Status Updates From Drinking: A Love Story

“You’re still entrenched in all the same problems you had before you quit drinking, but you react differently, because reacting in the same old ways becomes intolerable; it just hurts too much without anesthesia.”

“My terror that I'd be bored and lonely in sobriety abated almost immediately. In fact, as time goes on, I become more aware of how bored and lonely I was while I was drinking, and how much more textured and varied life seems without it.”

If you like your daily six-pack or your gin-and-tonic at the end of the day, if you see drinking as part of your right as an adult member of society, you're not apt to look kindly on those of us who can't tolerate it. Something must be wrong with her, you may think. Or I'm glad it's her and not me.
The stigma surrounding alcoholism has abated a great deal in the past few decades, but it's still present

“You drank to drown out fear, to dilute anxiety and doubt and self-loathing and painful memories, and when you stop drinking, all those emotions come to the fore, sometimes in a torrent that feels overwhelming. Putting down the drink may give you an opportunity to solve problems, but abstinence won't solve them on its own.”

“Anxiety looms and you think: This is why I drank.
Sadness and shame wash up. This is why I drank. Feelings of rage surface. This is why I drank. The drink may have become the main obstacle between you and any hope of change, but a hundred other obstacles lie behind it and most of those have to do with emotions, the very beasts you never learned to contend with in any other way.”

“I drove home thinking about the trade-offs you make when you drink: about how many times I'd chosen drunken company over sustaining company in the past; about how hollow that is, opting for the trappings of intimacy - the restaurant, the candles, the wine - shielding yourself from its warmth.”

“I saw growing up as something that happened to you. In some ways giving up an addiction involves reversing that equation, understanding finally that growth comes from the inside out, from trying and failing and trying again. When you quit drinking you stop waiting. You begin to let go of the wish, age old and profound and essentially human, that someone will swoop down and save you.”

I'd never really grasped the idea that growth was something you could choose, that adulthood might be less a chronological state than an emotional one which you decide, through painful acts, to both enter and maintain. Like a lot of people I know (alcoholics and not), I'd spent most of my life waiting for maturity to hit me from the outside, as though I'd just wake up 1 morning and be done, like a roast in the oven.

“Alcohol is what shielded me all those years from the messy business of standing in that room with my own emotions, coming to terms with my own quiet, restrained, complicated heritage, finding ways to tend to my own needs, instead of waiting for others to jump in and tend to them for me. In a word, alcohol is what protected me rom growing up.”

Not drinking is a choice one makes every day, sometimes many times a day. The immediate decision is clear: either you pick up the glass or you don't. Hard days - a larger set of choices can be at work too. Not drinking that day meant acknowledging certain truths: that self-destruction would have served no one, least of all me; that medicating those emotions wouldn't resolve or alter them; self defeating solution

“I felt as though an old, rebellious part of me was straining to get out: the part that resisted and resented our calm, orderly family style; the part that grew up longing and yet fearing to be different; the part that wanted to call attention to whatever pains and rages lurked beneath the surface, instead of relinquishing them to the quiet.
Self-pity triggers my craving for alcohol more than any other emotion.”

“with each decision in sobriety, you are faced with two possible choices: the alcoholic choice or the healthy choice. The alcoholic choice is the self-sabotaging one, the one that makes you feel self-pitying or resentful or somehow defeated.
The healthy choice is the one that reinforces your vision of yourself as a better person, more in charge of your life, equipped with options.”

“Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.”

a quality of deliberateness that creeps into life when you put down the drink. When you're actively alcoholic, you don't bother to solve problems, even petty ones, in part because you have no faith in your ability to make changes and in part because even the smallest changes seem improbable and risky.

“Better. The word seems thin, even a little deceptive. Sobriety is less about "getting better" in a clear, linear sense than it is about subjecting yourself to change, to the inevitable ups and downs, fears and feelings, victories and failures, that accompany growth.”

You do everything for the first time. Here I am, going to a restaurant for the first time and not drinking. Here I am, at a work-related function, not drinking. Here I am, celebrating my birthday without a drink. Liquor stores loom out at you on every street corner, people holding glasses of wine or tumblers of Scotch jump out at you from TV and movie screens, and you realize how pervasive alcohol is in our culture.

2/2 —trying to address it in therapy, trying to excise it with understanding, only to realize while he was dying that he'd never really found the level of peace he'd wanted, never tasted freedom from his own depression.”

1/2 “I thought about my father that morning. I thought about the sense of sorrow that had seemed to bind us for so long, that sense of deep dissatisfaction, of being slightly off so often. I thought about how he'd lived his whole life with that feeling

“I thought about Ernest Hemingway, who'd killed himself with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and about James Agee, who died of alcoholism at the age of forty five. I had a dark, heavy sense of resignation, inevitability, as though I were in a box and simply couldn't get out.”

“I would remember that moment, that glimpse of myself as a drunk young woman at a party. Not a pretty young woman, not a sophisticated young woman. A drunk, out of control.”

“My mother had lived this way, unable to leave a man who never quite left her feeling appreciated or fully loved, and my father had lived this way, torn between two relationships, saddled with chronic ambivalence, unable to wrench himself free of the complicated, duplicitous patterns he'd established.”

“I’d always wondered what those drives had been like for him, how it must have felt to be sitting there on the vinyl seat beside a thin, mute daughter, what it must have been like to see yourself in someone else and not be able to find any comfortable ground, anyplace to connect.”

“My parents' house felt so loaded with illness and anger and unresolved bits of history it was hard to walk inside without feeling like you had to hold your breath. Details about my father's betrayal would emerge, erupting like volcanoes—he'd given the woman money; he'd taken her on a trip—and they'd fill the house with a bitterness you could practically taste.“