Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

by Sarah Hepola

Until then, it had not occurred to me what an act of love this was: to remember another person’s life.

Discord is often an accumulation. A confrontation is like a cold bucket of water splashed on you at once, but what you might not realize is how long the bucket of water was building. Five drops, a hundred drops, each of them adding to the next, until one day—the bucket tips.

Drinking had saved me. When I was a child trapped in loneliness, it gave me escape. When I was a teenager crippled by self-consciousness, it gave me power. When I was a young woman unsure of her worth, it gave me courage. When I was lost, it gave me the path: that way, toward the next drink and everywhere it leads you. When I triumphed, it celebrated with me. When I cried, it comforted me. And even in the end, when I was tortured by all that it had done to me, it gave me oblivion.

When I passed a mirror, I was startled by the person I’d become. Although perhaps it was more accurate to say: I was startled by the person I could’ve been all along. The person I had buried.

Some people are so brimful with misery they can’t help splashing everyone else.

But the one that stands out to me is how I quashed my feelings for the sake of someone else’s. His pleasure was important, not mine. His regret was important, not mine. It was a pattern I repeated for years. And every time I did, alcohol was there.

It’s a fine day when you finally figure out the right time to leave the party.

We are cursed by a gnawing fear that whatever we are—it’s not good enough.

I read an interview with Toni Morrison once. She came into the literary world during the drug-addled New Journalism era, but she never bought the hype. “I want to feel what I feel,” she said. “Even if it’s not happiness.” That is true strength. To want what you have, and not what someone else is holding.

A lot of my friends are atheists. We don’t talk much about belief, and I wouldn’t presume to know theirs, but I think their stance comes from an intellectual allergy to organized religion, the great wrongs perpetrated in the name of God, the way one book was turned into a tool of violence, greed, and bigotry. I don’t blame them. But I wish belief didn’t feel like a choice between blind faith and blanket disavowal.

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College, a speech that is a bit like a sermon for people who don’t want to go to church: In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.

I think each generation reinvents rebellion. My generation drank. But the future of addiction is pills. Good-bye, liquor cabinet, hello, medicine cabinet. A kid who pops Oxycontin at 15 doesn’t really get the big deal about taking heroin at 19. They’re basically the same thing. Growing up, I thought substance abuse fell into two camps: drinking, which was fine, and everything else, which was not. Now I understand that all substance abuse lies on the same continuum.