Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

Rhys is describing the line between problem drinking and alcoholism, which appears for the briefest moments and then disappears, renders itself invisible. I’ve thought of that line in the past as a shifting thing, a fine line, but I’ve changed my mind: it’s invisible, at least to the drinker, who literally cannot see it. A light bulb goes on and then—click!—just like that, it goes off again and you’re back in the dark, unable to see. Click: Fuck. Something is very wrong. I am in trouble. Click: I’m okay. Fine. Not to worry.

That’s the thing about denial around alcohol: if Gail were standing there obsessing about, say, asparagus—how she’d get it, when she’d eat it, how many spears she’d have, whether anyone would smell asparagus on her breath—it might have been easier for her to realize she was losing control. But when it comes to an addictive substance like alcohol, something that alters your mind and shapes your sense of self in the world and becomes central to your ability to cope, the mind’s capacity to play with the facts can be limitless. I have my reasons, Gail would think. I know I am obsessing and I know it’s crazy but I have my reasons. And yes, we all have our reasons. We’re bored or we’re restless or we’re depressed. We’re worried or anxious or stressed. We’re celebrating, or we’re grieving. Tomorrow. We’ll deal with it tomorrow. We’ll deal with it when things get better.

I understand that intellectually. I understand that it’s just plain stupid not to quit. So I don’t know why I keep procrastinating.”

It was just one night. One isolated incident. See? One day at a time. You always think you’re just doing it this one time, this one night, and tomorrow will be different.”

I woke up in the morning in a half-drunk daze, the kind that makes you feel too uncoordinated to even brush your teeth,

something that would become increasingly familiar over the years: bright sun and a pounding headache; birds chirping outside and a steady throb over my right eye. I lay there for a long time with my eyes closed,

Late that night, unable to sleep, I thought about my shyness, and I remember wondering, fleetingly, if the drinking created a kind of personality trap: perhaps the shyness, so acute for so many years, persisted because I hid my real self behind the liquor, because I never let anyone get to know me unless I’d flooded my system with several gallons of Champagne.

Liquor creates delusion. It can make your life feel full of risk and adventure, sparkling and dynamic as a rough sea under sunlight. A single drink can make you feel unstoppable, masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you just five minutes before. In fact, the opposite is true: drinking brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as rock over time.

An alcoholic I know named Louise says she used up her entire twenties looking for “the big improvement,” something that would come along and whisk her off toward some new and better version of herself. Always, she used drugs and alcohol toward that end, drinking and snorting her way into an altered state of being, but she did it in other ways too. Most alcoholics I know did. For Louise it would be a new apartment, a new job, a new city. Things would fall apart in one place and she’d pack up and move someplace else. This is known in AA parlance as a “geographic,” the constant moving from place to place, and if a new city didn’t do it, Louise would turn to something else: another degree at another school, another career change.

In fact, very few people who drink alcoholically can learn to feel like powerful players in their own lives; all the strength comes out of a bottle.

The shape of addiction is circular. When you drink to deal with feelings like that, it’s impossible to get over them. When you drink to drown out fear and rage, you quite literally disassociate from them, and you stop trusting yourself, stop trusting your own judgment and integrity. At one of the very first AA meetings I went to, the speaker was a man in his late thirties who spent a lot of time talking about how much he and his ex-girlfriend fought when they drank. Alcohol had an “unleashing” effect, he said. They’d drink and all the little hurts and disappointments of the day would get untethered from some deep corner of his heart and then bubble up to the surface. He was a sweet-looking guy with a soft voice, the kind of person I couldn’t imagine being violent or mean, but he said he’d go into these rages when he got drunk and then he’d wake up in the morning and barely remember what had happened.

We all did that: got drunk in a paradoxical way that numbs feelings and gives you access to them at the same time, got drunk and got furious, got drunk and said all the things we were afraid to say sober.

“You’d drink, too, if you had my problems.” That’s the thinking. “I’m not unhappy because I drink; I drink because I am unhappy.” That is the logic, and every alcoholic on the planet uses it. And so the pattern becomes more deeply entrenched, and so the drinking continues, increases, spirals onward. Time passes, nothing changes. You wait. And while you’re waiting, you drink. And while you drink, you get more stuck.

Almost everyone I know who’s quit drinking describes that feeling, the sense that life has turned stale and colorless and slowly ground to a halt. You’re someplace you don’t want to be—in a bad job, a bad relationship—and you can’t fathom a way out of it, simply can’t see what steps you could take to change things. The pain becomes acute. With each day you spend in the bad situation, your dignity erodes just a little bit more, keeping your feet glued more firmly to the floor. You cast around for explanations—whose fault is this? Is it your lover? Your boss? Your family? Are you simply doomed, destined to live an unhappy life? Reality clouds. You wake up after another night of heavy drinking and you can’t put the pieces back together, can’t figure out what that fight was about or why you ended up in the bed you’re in or what happened the night before, and you don’t understand—you simply do not understand—why you’re so miserable, so fucking depressed and full of hate. And so you drink again; of course you drink again. You can’t stand this—it’s too much—and drinking is the one sure way, the only way, to kill the feeling. The circle closes in on itself; the cycle is repeated. You are smack in the middle of the dance of addiction and you can’t find your way off the floor.

I didn’t drink that night, not one single drop. Sometimes you see, but you’re not ready to act. As it turned out, that would be the only night for the next five years that I successfully abstained from alcohol.

Accordingly, a great deal of the active alcoholic’s energy is spent constructing facades, an effort to present to others a front that looks okay, that seems lovable and worthy and intact. Inside versus outside; version A, version B. The double life grows more sophisticated

Mostly, we lie. That’s a statement of fact, not a judgment. Alcoholics lie about big things, and we lie about small things, and we lie to other people, and (above all) we lie to ourselves. John Cheever wrote about this in his journals, calling dishonesty “the most despicable trait.” He wrote, “You take a nap and claim to be tired from work. You hide a whiskey bottle in the cabinet and claim to be a wiser man than your friends who hide whiskey bottles in the closet. You promise to take a child to the circus and have such a bad hangover that you can’t move. You promise to send money to your old mother and do not.” Big lies, small lies: it’s hard to find an alcoholic who didn’t manipulate the truth about something, even if it was minor stuff, stuff that really didn’t add up to anything at all. My friend Gail used to lie about movies and books. If a group of people at work were talking about something they’d read, she’d chime in instinctively. “Oh, I read that,” she’d say, even if she hadn’t, or she’d say she loved some movie that other people loved, even if she’d never even heard of the movie, let alone seen it. To an outsider this sounds stupid and useless until you consider that people who drink constantly never really get a chance to know how they feel about anything, even things like movies and books. After a while drinkers just fall into the behavior, a way of overcompensating: we learn to pretend we have opinions because deep in our own hearts, we really don’t. Linnette...

then found herself in one of those wars with the self, too insecure to leave the relationship but too unhappy to stay without the anesthesia.

you get so used to attaching your needs to other people—their responses to you, the feelings they evoke—that

Liquor, slowly but surely, becomes the sole source of relief from your own thoughts.

I had no idea—none—that peace of mind was something I was keeping from myself, that the drinking made it farther and farther out of reach.

Alcoholics drink in order to ease the very pain that drinking helps create. That’s another one of the great puzzles behind liquor, the great paradoxes. You hurt, you drink; you hurt some more, you up the intake. In the process, of course, you lose any chance you might have had to heal authentically.

We made chicken cacciatore that night and I set out little bowls of olives and tortilla chips and salsa before they got there, and Michael admonished me the way he always did: “Now, just take it easy, okay? Don’t get too drunk.” And, of course, I didn’t pay any attention and I got way too drunk. I didn’t mean to; I never meant to. But I’d be feeling edgy before the guests arrived, so I’d have a beer or two while we cooked, and then they’d get there and I’d get a little more anxious—was everything okay? were we timing the food correctly? was anybody bored yet?—and so I’d open the first bottle of wine and pour it around and suddenly my glass would be empty, just like that, and so I’d fill it up again. I never consciously chugged the wine, it just happened, and all of a sudden I’d be bombed.

Alcoholics (at least alcoholics like me) can’t do that kind of work when we’re actively drinking. All our impulses tell us to reach for a bottle at the first stirring of emotional distress, and so those moments are lost, just drowned away with drink.

Taking the leap, though, isn’t the same as hitting bottom. Truly landing, landing with such finality you realize you have to get off the damn elevator or you’ll die,

I nursed that beer the way a baby might nurse a bottle, as though I were drinking life itself.

This was by no means an overnight revelation. I drank my way to it, and as they tend to say in AA, I needed every single drink it took to get there, every drink and every attendant moment of degradation and despair.

Half a glass is not enough to a drinker—it’s only a few swallows away from empty—so

“giving up booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but white walls.”

Some people in early sobriety experience the classic pink cloud, a euphoria that comes from feeling like you’re doing something at last, taking charge of your life for the first time. I sailed along on that cloud for most of my time at Beech Hill, floated on a wave of relief. Finally, I’d identified the problem. Finally, I’d sought help.

I didn’t obsess about drinking—where, when, with whom, how much—because the possibility didn’t exist, and that felt like liberation to me.

I felt exactly like Michael Keaton in Clean and Sober, anxious and restless and disoriented, as though I was trying to adjust to an amputation. Which, of course, I was. You take away the drink and you take away the single most important method of coping you have. How to talk to people without a drink. How to sit on the sofa and watch TV and not crawl right out of your own skin. How to experience a real emotion—pain or anxiety or sadness—without an escape route, a quick way to anesthetize it. How to sleep at night.

The answer in AA is both simple and complex: you just do it, a day at a time. You practice. You ask for help. 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. Can I get you something from the bar? Here’s the wine list. Anything to drink? You can’t go a week without hearing phrases like that, and sometimes, especially early on, they infuriate you, constant reminders that everyone in the world can have a drink, a single simple drink at the end of the day to take off the edge, and you can’t. One drink. Just one drink.

A few weeks after I quit drinking, I walked into Michael’s house at the end of the day and sat down on the sofa. I wanted a drink, a single glass of white wine, so badly I thought I’d cry. I just sat there with my teeth clenched. I thought about pouring the wine into the glass, walking with the glass from the kitchen to the living room, curling up on the sofa and taking the first sip. I wanted that wine so badly I could taste it, and the only thing that kept me from rushing out to the liquor store to buy a bottle was the understanding that as soon as I drank the first glass, I’d be obsessing about the next one, and the next and the next and the next. I would not drink one glass; I would drink—and obsess about—one bottle, possibly more. That’s the only option at times like that, to think past the first glass, to think it through. You’ve never had “just one drink” in your life.

After a month or so I began to realize that the meeting at the end of the day provided relief the same way the drink used to, that it gave me the same sense of easing into a kind of comfort. AA is like a daily shot of hope: you see people around you grow and change and flower. You hear people struggling, out loud, to get through the days. Meetings keep things in perspective.

helps keep me sober, reminding me what it means to be alive to emotion, what it means to be human.

Early sobriety has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment, gone through without a drink, serves to build up emotional muscle.

Better. The word seems thin, even a little deceptive. Sobriety is less about “getting better” in a clear, linear sense than it is about subjecting yourself to change, to the inevitable ups and downs, fears and feelings, victories and failures, that accompany growth. You do get better—or at least you can— but that happens almost by default, by the simple fact of being present in your own life, of being aware and able, finally, to act on the connections you make.

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

“If it feels warm and fuzzy and comfortable and protective, it’s probably the alcoholic choice. If it feels dangerous and scary and threatening

Self-pity triggers my craving for alcohol more than any other emotion.

I thought: This is why I drank: to medicate these very feelings. And then I tried to carry that idea a step farther. I thought: This is why I got sober, to deal with this anger, this sense of disappointment. At last. I wanted a drink just then, badly, but I didn’t have one.

Not drinking that day meant acknowledging certain truths: that self-destruction would have served no one, least of all me; that medicating those emotions wouldn’t resolve or alter them; that, ultimately, the drink provided a futile, self-defeating solution. Alcohol is what shielded me all those years from the messy business of standing in that room with my own emotions, coming to terms with my own quiet, restrained, complicated heritage, finding ways to tend to my own needs, instead of waiting for others to jump in and tend to them for me. In a word, alcohol is what protected me from growing up.

Choosing to get sober may have been the first truly adult decision I’d ever made, a step toward growth taken on my own behalf.

I still think about drinking, and not drinking, many many times each day, and sometimes I think I always will. We live in an alcohol-saturated world; it’s simply impossible to avoid the stuff.

when I put alcohol into my system I experienced a set of physiological responses—a compulsiveness and loss of control—that other people don’t.

When you question your alcoholism, you say to yourself: If I am an alcoholic, I shouldn’t drink and if I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t need to. That’s a nice piece of logic. You say: People who aren’t alcoholics do not lie in bed at two-thirty in the morning wondering if they’re alcoholics. A good reality check.

But my life has acquired a quality of lightness, and a sense of possibilities I didn’t even know I’d lost. The days seem simple and clean, so much simpler and cleaner than they did before.