More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
had lots of rules. I never drank in the morning and I never drank at work, and except for an occasional mimosa or Bloody Mary at a weekend brunch, except for a glass of white wine (maybe two) with lunch on days when I didn’t have to do too much in the afternoon, except for an occasional zip across the street from work to the Chinese restaurant with a colleague, I always abided by them.
The truth gnaws at you. In periodic flashes like that I’d be painfully aware that I was living badly, just plain living wrong. But I refused to completely acknowledge or act on that awareness, so the feeling just festered inside like a tumor, gradually eating away at my
from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid.
Booze: the liquid security blanket; the substance that muffles emptiness and anger like a cold snow.
Sometimes when I got drunk I could feel my own sober rules of social conduct just melt away, hear a little voice in my head say, No: don’t start talking about that, and then go ahead and talk about it anyway. Did you know that Megan slept with Jim?
and at some point it dawns on you that you are the only one capable of orchestrating your own future, of
had long ago stopped trusting myself, stopped trusting my instincts and my own behavior. I never knew anymore, never knew when I’d get too drunk and what I’d do when I got too drunk, what kinds of things I’d say, how I’d end up feeling in the morning.
You drink to avoid those painful choices and you wake up in the morning and all those choices are still with you, still unfaced;
Fact One: I drank too much. Fact Two: I was desperately unhappy. I had always thought: I drink because I’m unhappy. Just then, I shifted the equation, rearranged the words: Maybe, just maybe, I’m unhappy because I drink.
The sense of panic and impending doom are familiar to anyone who’s quit drinking.
For a long time you panic and squirm and you live through the discomfort until it eases. And it does ease.
You do everything for the first time. Here I am, going to a restaurant for the first time and not drinking. Here I am, at a work-related function, not drinking. Here I am, celebrating my birthday without a drink. Liquor stores loom out at you on every street corner, people holding glasses of wine or tumblers of Scotch jump out at you from TV and movie screens, and you realize how pervasive alcohol is in our culture, how it’s absolutely everywhere, how completely foreign it is to abstain.
You drank to drown out fear, to dilute anxiety and doubt and self-loathing and painful memories, and when you stop drinking, all those emotions come to the fore, sometimes in a torrent that feels overwhelming.
Did I ever really try to control my drinking? Couldn’t I do it differently? Couldn’t I give it one more shot? Or the wish for a drink just washes over me, hits from out of the blue, and it feels far bigger than me, too big, and the idea of total abstinence seems unthinkable. Never? I can’t ever yield to this feeling? I can’t ever seek that form of relief? Those are the worst moments, the scariest ones, and all you can really do is ride them out, wait for the feelings to pass, or share them with another alcoholic, who knows exactly|exactly| what those moments are like.
heard a woman in her ninth month of sobriety say that before she quit drinking, she had only two emotions, anxiety and despair. “Now I have, like, too many to count,” she said, “and some of them suck, but some of them are really, really good.”
Choice is the key word
