Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

What’s a girl to do when a bunch of dudes have just told her, in front of an audience, that she’s wrong about what it’s like to be herself?

We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating.

didn’t want to let perfectionism rule my life, so why try hard new things at all?

But the upside to being leveled is that it sets the bar for achievement so low. One day you managed to buy a wedge of pecorino.

You see nothing strange about going to such lengths to consume something that repulses you.

thinking about how you are slowly decaying and there is nothing you can do to stop it. And it happened so fast, out of nowhere. Everything was fine, and now everything is over.

The word on a drinks menu is like seeing an old, bad boyfriend on Facebook. Wow, he still looks great.

Thirty-second dopamine explosions followed by days of gloom.

delightful. I secretly rejoiced when I felt a cold coming on because I knew it would make me stop wanting to drink, though it really just made me want to drink a bit less.

I signed up for early-morning exercise classes because I didn’t think I’d show up to them hungover, but of course I did.

Smaller glasses. Switching to red. Switching to liquor. Going to therapy and talking only about other things.

Many nights I had tried to wait twenty minutes between wanting a glass of wine and having one and almost always failed.

die. I didn’t know then that eventually I’d stop stacking days. That I’d just be living a life.

There’s only so much I can take of you people and your celebrations and that thing where you want me in your life. It’s a lot, okay?

First I had to pass through the just-got-sober part, where I was safest holed up at home with a cozy mystery and vats of ice cream.

My circle of close friends got smaller and tighter and dearer to me.

But the more sober time I racked up, the more clearly I saw that those unimpressive fuckups and lost evenings had been acts of aggression against myself. I’d hurt myself over and over.

Meetup came to mind, but it involved, you know, meeting up with people. Also, it was based on hobbies, and as a drinker I really didn’t understand the notion of shared interests (besides drinking) bringing people together.

I’d tried for years to turn myself into a moderate drinker. It turned out adding extra vigilance and stress to a debilitating habit while still utterly failing to drink like a normal person was not the way to go.

I could never pass up the chance to drink four different versions of something under the pretense of studying their nuances.

I thought back then that the right boy would be my one-stop solution to all of it. Over and over I proved that theory wrong, but I still carried the longing with me, invisible and shifting to fit whoever was around the bend.

I wanted excitement and the hunt for approval more than I wanted peace or comfort or self-confidence.

I was sometimes haunted by the absence of panic in my life. If I wasn’t choking on work, I felt as if I weren’t doing my job, as though fear and paranoia were part of the description.

But I also lived in a constant state of low-level panic over work and the creeping sense that my time on earth was flying by and I had no lasting accomplishments or even passions to show for it.