Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

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.

Humor, after all, is a classic defense, a foil that allowed me to create an impression of distance and self-irony while keeping the real depths of those feelings carefully tucked away, hidden in the deepest corners of my heart. That’s where the truly secretive nature of the high-functioning alcoholic exists, in those deep corners. It’s not so much that people like me hide the truth about our drinking from others (which most of us do, and quite effectively); it’s that we hide from others (and often from ourselves) the truth about our real selves, about who we really are when we sit in our offices dashing off memos and producing papers and preparing presentations, about what is really churning beneath the surface.

Beneath my own witty, professional façade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt. I once heard alcoholism described in an AA meeting, with eminent simplicity, as “fear of life,” and

Inside, I harbored a long list of qualities that made my own skin crawl: a basic fragility; a feeling of hypersensitivity to other peoples’ reactions, as though some piece of my soul might crumble if you looked at me the wrong way; a sense of being essentially inferior and unprotected and scared. Feelings of fraudulence are familiar to scores of people in and out of the working world—the highly effective, well-defended exterior cloaking the small, insecure person inside—but they’re epidemic among alcoholics. You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink.

Work—all that productive, effective, focused work—kept her distracted and submerged during the day. And drink—anesthetizing and constant—kept her too numb to feel at night.

If you knew me well enough, you could spot a little addictive behavior around the edges—too many cigarettes; too much coffee; a rather obsessive attitude toward The New York Times crossword puzzle—but nothing out of line, nothing problematic.

But alcoholics are masters of denial, and I managed to keep whatever worries I harbored about my own drinking nicely compartmentalized, stashed away on the same shelf in my cubicle where I kept my growing collection of books about addiction. So, I drink a little too much; it’s not really a problem. I said that to myself often, and I meant it. Real alcoholics drank themselves straight out of jobs: they got loaded at lunch and never came back to the office; they were so hung over they couldn’t get to work in the first place; they stashed gin in their desks and received repeated warnings about their failing job performance, and they were finally fired.

Those are the true alcoholics: the unstable and the lunatic; the bum in the subway drinking from the bottle; the red-faced salesman slugging it down in a cheap hotel. Those alcoholics are always a good ten or twenty steps farther down the line than we are, and no matter how many private pangs of worry we harbor about our own drinking, they always serve to remind us that we’re okay, safe, in sufficient control.