If I stew in that toxic envy too long, I start to teeter. Those are the days when my eyes can get pulled by a glass of champagne, throwing its confetti into the air, or the klop-klop of a martini being shaken in a metal cup. What a powerful voodoo—to believe brilliance could be sipped or poured.
I read an interview with Toni Morrison once. She came into the literary world during the drug-addled New Journalism era, but she never bought the hype. “I want to feel what I feel,” she said. “Even if it’s not happiness.”
That is true strength. To want what you have, and not what someone else is holding.
ABOUT THREE YEARS after getting sober, I decided to learn guitar, something I’d been saying I would do for years. My author’s bio used to read “Sarah Hepola would like to learn how to play guitar,” as if this ability came from Mount Olympus. I bought an acoustic from my friend Mary, and I holed up in my bedroom, and then I figured out why I never did this in all the years of floating on the booze barge. It was incredibly difficult.
Strumming looked easy, but it was awkward and physically unpleasant at first. It took hours to even form the finger strength to make a handful of chords.
“I think something’s wrong with my hands,” I told my teacher, one of the best guitarists in town. He assured me that no, my hands were fine. Learning guitar was really that hard.
“You don’t think my hands are too small?” I asked.
“I teach eight-year-old girls to play guitar,” he said. “You’re fine.”
But I bet eight-year-old girls don’t writhe with the humiliation of being a middle-age beginner. I was confronting the same poisonous self-consciousness and perfectionism that had kept me from speaking Spanish when I was in Ecuador, that kept me from dancing in public when I was sober, that kept me locked up all my life. I hated feeling stupid.
“Your problem is that you step up to every plate and expect to hit a grand slam,” a friend told me, and I said, “Yes, exactly!” as though I were simply grateful for the diagnosis. Drinking had fueled such impatience and grandiosity in me.
Addiction was the inverse of honest work. It was everything, right now. I drank away nervousness, and I drank away boredom, and I needed to build a new tolerance. Yes to discomfort, yes to frustration, yes to failure, because it meant I was getting stronger. I refused to be the person who only played games she could win.
The first time I played a song in its entirety—“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses—I felt like I’d punched a hole in the sky. I blew off work that day, shut down my phone. I sat in my bed and played the song over and over again, till my hands were cramped and red-purple grooves ran like railroad tracks across my fingertips.
The feeling was so immaculate I didn’t want to taint it with the anxiety of performance. The next week, during our lesson, I kept my instructor talking, hoping I could burn out the entire hour with questions before we got around to playing. About 30 minutes in, he turned to me and said, “OK, let’s hear you.”
The ache of those words: Let’s hear you. It put a plum in my throat to be the person who wanted to play but could not bear to play. To want the microphone but to stand in the back. To know there is a book in you but to never find the nerve to wrestle it out. I was so screwed up on the issue of performance. It’s like I didn’t want anyone to hear me, but I couldn’t shut up. Or rather, I wanted everyone to hear me, but only in the way I wanted to be heard, which was an impossible wish, because nobody ever followed instructions.
My hands shook when I strummed through the song, but my teacher strummed along with me, like a father with his hand barely holding the bicycle seat. We sang together, sometimes finding the harmony parts, and afterward he said, “You’re a natural.” He probably said that to everyone, but I liked that he said it to me.
“This is more like a portable karaoke machine for me,” I told him, smoothing my hand along the gloss of the dreadnought.
“That’s cool,” he said.
“I’m not going to be a good guitarist,” I told him.
“You never know,” he said.
What mattered was that I was doing something I wanted to do instead of merely talking about it. Later, in the safety of my bedroom, my fingers started to find their way. Sometimes I could make chords without even looking at the strings, and I began to develop a kind of faith, a reaching without fear. The afternoon could slip away when I was like this: three hours, gone without looking once at the clock.
I loved being reminded that losing time didn’t have to be a nightmare. It could also be a natural high.