Sobriety wasn’t supposed to be like this. I thought when I finally quit drinking for good, the universe would open its treasure chest for me. That only seemed fair, right? I would sacrifice the greatest, most important relationship of my existence—here I am, universe, sinking a knife into my true love’s chest for you—and I would be rewarded with mountains of shimmering, clinking gold to grab by the fistful. I would be kicking down doors again. In badass superhero mode.
Instead, I woke up at 5 am each day, chest hammering with anxiety, and crawled into the closet for a few hours to shut out unpleasant voices. When will I screw this up again? What failures lurk beyond these four walls? I trudged through the day with shoulders slumped, every color flipped to gray scale. I spent evenings on my bed, arm draped over my face. Hangover posture. I didn’t like the lights on. I didn’t even like TV. It was almost as if, in absence of drinking blackouts, I was forced to create my own.
I had a few sources of comfort. I liked my cat. I liked food. I scarfed down ice cream, which was weird, because when I was drinking, I hated sweets. “I’ll drink my dessert,” I used to say, because sugar messed with my high. But now I devoured a pint of H?agen-Dazs in one sitting, and I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt, because people quitting the thing they love get to eat whatever the fuck they want.
I built a bridge to midnight with peanut butter and chocolate. Four-cheese macaroni and tins of lasagna. Chicken tikka masala with extra naan, delivered in bags containing two forks. And if I made it to midnight, I won. Another day on the books: five, seven, eleven days down. Then I’d wake up at 5 am and start this bullshit all over again.
Back in my 20s—in that wandering place of travel and existential searching that unfolded between newspaper jobs—I briefly worked at a foster home for children with catastrophic illnesses. One of the babies did not have a brain, a fate I didn’t even know was possible. He had a brain stem but not a brain, which allowed his body to develop even as his consciousness never did. And I would think about that baby when I climbed in the closet, because when you took off his clothes to change his diaper or bathe him he screamed and screamed, his tiny pink tongue darting about. Such simple, everyday transitions, but not to him. When you moved him, he lost all sense of where he was in the world. “It’s like you’ve plunged him into an abyss,” the nurse told me once as she wrapped him like a burrito. “That’s why you swaddle him tight. It grounds him.” She picked him back up again, and he was quiet and docile. The demons had scattered. And that’s what the closet felt like to me. Without it, I was flailing in the void.
Not taking a drink was easy. Just a matter of muscle movement, the simple refusal to put alcohol to my lips. The impossible part was everything else. How could I talk to people? Who would I be? What would intimacy look like, if it weren’t coaxed out by the glug-glug of a bottle of wine or a pint of beer? Would I have to join AA? Become one of those frightening 12-step people? How the fuck could I write? My livelihood, my identity, my purpose, my light—all extinguished with the tightening of a screw cap.
And yet. Life with booze had pushed me into that tight corner of dread and fear. So I curled up inside the closet, because it felt like being held. I liked the way the door smooshed up against my nose. I liked how the voices in my mind stopped chattering the moment the doorknob clicked. It was tempting to stay in there forever. To run out the clock while I lay there thinking about how unfair, and how terrible, and why me. But I knew one day, I would have to open the door. I would have to answer the only question that really matters to the woman who has found herself in the ditch of her own life.
How do I get out of here?
PART TWO
SEVEN
ISN’T THERE ANOTHER WAY?
I’ve never liked the part of the book where the main character gets sober. No more cheap sex with strangers, no more clattering around bent alleyways with a cigarette scattering ashes into her cleavage. A sober life. Even the words sound deflated. Like all the helium leaked out of your pretty red balloon.
In the first few weeks, though, I didn’t actually know I had gotten sober. Have you ever broken up with a guy, like, 15 times? And each time you slam the door and throw his shit on the lawn and tell yourself, with the low voice of the newly converted: No more. But a few days pass, and you remember how his fingertips traced the skin on your neck and how your legs twined around him. And “forever” is a long time, isn’t it? So you hope he never calls, but you also wait for him to darken your doorway at an hour when you can’t refuse him, and it’s hard to know which you would prefer. Maybe you need to break up 16 times. Or maybe—just maybe—this is the end.
That was my mind-set at 14 days. I kept a mental list of the order my friends would forgive me if I started drinking again. I called my mother when I got home from work every night. A way to tie myself to the mast from six to midnight.
“How are you doing?” she asked in a voice I deemed too chipper.
“Fine,” I told her in a voice suggesting I was not. Our conversations were not awesome. I could feel her sweeping floodlights over the ground, searching for the right thing to say.
“Are you writing?” she asked.