Writing to Uncover Your Selfiest Self
A neurodivergent story of addiction, diagnosis, and learning to tell the truth
When I first started writing publicly about alcohol, I wasn’t aiming to tell the truth. I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop drinking.
In January 2019, I published a piece on my brand new blog called Beautiful Hangover. It was called something like, What Happened on My First Dry January, and it was my first honest account of my drinking life. I was almost three years sober, but still writing from behind a mask I didn’t know I was wearing.
I wrote:
“I’m trying to stop drinking, but alcohol won’t let me. It’s in my head, my friendships, my culture. It’s a bad boyfriend with a PhD in NLP who refuses to let me go.”
It was the first time I’d written the real story — that I loved alcohol but I also hated it, and I didn’t know who I was without it.
The blog post got a few thousand views, and I earned a little money from engagement (which was thrilling) but it changed everything for me. It marked the beginning of my unmasking — not just around addiction, but around something I hadn’t yet even named: neurodivergence.
At the time, I didn’t know I was Autistic and ADHD. I didn’t know that alcohol had been serving me as a kind of temporary neurotypical mask.
I just knew that when I drank, I felt normal.
I could laugh and dance and make eye contact. I could join in.
In a later blog I called alcohol my “self-esteem juice” because it let me participate in the non-stop improv of The Other Humans. Without it, I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know what to do with my face. I felt painfully self-conscious and nervous stream-of-consciousnessed my way through interactions in ways that led to chronic rumination and regret.
I still did all this drunk, the difference was: I didn’t care! And people seemed to like it!
Back then I didn’t know that this wasn’t just a me problem.
Or even just an alcohol problem.
Alcohol as a Mask
A 2025 systematic review in the British Journal of Psychology by William Barber et al. shows that while autistic people are less likely to drink overall, those who do drink are significantly more likely to develop alcohol use disorder — especially if they’re undiagnosed or struggling with ADHD, anxiety or depression (hi).
The reasons are familiar:
To take the edge off sensory overwhelm.
To manage social situations.
To soften anxiety and emotional intensity.
To feel part of things.
The paper describes alcohol as helping blunt sensory processing and improve social interaction — forming what they called a “reinforcing maintenance loop.” In other words, alcohol can create a temporary neurotypical mask.
But it’s heavy. It doesn’t last. And it can destroy you.
It also delays self-knowledge.
Because when you’re drinking to cope and fit in, and then recovering from the hangover, you’re not discovering who you really are.
When I look back at my early sobriety, I realise I was still masking. AA kind of taught me some of the skills I’d missed out on due to leaning on booze. How to tolerate social awkwardness and stick to my commitments.
But over time, the cracks began to show. Pushing myself to be a completely different kind of person to my natural ways was just too hard.
Arctic Meltdown
I learned this the hard way on a tall ship in the Arctic.
I’d signed up for a creative residency, expecting adventure, connection, transformation.
Instead, I found myself stuck in a floating pub with 30 self-optimised artists, wishing I could go home.
I was overstimulated, time-blind, burnt out.
I wanted to drink but I couldn’t.
I wanted to fit in but I couldn’t.
Without another option, I blamed myself.
I thought I was failing at being sober. But really I was failing at being masked without my favourite mask.
It was only later that someone asked me — in an offhand email — if I’d ever considered autism.
I hadn’t.
After months of hyper-focused research, I recognised myself so completely in the descriptions of autistic girls that I felt physically rearranged. I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism soon after.
Suddenly, so many things made sense.
My drinking. My social exhaustion. My lifelong sense of being on the outside, even when I looked like I was in the middle of things.
Double-Masking
If being undiagnosed is a kind of involuntary mask, then drinking on top of that is a double-mask.
Alcohol helped me succeed.
It helped me socialise, teach, publish, connect. Especially with other artists, who can be intimidating shy and wonderful weirdos who love drinking, too.
But as my career grew, the costs started to outweigh the benefits. I hit a ceiling. Hangxiety got worse. Exhaustion and self-blame deepened.
I knew I couldn’t keep using alcohol as a mask. But I didn’t yet know what to put in its place.
Creativity as Unmasking
When I went back to teaching after diagnosis, I was convinced I’d have to leave academia. The social performance of it felt impossible.
But I didn’t leave. I couldn’t! Well, I could, but you know, mortgage, puppy, etc.
And so, I started experimenting with unmasking at work. Out of sheer necessity.
I let myself dress for sensory comfort.
I admitted to students when I made mistakes. Disclosed when it felt okay that I was autistic/ADHD and that I struggled with executive function.
I made it part of my teaching to share what I was learning about vulnerability, creativity and self-acceptance. And I found that the more I unmasked, the more my students did too.
They took more creative risks. Wrote with more honesty. They stopped hiding the weird, wonky parts of themselves, which is what art is really all about.
I only realised this recently but creativity is a kind of unmasking.
This is why writing has always been so important to me. Not just important: crucial. Like, survival level essential. It’s like a pressure valve can be released, and it allows me to return and try again at all the things I find so difficult.
After becoming a professional writer and publishing my first novel, I lost the joy for writing. Writing my blogs, I found it again.
It’s a different kind of writing, freer and loser and chattier and rougher.
When I have time I love to draw my own illustrations too, quick, ugly, impulsive drawings that often feel more me than the prose that I literally spend years polishing.
My drawings are messy and alive. They contain all the weirdness I usually try to edit out of my ‘professional writing’.
I have been wondering about what if I didn’t edit so much out.
Maybe I would actually finish a novel!
And maybe it would bring me more joy…
Some questions:
Where in your life are you still masking?
And what parts of your creative work do you edit out to seem more polished, professional, marketable?
What might happen if you stopped?
What would your art, writing, teaching, look like if you let the mask drop a little?
I don’t have all the answers yet.
Lately, I’m not even sure what ‘masking’ is since it seems so central to the human experience, generally. (More on this soon!)
But I know this:
The best stories aren’t always the most polished. (Is that true?)
Sometimes they’re the ones that are a little raw, a little embarrassing.
Weird and messy and human.
But with fewer spelling mistakes.
Thanks for reading.
Chelsey xox
📚 Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a book for Jessica Kingsley Publishers about the connection between undiagnosed neurodiversity and addiction + her first domestic noir. 📚
Really nice post. Thanks for sharing it. I too need to write it. It's really crucial. If I don't, I get unhappy, I get stressed, I get anxious, I snap at people, get really irritable. It's not good. At a bare minimum I need to journal, but often writing some fiction or non-fiction can be ... not helpful..., just as therapeutic, cathartic, if not more so.
In two weeks, I will have been sober from 5 years. My anxiety and depression haven't gone away but they are much more manageable. I relate to this essay.