Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

Note: newly sober people can be the teeniest bit judgmental, especially if they were judgy to begin with, which I was.

Ha

because if I really took it in, I’d have to ask why I was willingly destroying myself.

I’m becoming a twenty-four-hour person, not a twenty-four-hour woman. And twenty-four-hour people get a lot more room to breathe. *

I started to see that I could start out truly awful at something and get better. Since childhood, I’d been pursuing things I was naturally good at and avoiding stuff that was hard, because if I couldn’t bring home the Blue Ribbon of Parental Approval, I didn’t see the point.

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the one where you realize you’ll probably never have that newly-in-love feeling again—or if you do, it will mean a world of trouble

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I still keep some things secret. From him, from you. No one needs to know the whole story of who I think I am.

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I paid close attention to the articles about wine preventing heart disease and ignored the ones about wine causing heart disease, plus cancer, depression, and liver failure.

Now I rarely worry about the manner of my death, though I still take issue with the fact that it has to happen at all. * * *

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think back to my first six months sober and how clear it became that I needed my life to not, as the man said, suck balls. It hit me within weeks that I needed a happier job, more practice saying no, more sleep, more time outside. More time in general, for walking the uphills. And it felt futile. The notion of stacking up sober day after sober day until the occasion of my funeral felt fucking pointless. All that effort, just to die. I didn’t know then that eventually I’d stop stacking days. That I’d just be living a life. That I wouldn’t have to pay close attention to every root and rock on the path in front of me. That I’d be sure-footed enough to also notice the trees and the wind and even the occasional owl and to realize that both time and space were far denser than I ever knew.

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think back to my first six months sober and how clear it became that I needed my life to not, as the man said, suck balls. It hit me within weeks that I needed a happier job, more practice saying no, more sleep, more time outside. More time in general, for walking the uphills. And it felt futile. The notion of stacking up sober day after sober day until the occasion of my funeral felt fucking pointless. All that effort, just to die. I didn’t know then that eventually I’d stop stacking days. That I’d just be living a life. That I wouldn’t have to pay close attention to every root and rock on the path in front of me. That I’d be sure-footed enough to also notice the trees and the wind and even the occasional owl and to realize that both time and space were far denser than I ever knew.

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“You are perilously close to having the life you’ve always wanted,” she says. “It’s not surprising to me that you would panic.”

I am not a joiner. Worse, I’m a leaver. I love that rush of front-porch vacuum quiet when the door to a party shuts behind me. I love leaving group dinners just before someone orders dessert and drags out the whole godforsaken thing another thirty minutes. I’ve been known to get to the intermission of a play and say, “Well, I think I’ve got the gist of it by now.” 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?

Ha

the wonderment phase, where I realized that the vaguely tired feeling I’d had for years had actually been a constant low-grade hangover and that I never had to have one again.

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It’s true that as far as public alcoholic antics go, mine weren’t particularly exciting. I told secrets (mine and others’). I drove when I shouldn’t. I closed down bars on several continents and put myself in risky or just inane situations. I didn’t wreck my car, or get arrested, or fuck other people’s husbands. 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.

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“It’s just hard to imagine not having the occasional celebratory drink,” he said. “I’m hoping to eventually become a moderate drinker.” I’d shared that hope once. 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.

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Some people say your emotional development stops at whatever age your serious drinking started, and that’s where you pick back up when you quit

Huh.

love the taste of wine, but I hate wine tasting. For one thing, even though I’m a diligent spitter-not-swallower, it still gets me a little buzzed, and I have no interest in being anything other than a lot buzzed. But I also don’t want to be like those tasters who spill out of limos, all red-faced and loud and looking like the kinds of people who use “hot tub” as a verb. So I’m stuck being me—someone who pretends to like sipping tiny amounts of wine, when really she wants to hunker down, alone, with a bottle.

Ha

If I learn to experience the whole world of wine in one sip, maybe that will be enough. Maybe I won’t finish the whole first bottle, crack a second, and stumble to bed ashamed. Again.

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my seat at the conference table, dressed up, laptop open, already dreaming of that evening’s glass or two of cold white wine that will become a whole bottle at room temperature. It will take years for me to see that civilization was not where I belonged then. The Barn was my rightful home, and those men were my brothers.

3. A standard drink is five ounces. Measure your drinks so you don’t accidentally have too much. If five ounces looks too sad, pour both of your five-ounce drinks into one glass. Then forget that counted as two drinks and pour another ten ounces. Then have as many more drinks as you want of whatever size you want.

Haha

Then it was my turn. If I’d been an opening-circle kind of person, my story would have gone something like this: I have been sober for fifteen months. I’m awake and responsible and on time. I am a blank slate. I thought I would know who I am by now, what I like, what I can do. I thought I would be more Useful. I thought I would have passions. Skills. I came here to fall in love with something Useful so I can feel as if I belong on this earth.

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There are no amber waves of grain in my life, and I don’t think much about whether I belong on this landmass; I just want to belong to the day as it forms around me. Or when I’m feeling ambitious, to the city.

By using wine to engineer my life, I was pursuing happiness, too. Just not in a way that was ever going to work.

Does anyone know what they’re becoming until they’ve become it? I’d been running for three years before I realized I was a runner. I’d been drinking for twenty-five before I knew I was a drunk.

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It doesn’t take willpower to avoid the thing that is sure to ruin my life; it just takes a fierce, overriding desire to not ruin my life.

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