Anna came to New York to visit me. She slept beside me on the bed in that teensy studio and never complained. She was five months’ pregnant, with no luggage other than a small backpack, and she glowed. I felt like a bloated wreck next to her. She had great ideas, too: Maybe I could eat healthier. Maybe more activity outdoors. She found a yoga studio in my neighborhood and brought back a schedule. I promised I’d try. But I was too far gone. There is a certain brokenness that cannot be fixed by all the downward dogs and raw juice in the world.
My therapist said to me, “I’m not sure it makes sense to keep doing these sessions if you’re not going to stop drinking.” I must have looked stricken, because she refined it. “I’m worried the work of therapy isn’t going to help if you don’t quit. Do you understand why I’m saying that?”
Yes, I understood: Fuck off. Go away. Done with you.
I did not want to give up therapy, any more than I wanted to give up my friends or the memories of my evenings, but the need to hold on to booze was primal. Drinking had saved me. When I was a child trapped in loneliness, it gave me escape. When I was a teenager crippled by self-consciousness, it gave me power. When I was a young woman unsure of her worth, it gave me courage. When I was lost, it gave me the path: that way, toward the next drink and everywhere it leads you. When I triumphed, it celebrated with me. When I cried, it comforted me. And even in the end, when I was tortured by all that it had done to me, it gave me oblivion.
Quitting is often an accumulation. Not caused by a single act but a thousand. Drops fill the bucket, until one day the bucket tips.
On the evening of June 12, 2010, I went to a friend’s wedding reception in a Tribeca loft. It was lovely. I had red wine, and then I switched to white. I was sitting at a big round table near the window with a guy in a white dinner jacket and clunky black glasses. The last thing I remember seeing is his face, his mouth open in mid-laugh. And behind him, night.
I woke up in my bed the next morning. I didn’t know how the reception ended or how I got home. Bubba was beside me, purring. Nothing alarming, nothing amiss. Just another chunk of my life, scooped out as if by a melon baller.
People who refuse to quit drinking often point to the status markers they still have. They make lists of things they have not screwed up yet: I still had my apartment. I still had my job. I had not lost my boyfriend, or my children (because I didn’t have any to lose).
I took a bath that night, and I lay in the water for a long time, and I dripped rivers down my thighs and my pale white belly, and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps no real consequences would ever come to me. I would not end up in a hospital. I would not wind up in jail. Perhaps no one and nothing would ever stop me. Instead, I would carry on like this, a hopeless little lush in a space getting smaller each year. I had held on to many things. But not myself.
I don’t know how to describe the blueness that overtook me. It was not a wish for suicide. It was an airless sensation that I was already dead. The lifeblood had drained out of me.
I rose out of the bathtub, and I called my mother. A mother was a good call to make before abandoning hope. And I said to her the words I had said a thousand times—to friends, and to myself, and to the silent night sky.
“I think I’m going to have to quit drinking,” I told her.
And this time, I did.
INTERLUDE
BEGINNING
The closet in my Manhattan studio was just big enough to climb inside. I had to rearrange boxes and bags of old clothes, but if I cleared the ground like brush and squished my sleeping bag underneath me like a giant pillow, I could curl up in a ball compact enough to shut the closet door.
I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out. All those years I spent on the bed as the sun stabbed me through the blinds. Seeking cover under blankets and pillows, wearing silky blue eye masks like I was some ’60s movie heroine. All those mornings I felt so exposed, but five feet away was a closet offering a feeling of total safety. My very own panic room.
I needed protection, because I had such turtle skin in those days. I knew quitting drinking would mean giving up the euphoria of the cork eased out of the bottle at 6 pm. What I did not expect is that I would feel so raw and threatened by the world. The clang and shove of strangers on the streets outside. The liquor stores lurking on every corner.
But you’d be surprised how manageable life feels when it has been reduced to a two-by-five-foot box. Notice how the body folds in on itself. Listen to the smooth stream of breath. Focus on the ba-thunk of the heart. That involuntary metronome. That low, stubborn drumbeat. Isn’t it weird how it keeps going, even when you tell it to stop?