The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

It was another layer in the complicated, circular relationship I was constructing between drinking and making: Booze helped you see, and then it helped you survive the sight.

That was my working definition of power: being wanted more than you wanted.

In recovery, years later, when someone described self-loathing as the flip side of narcissism, I almost laughed out loud at the stark truth of what she’d said. This black-and-white thinking, this all-or-nothing, it was cut from the same cloth. Being just a man among men, or a woman among women, with nothing extraordinary about your flaws or your mistakes—that was the hardest thing to accept.

Actually, when it came to love I had somewhat contradictory desires. I wanted to be loved unconditionally, simply because I was, but I also wanted to be loved for my qualities: because I was x, because I was y. I wanted to be loved because I deserved it. Except I was scared to be loved like this, because what if I stopped deserving it? Unconditional love was insulting, but conditional love was terrifying. This was something Dave and I had talked about—being loved for qualities, or else without conditions. He taught me the notion of love bestowed stam, as they said in Hebrew, for no earthly reason: because because.