Status Updates From Drinking: A Love Story

2/2 “Right," I said. "Or that you'd just had your period."
"Or that you were ovulating."
"Or that you hadn't had enough sleep, or enough to eat."
"Or that the moon was full."

1/2 A lot of us blamed it on hormones, which seemed like a rational enough explanation. My friend Abby remembers this clearly. "Oh, right," she said to me one afternoon, over coffee. "You'd get really drunk one night, inexplicably drunk, and you'd blame it on the fact that you were about to get your period."

The worst was wondering what I'd said, what confidences I might have broken, what evil tidbit I might have passed along to someone about a mutual friend, what self-aggrandizing comment I might have tossed off. Sometimes when I got drunk I could feel my own sober rules of social conduct just melt away, hear a little voice in my head say, No: don't start talking about that, and then go ahead and talk about it anyway.

“As happens with most addictions, life took on a blank sameness, each day rituålized and invariable, barely distinguishable from the day before.”

That morning, lying in bed with a hangover, it occurred to me that I'd been out with friends all evening and hadn't really made eye contact with any of them, hadn't had a moment of conversation that felt genuine or connected.
The realization was small, a little flash, but it would stick with me, & return to me sometimes, a wave of awareness that made something in my stomach feel heavy, like Id swallowed a stone.

“Booze: the liquid security blanket; the substance that muffles emptiness and anger like a cold snow.”

“I kept writing about my need for a "sense of purpose in my life" and I believed-or hoped-that this feeling would simply arrive, descend from above in the form of the right career or the right set of friends or the right relationship.
I lived by the words if only and I'd continue to do so for a decade.”

2/2 I put on my coat and trudged off in the snow to the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine. I drank most of it that night, sitting on the futon sofa, and before I went to sleep, I picked up my journal and scrawled:
‘I'm so depressed. Please make this feeling go away.’”

1/2 “These tasks terrified me—l felt so inadequate and small inside, so afraid of failing-and I hadn't checked off any-thing. I remember sitting there feeling paralyzed and passive and full of self-loathing and by six o'clock or so, telling myself I needed some fresh air,

“Alcoholic drinking is by nature solitary drinking, drinking whose true nature is concealed from the outside world and, in some respects, from the drinker as well. You think you're drinking to have fun, to be sociable or more relaxed.
But you're also drinking to shut down, to retreat.”

“But mostly I remember looking at him with a feeling I'd had since childhood: that he held something dark and conflicted and unknowable inside, something I shared but couldn't yet put words to; that he'd remain a mystery to me until he died.”

- on her father

3/3 Of course he was preoccupied; he was leading a double life. And of course he relied on that martini every evening: coming home was a painful thing, an exercise in guilt and betrayal that needed easing daily. The information might have been shocking but it also made him human.”

2/3 I'd seen him all my life on such an epic scale-lost in his own grand thoughts, above me and my small concerns, possibly even frustrated or bored with me-and the news of his affair shifted the burden for the first time away from me and onto something else.

1/3 “My instinctive reaction was to side with my mother, to react with horror and shock, but I remember breathing a sigh of relief at the news. It made my father a little less mysterious, helped put some of his remoteness and preoccupation in context. When I sat with him in those strained silences in the family living room, I had thought there was some inadequacy on my part that ground the conversation to a halt.

“Alcoholics compartmentalize: this was classic behavior, although I wouldn't have known that back then. I've heard the story in AA meetings time after time: alcoholics who end up leading double lives—and sometimes triple and quadruple lives-because they never learned how to lead a single one, a single honest one that's based on a clear sense of who they are and what they really need.”

“Rack up enough pain and the old math-Discomfort + Drink = No Discomfort - ceases to suffice; feeling "comfortable" isn't good enough anymore. You're after something deeper than a respite from shyness, or a break from private fears and anger.
So after a while you alter the equation, make it stronger and more complete. Pain + Drink = Self-Obliteration.”

2/2 After a while you don't know even the most basic things about yourself—what you're afraid of, what feels good and bad, what you need in order to feel comforted and calm- because you've never given yourself a chance, a clear, sober chance, to find out.”

1/2 “When you drink in order to transform yourself, when you drink and become someone you're not, when you do this over and over and over, your relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear. You lose your bearings, the ground underneath you begins to feel shaky.

“The way it generates a sense of connection to others, the way it numbs social anxiety and dilutes feelings of isolation, gives you a sense of access to the world. You're trapped in your own skin and thoughts; you drink; you are released, just like that. One drink, and the bridge—so elusive in the cold, nerve-jangled sensitivity of sobriety-appears, waiting only to be crossed.”

“This is such a common sensation to a drinker. My friend Meg says she felt like the "real" her was trapped somewher inside, locked up in a cage beneath her ribs. When she drank, that version was freed. "For years," she says, "it felt like the road to truth." She smiles and adds, "In vodka veritas."

-liquor transforming us

“And it does, at least for a little while. It melts down the pieces of us that hurt or feel distress; it makes room for some other self to emerge, a version that's new and improved and decidedly less conflicted. And after a while it becomes central to the development of that version, as integral to forward motion as the accelerator on a car.“

“together the wine, beer, and liquor industries spend more than $1 billion each year reinforcing this knowledge: drinking will transform us.”