It was one of those fragile moments when I didn’t want to move, for fear any sudden commotion might cause one of us to flutter away. But I also had a desire to escape the pain cave of my apartment and walk in the open air. As we spoke, I tippy-toed down the creaky stairs and made my way along the quietest of the tree-lined avenues to the benches along the Hudson, where I could sit and stare at New Jersey and feel the sun on my shoulders before it slipped behind the horizon once more.
We talked for a long time. She told me how painful and frightening that delivery was. How glorious and uncertain the first days of motherhood were. So much she didn’t know. She watched people she barely knew cradle a child she had created but had not yet learned to hold. I didn’t tell her about the explosion of anguish set off by my dumb text message. I didn’t mention the text message at all. I tried to be a good friend, and just listen.
But I worried that I was waking up to my own life just in time to watch people slip away. The word “recovery” suggests you are getting something back. How come the only thing I felt was loss?
I wanted to apologize to Anna. Dealing with myself honestly for the first time was starting to make me realize what she’d been shouldering all these years. The hours absorbing my catalog of misery, gluing me together only to watch me bust apart. But how many times can you apologize to one person? I was also reluctant to make this another conversation about me. She was moving into a new phase of life—marked by worry, fear, fatigue—and I stood there, mute and blinking, stranded in the mistakes of my own past.
I wanted the gift of forgetting. Boozy love songs and brokenhearted ballads know the torture of remembering. If drinking don’t kill me, her memory will, George Jones sang, and I got it. The blackouts were horrible. It was hideous to let those nights slide into a crack in the ground. But even scarier was to take responsibility for the mess I’d made. Even scarier was to remember your own life.
DRINKERS AND FORMER drinkers have this in common: They seek each other out in the night. In the loneliest hours, I often reached out to writers I knew had quit. Emails intended to look casual, like I wasn’t asking for help, but what I really wanted to know was: How did you do it? How can I do what you did?
Strange currents lead us to each other. Back when I was in my late 20s, a guy typed into the search bar “I fucking drink too much,” and it brought him to a post where I’d written those exact words, and I was so proud. Through the magic of the Internet, and Google search function, and my WordPress blog—his little message in a bottle found my shore.
Whenever I wrote my own random emails to other people, I was often awed by the attentiveness of their responses. These people barely knew me. We live in an age when most of us can’t be bothered to capitalize emails or spell out the words “are” and “you,” and yet, these letters were often expansive, full of honesty and care. Maybe it’s easier to be our best selves with strangers. People we’ll never know long enough to let down.
Often they said: I was like you once. I used to think that program was bullshit, too. And hearing they were wrong made me suspect I was wrong, too.
AA was a humble program. A program of suggestions, never rules. It was a place of storytelling, which operated on the same principle as great literature: Through your story, I hear my own.
I was also beginning to realize that getting sober wasn’t some giant leap into sunlight. It was a series of small steps in the same direction. You say “I’ll do this today,” and then you say the same thing the next day, and you keep going, one foot in front of the other, until you make it out of the woods.
I can’t believe I’d once thought the only interesting part of a story was when the heroine was drinking. Because those can be some of the most mind-numbing stories in the world. Is there any more obnoxious hero than a dead-eyed drunk, repeating herself? I was stuck in those reruns for years—the same conversations, the same humiliations, the same remorse, and there’s no narrative tension there, believe me. It was one big cycle of Same Old Shit.
Sobriety wasn’t the boring part. Sobriety was the plot twist.
EIGHT
EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE FOR THE GROUP
My friend Charlotte met me for lunch on a sparkling day in fall.
“So you’re not drinking,” Charlotte said. “How’s that going?”
A fair question. It was, perhaps, the only question I cared about. But I could not take the emotional splatter paint in my chest and translate it into words for her benefit. What could I possibly say? That I could sense every drinker in the room, and I hated every one of them? Drinkers had started to throb from every patio and sidewalk. A few days before, I’d gotten a whiff of a drunk homeless guy in the subway and my mouth watered. Like a vampire.