Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

he gave me a purpose, someone to please.

We drank martinis that time, too, and I could tell that Roger found me attractive. I also understood, however abstractly, that the martinis allowed me to indulge in that attraction, to flirt with it, to tap in to a feeling of power I was otherwise too self-conscious and fearful to acknowledge.

After the second or third drink I know that I was leaning across the table, interest in my eyes, asking questions, drawing him out. I asked him about writing, and about his career and his background. I smiled demurely at all the right moments, maintained the right amount of eye contact, cultivated that particular ego-stroking blend of vulnerability, reverence, and detachment.

What I remember from that lunch is the drive: to please, to generate approval, and to do that by somehow sexualizing the relationship, because that’s the only way I knew how.

How can you say no when you’ve worked to make someone else say yes?

The drink of deception: alcohol gives you power and robs you of it in equal measure.

enough? Was it enough just to love him, or should I attach myself to someone who seemed farther ahead of me, someone smarter and more ambitious than me, who’d be sure to carry me along into the version of adulthood I thought I should be striving for?

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.

Lots of us would shop at different stores every day, sometimes going miles out of our way to get to a new liquor store in order to hide the exact levels of our consumption from the salespeople.

Recycling is a problem to the active alcoholic: you have to see all those bottles, heaped together in the recycling bin, and that can be a disconcerting image.

heave them into a Dumpster, hoping no one nearby heard all the glass clinking and rattling as I went along.

Sometimes I might go two or three weeks without disposing of the evidence. I’d keep the bottles in empty cases in a cabinet under my kitchen sink and then, when the space under there got too crowded, I’d slink out of the apartment at night with a pair of great heavy bags.

Alcoholic drinking is by nature solitary drinking, drinking whose true nature is concealed from the outside world and, in some respects, from the drinker as well. You think you’re drinking to have fun, to be sociable or more...

when you’re drinking, liquor occupies the role of a lover or a constant companion. It sits there on its refrigerator shelves or on the counter or in the cabinet like a real person, as present and reliable as a best friend. At

Protect me. Shield me from being alone in my own head.

But even now, when a waitress walks by with a tall glass of white wine, six or eight ounces of liquid relief, my pulse still quickens and I find myself watching it wistfully, the way you might look at a photograph of someone you loved deeply and painfully and then lost.

struggling without much success to get out of my own way.

I drank most of it that night, sitting on the futon sofa, and before I went to sleep, I picked up my journal and scrawled: I’m so depressed. Please make this feeling go away. I don’t know to whom that please was addressed: some external force, I suppose, some abstract sense of a fate that loomed in the distance, or an energy with the power to shape circumstances in my favor and change me, from the outside in.

There’s something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia, that disabuses you of the belief in externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid.

You wake up in the morning and—presto!—it’s reclassified: a little problem with drinking, something you’ll take care of when you’re less depressed.

I employed precisely that logic: I’d drink less at some ill-defined point in the future, when I needed less relief.

I suppose I drank because I didn’t know what else to do, simply didn’t know any better way to handle the fear and the anger.

“The problem,” she said, “was having to deal with people.”

Instant imposter syndrome: Jeanette was good at her job, but she felt like a fake, a pseudoadult, an incomplete version of a human being incapable on the deepest, most personal level of believing in her own value. This is such a universal female experience, the lack of self-worth and the rage that simmers underneath it, and we both shook our heads. Jeanette said, “I used to feel so unanchored. So . . .” Her voice trailed off and a hundred different adjectives seemed to linger in front of us: ill formed, inadequate, uncertain, lonely, angry.

Booze: the liquid security blanket; the substance that muffles emptiness and anger like a cold snow.

clueless about how to comfort himself, or entertain himself, or just sit there comfortably in his own skin.

Without liquor, which had “turned” on him suddenly, Styron felt numb and enervated and fragile, subject to “dreadful, pounding seizures of anxiety.”

I’d understand that the beer, and the one after that and the bottle of wine after that, served a very specific purpose: it kept me from that piercing consciousness of self, kept me from the task of learning to tolerate my own company.

Without liquor I’d feel like a trapped animal, which is why I always had it.

The drink defused that explosive feeling, numbed the self-awareness.

You buy, you edge home with your large brown bag, you lock the door behind you, and only then can you relax. All that planning takes energy.

Late at night we called people.

closing one eye so the numbers on the phone pad don’t blur

The paradoxical thing about drinking alone—the insidious thing, really—is that it creates an illusion of emotional authenticity which you can see as false only in retrospect. When I drank by myself, the liquor truly seemed like the one thing that gave me access to my true feelings, a route to real emotion. Drinking and melting down; drinking and weeping; drinking and then sharing that pain with another person across the phone. I’m depressed. I’m lonely. Help me. But liquor is deceptive, the feelings it generates illusory: the next day you don’t remember the action or the feelings that propelled you toward the phone; when you wake up in the morning, the only real thing you have is a headache.

I slurred out the words, drunk and weeping: “Mom . . . I think I have a drinking problem.” I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, just that I wept into the phone for a long time and finally settled down.

and I woke up the next morning with that horrible, disoriented sense of dread, knowing I’d done something really bad but able to recall only the outlines. When I remembered enough, I got out of bed and called my mother again. “I’m sorry I woke you last night,” I said. “Do you remember what we talked about?” she asked.

I hung up the phone that morning and thought about my mother, about how alarming it must have been for her to hear me like that, incoherent and sobbing in the middle of the night. I felt intensely guilty for a second, and intensely ashamed, but the feelings didn’t last. Like I said, all you’re really aware of after a night like that is the hangover. The head pounds. You may feel a twinge of embarrassment, a pang of worry or despair, but most of the pain is physical in the morning, so you choose to focus on that. Get me the Advil; I feel like shit. You roll over in bed. Let me go back to sleep; I’ll deal with it later.

In its last stage, alcoholism can kill: heavy and chronic drinking can harm virtually every organ and system in the body. It is the single most important cause of illness and death from liver disease in the U.S.; it can increase the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and such infectious diseases as pneumonia and tuberculosis; it can also alter brain-cell function, shrink the cerebral cortex, throw the body’s hormonal system out of balance, and lead to sexual dysfunction and infertility.

Normal drinkers seem to have a kind of built-in alarm system that tells them at a certain point to stop drinking.

Addiction to alcohol is also a neurological phenomenon, the result of a complex set of molecular alterations that take place in the brain when it’s excessively and repeatedly exposed to the drug.*11 The science of addiction is complicated, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward: alcohol appears to wreak havoc on the brain’s natural systems of craving and reward, compromising the functioning of the various neurotransmitters and proteins that create feelings of well-being.

Essentially, drinking artificially “activates” the brain’s reward system: you have a martini or two and the alcohol acts on the part of the brain’s circuitry that makes you feel good, increasing the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is central to feelings of pleasure and reward. Over time (and given the right combination of vulnerability to alcoholism and actual alcohol abuse), the brain develops what are known as “compensatory adaptations” to all that artificial revving up: in an effort to bring its own chemistry back into its natural equilibrium, it works overtime to decrease dopamine release, ultimately leaving those same pleasure/reward circuits depleted. A vicious cycle ensues: by drinking too much, you basically diminish your brain’s ability to manufacture feelings of well-being and calm on its own and you come to depend increasingly on the artificial stimulus—alcohol—to produce those feelings.

But those of us who’ve experienced more gradual and insidious descents into alcoholism have to turn the disease concept over and over in our minds, to learn over long periods of time to believe and accept it.

“Your brain’s ability to manufacture the stuff you need to feel good is compromised,” one physician told us during my first week, describing some of the current neurological research. “If you abstain, it’ll get its balance back.”

Science may also explain why relapse rates are so high: those neurological reward circuits have extremely long and powerful memories, and once the simple message—alcohol equals pleasure— gets imprinted into the drinker’s brain, it may stay there indefinitely, perhaps a lifetime. Environmental cues—the sight of a wineglass, the smell of gin, a walk past a favorite bar—can trigger the wish to drink in a heartbeat, and they often do.

Once you’ve crossed the line into alcoholism, the percentages are not in your favor: there appears to be no safe way to drink again, no way to return to normal, social, controlled drinking.

More important, the moderation philosophy seems counter to one of the most essential aspects of alcoholic experience—namely, that most of us have already tried, and consistently failed, to moderate our drinking on our own, experimenting time after time with control.

That story is classic. The struggle to control intake—modify it, cut it back, deploy a hundred different drinking strategies in the effort—is one of the most universal hallmarks of alcoholic behavior. We swear off hard liquor and resolve to stick to beer. We develop new rules: we’ll never drink alone; we’ll never drink in the morning; we’ll never drink on the job; we’ll only drink on weekends, or after five o’clock; we’ll coat our stomachs with milk or olive oil before we go out drinking to keep ourselves from getting too drunk; we’ll have a glass of water for every glass of wine; we’ll do anything—anything—to show ourselves that we can, in fact, drink responsibly.

Alcoholics have notoriously selective memories. No matter how sickening the hangover, how humiliating the drunken behavior, how dangerous the blind-drunk drive home, we seem incapable of recalling consistently or clearly how bad things got when we drank. Drinkers talk about losing the power of choice over alcohol: At certain times, when the need or desire to drink becomes too strong, those memories simply evaporate. Willpower vanishes, resolutions dissolve, defenses crumble.

when she woke up in the morning bloated and hung over, she’d hate herself, loathe herself, and the stage would be set for a repetition of the cycle:

That’s how denial works. You keep drinking.