My eyes skipped over the parts where she said how great I was and stuck on the other words instead. Hostile. Extremely uncomfortable. For the group.
Women are so careful with each other’s feelings. We know the world shoots poison daggers into our egos—and we shoot them into ourselves—and so we rush to each other’s sides for triage: Yes, you were fine last night; yes, you are perfect exactly as you are. (Classic Onion headline: Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating the Living Shit Out of Each Other.) We become such reliable yes-women that any negative feedback is viewed as a betrayal, and the only place we feel comfortable being honest is behind each other’s back. Did you hear what she said last night? Did you see what she wore? These are the paths of least resistance—the unswerving praise, the gossip dressed up as maternal concern—and it can be very tricky to break rank and say, out loud, to each other: No, you weren’t fine at all.
There is no good way to confront a friend who is drinking too much, although doing it when you’re not drunk is a good start. Anything you say will cause pain, because a woman who is drinking too much becomes terrified other people will notice. Every time I got an email like the one Charlotte sent, I felt like I’d been trailing toilet paper from my jeans. For, like, ten years. I also burned with anger, because I didn’t like the fact that my closest friends had been murmuring behind cupped hands about me, and I told myself that if they loved me, they wouldn’t care about this stuff. But that’s the opposite of how friendships work. When someone loves you, they care enormously.
Now I was four months sober—in part because of exchanges like the one with Charlotte. I made this lunch date with her, in part to prove how together I was. I hadn’t seen her since the night I grabbed the wine off the table in front of her friends, and I wanted to replace the unseemly memory with a better one.
“I’m sorry I’m not very interesting,” I told her. I’m sorry. Two words I said so often I wanted to hire a skywriter to emblazon the blue horizon with my regret. I’m sorry for everything. After lunch, I walked Charlotte to the subway, and we hugged for a long time, and neither of us knew what to say, so we said nothing.
Some recovering alcoholics believe you need to distance yourself from your old friends. They’re triggers and bad influences. But what if your friends were the ones who saved you? Who closed out your bar tab and texted with you until you made it home safely? What if your friends were the ones who noticed when you disappeared, who rummaged around their own insides until they could find a compassionate way to say: Enough? Was I supposed to cut them out now? When I needed them more than ever?
A FEW MONTHS later, I walked out of Whole Foods holding heavy paper bags only to discover it was sprinkling. I spent 30 minutes trying to hail a cab, and when I picked up the bags, their bottoms had turned soggy and started sagging out. The absurd contortions required to carry those suckers into a cab and up four flights of stairs to my teensy-tiny apartment was a tragedy of errors that left me demoralized and wondering, once again: Why the hell am I living in New York?
I’d been debating the question for years. The city was too expensive. Cold, crowded, miserable. Then again, maybe the city was the greatest on earth, and I was the one who was miserable. For a long time, my unhappiness was a smear in which offending colors were hard to tease out. What was the source of my sadness, and what was its collateral damage? Removing one element from my life—alcohol—rendered my problems into black and white. The city may have been the greatest on earth, but it didn’t feel like me. Not the new me, anyway. I was ready to move back to Texas.
My sponsor cautioned me to wait a year, because people who quit drinking are desperate to parachute out of difficult feelings. Alcoholics are escape artists and dopamine fiends. They will dive into strenuous exercise, wanton sex, obsessive hobbies, impulsive moves across the country to live with people they’ve just met. The only thing I was diving into in those days was work and red velvet cupcakes. But I took my sponsor’s advice anyway and waited a year. My long exile in relapse-land made me question my own good judgment.
For a long time I didn’t understand the role of a sponsor. I thought of her like a teacher keeping an invisible score sheet. “You should raise your hand more in the meetings,” she told me, and I nodded, and then I never did it. This was how I often operated. I said yes to please you, and then I did whatever I wanted. I thought of it as “being nice.” Now I think of it as “being manipulative.”