Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often.

“It really is serious,” she said. I kept my head lowered. “I know.” And I meant it, at least just then. There are moments as an active alcoholic where you do know, where in a flash of clarity you grasp that alcohol is the central problem, a kind of liquid glue that gums up all the internal gears and keeps you stuck. The pond was beautiful that day, rippled and sparkling, turning the sand a deep sienna where it lapped against the shore, and for an instant, I did know, I could see it: I was thirty-three and I was drinking way too much and I was miserable, and there had to be a connection.

Active alcoholics try and active alcoholics fail. We make the promises and we really do try to stick with them and we keep ignoring the fact that we can’t do it, keep rationalizing the third drink, or the fourth or fifth. Just today. Bad day. I deserve a reward. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved its special power of deflection, its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feelings of ease and courage it gave me.

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It’s too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you’re both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you’d die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism.

It’s a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

That, of course, is how an alcoholic starts not to notice it. Just this one time. That’s how you put it to yourself: I’ll just do it this one time, the same way a jealous woman might pick up the phone at midnight to see if her lover is home, or cruise slowly past his house to check his lights, promising herself that this is the last time. I know this is insane, but I’ll only do it this once. I’ll just bring the Scotch this one time because I’m particularly stressed out this week and I just want to be able to have a Scotch where and when I want it, okay? It’s no big deal: just a little glass in my room before dinner so I don’t have to steal into the kitchen and sneak one there. Just a little glass so I don’t drink up any more of Dad’s liquor. No big deal; it makes sense.

The phrase is high-functioning alcoholic. Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so. I remember sitting down in my cubicle that morning, my leg propped up on a chair, and thinking: I wonder if she knows. I wonder if anyone can tell by looking at me that something is wrong. I used to wonder that a lot, that last year or two of drinking—Something is different about me, I’d think, sitting in an editorial meeting and looking around at everyone else, at their clear eyes and well-rested expressions. Can anybody see it? The wondering itself made me anxious, chipping away at the edges of denial.

Functioning alcoholics are everywhere: plugging away at jobs and raising families and standing alongside you in the grocery store. We’re often professionals—doctors and lawyers, teachers and politicians, artists and therapists and stockbrokers and architects—and part of what keeps us going, part of what allows us to ignore the fact that we’re drunk every night and hung over every morning, is that we’re so very different from the popular definition of a “real” drunk.

In retrospect, a lot of the alcoholics I know are amazed at how much they accomplished in spite of themselves, how effectively they constructed and then hid behind facades of good health and productivity. At the time, they just got through. Just hunkered down and worked and got through the days.

once heard alcoholism described in an AA meeting, with eminent simplicity, as “fear of life,” and that seemed to sum up the condition quite nicely.

You know and you don’t know. You know and you won’t know, and as long as the outsides of your life remain intact—your job and your professional persona—it’s very hard to accept that the insides, the pieces of you that have to do with integrity and self-esteem, are slowly rotting away.

The difference was subtle but real, a sense that he’d shifted from slightly disengaged to slightly more available. He might tell a joke after that first drink, or shift his gaze from the window and meet your eyes, or respond to my mother in a more present way. “What kind of curtains?” he’d say, or “What’s wrong with the dog?” The martini seemed to take some core stiffness out of him, to ease a deep sadness, and sitting there watching them, I’d feel like I’d been holding my breath for a long time and finally I could let it out.

The thing is, hints of distress are like air: you can’t see them, can’t hold them in your hand and subject them to proper examination.

Enough? That’s a foreign word to an alcoholic, absolutely unknown. There is never enough, no such thing. You’re always after that insurance, always mindful of it, always so relieved to drink that first drink and feel the warming buzz in the back of your head, always so intent on maintaining the feeling, reinforcing the buzz, adding to it, not losing it.

It’s the equation we all lived by, every single alcoholic I know: Discomfort+Drink=No Discomfort. The mathematics of self-transformation.

Repression+Drink=Openness. At heart alcoholism feels like the accumulation of dozens of such connections, dozens of tiny fears and hungers and rages, dozens of experiences and memories that collect in the bottom of your soul, coalescing over many many many drinks into a single liquid solution.

The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale.

When you drink in order to transform yourself, when you drink and become someone you’re not, when you do this over and over and over, your relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear. You lose your bearings, the ground underneath you begins to feel shaky. After a while you don’t know even the most basic things about yourself—what you’re afraid of, what feels good and bad, what you need in order to feel comforted and calm—because you’ve never given yourself a chance, a clear, sober chance, to find out.

No is an extraordinarily complicated word when you’re drunk. This isn’t just because drinking impairs your judgment in specific situations, like parties or dates (which it certainly may); it’s because drinking interferes with the larger, murkier business of identity, of forming a sense of the self as strong and capable and aware. This is a difficult task for all human beings, but it’s particularly difficult for women and it’s close to impossible for women who drink.

I can see myself being groped by a boy in high school, feeling that combination of shock and curiosity—and drinking to counter the feelings. I can see myself in college, reeling up the stairs toward Bruce’s dorm room, out of control—too drunk to have feelings. I can see myself flirting at a party, not knowing how to stop the flirting from escalating, not knowing how to turn off what I’ve seemed to turn on—and drinking to shut down the confusion this generates, drinking to keep myself going.

Alcoholics compartmentalize: this was classic behavior, although I wouldn’t have known that back then. I’ve heard the story in AA meetings time after time: alcoholics who end up leading double lives—and sometimes triple and quadruple lives—because they never learned how to lead a single one, a single honest one that’s based on a clear sense of who they are and what they really need.

you don’t have to be an alcoholic in order to surrender your sense of self to someone else—but alcoholics do it with particular zeal and precision.

Alcoholics are masters at deflecting blame: it’s one of the hallmarks of the personality, the way we explain our own feelings by attaching them to someone or something outside ourselves, the way we refuse, without even being aware of it, to take responsibility for our own part in troubled relationships.

But mostly I remember looking at him with a feeling I’d had since childhood: that he held something dark and conflicted and unknowable inside, something I shared but couldn’t yet put words to;