety of reasons—but no one willingly hands the reins to their life over to a bottle or pill or powder and says, “Yep, go ahead and fuck everything up. While you’re at it, make my loved ones collateral damage.”

Still, that’s what addiction does. No one makes it to the other side without a long list of things they aren’t particularly proud of. That’s true whether three or 3 million people witnessed your fall. What Biden is currently illustrating is how taking accountability for one’s past isn’t about self-flagellation, public apologies, or pity. It’s about accepting reality, finding compassion, and filling the space that used to hold so much shame with gratitude and a little bit of humor.

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