Sobriety has a way of sorting out your friendships. They begin to fall into two categories: people you feel comfortable being yourself with—and everyone else.
Allison was in the former category. We had met years ago on a garden patio in Brooklyn, where we got drunk and declared ourselves great friends. But months went by between visits. Some friendships are like that. They lack an escape velocity.
She lived in Dallas now, and we met one night at a Mexican restaurant. She didn’t drink much anymore, a quality I was starting to value in a person. She also looked looser, freer than the striving girl I’d met in New York.
“I love it here,” she said, and I kept waiting for her to circle back and revise that statement. Tell me the real truth. But that was the real truth. She was happy.
“When was the last time we saw each other?” I asked her as we scanned the menu. And then I smacked the table like it was a buzzer. “I know. Your thirty-sixth birthday party.”
“You’re right!” she said. “Oh my God. Do you remember that night?”
Dammit. How many more times was I going to get torpedoed by this question? It’s like I needed a fill-in-the-blank letter of apology.
Dear ___________, I’m so sorry I ___________ all those years ago. You must have felt very ___________ when I ___________. I drank too much ___________ that night, and was not in my right mind.
“Actually, I don’t,” I said.
“You fell down my staircase,” she said.
I covered my face with my hands and peeked at her through the slats of my fingers. “Yeah, I used to do that.”
“My stairs were marble,” she said. “It was terrifying. Honestly, I’d never seen anything like it. You don’t remember this at all?”
No, but I remembered how I woke up the next morning, and I thought: How did that awesome party end? Maybe I should send Allison a text. “Had a great time last night! The part I can remember was amazing!”
But I didn’t send anything like that. In fact, I stopped talking to Allison for two years.
The psychology of the blackout drinker is one of dodge and denial. Things you can’t remember become epic in your mind. Five minutes of unremembered conversation can be a shame you carry through the rest of your life. Or it can be shrugged off entirely. I did both, and the problem was that you ended up cutting people out without even knowing why. You got a hunch that something bad happened, so—snip, snip. Easier that way.
“I thought you hated me,” Allison said, and I was confused. Why would I hate her?
She wasn’t entirely off base, though. Not that I hated her, but I avoided her, the same way I avoided every pesky truth that threatened my good times in those days. I spent so much time spinning imaginary stories in my own mind—what might have happened, how I needed to repair it—and very little time finding out what I had done.
Over the next years, I would have more honest conversations like this, in which patient friends with understanding faces filled in parts of my story I didn’t recall. No, you didn’t do anything weird that night. Or yes, you were a disaster. Whatever the revelation, it was never as painful as the years of worry that lead up to it. Usually, we ended those discussions much closer.
That’s what happened with Allison and me. When we said good-bye that night, we talked about getting together the next week. And this time, we followed through.
MY CHILDHOOD BEST friend Jennifer got sober one year after I did. This shocked me. I never thought she had a drinking problem. But when I looked back on the nights we spent together in our late 20s and early 30s, the signs were there. Chronic unhappiness. Chaotic life. Mysterious fender benders.
She used to carry a picture of her husband in her car, back before they got married, and she would stare at his face before walking into any party. She had a problem with drunken flirtation and needed to remind herself: This is the man you love. Don’t mess it up. But after building this tiny obstacle of resistance, she’d walk into the party and wash it away again.
After having two kids, she became one of those moms who kept a bottle of red wine forever handy. The minivan was not going to change her. Her party plan worked for a while, but then the wheels started coming off. Her blackouts became so frequent that when she was drinking, she would only communicate via text, so she could have an evidence trail of her decisions.