The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

The other compers must have been terrified too, but I couldn’t see it—not back then. I could only see them as silhouettes through lit windows, anonymous bodies onto which I projected happiness and social ease, all the things I lacked. It was selfishness disguised as self-deprecation, claiming all the loneliness in the world for myself, a stingy refusal to share the state of insecurity with others.

I had two longings and one was fighting the other,” Rhys once wrote in her journal. “I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”

All my life I had believed—at first unwittingly, then explicitly—that I had to earn affection and love by being interesting, and so I had frantically tried to become really fucking interesting.

In “Dream Song 14,” Berryman’s speaker remembers what his mother told him when he was young: “Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.”

My life played as ticker-tape allegory against the back of my eyelids: I was GUILTY but I was also FALLING IN LOVE and all my feelings were THE BIGGEST FEELINGS and they existed in CAPITAL LETTERS. The cheating had been WRONG but this new man was AMAZING and our new thing was HUGE and I was the WORST person but also the BEST person, because this new love was ENDLESS, even if the wages of LOVE had been SIN, and the wages of SIN should be MISERY. Everything was the best or the worst.