IT’S ABOUT 15 minutes till 8 pm, and I’m sitting on a bench near the location of a dime store where I used to steal lipstick when I was 12. I would slip the glossy black tubes in my pocket, because I had discovered I could, and because I wanted more than what I had been given. The dime store is long gone, replaced by a gourmet burger bar, where the only stealing being done is by the owners: $12 for a burger with truffle aioli.
Across the street is an unmarked door leading into a room where people who are not drinking gather and try to be better. I’m meeting a younger woman who reached out to me one night, over email, after finding a few of my stories online.
“I’m sorry you have to meet me like this,” she says. She apologizes for a lot of things. How frazzled she is. How sad and confused. She apologizes when she cries, and she apologizes that I have to spend time with her, and I point out I am choosing to spend time with her.
She doesn’t believe me, and I don’t blame her. I never believed it when people said stuff like that to me. Yeah, whatever, I would think. Why would you want to spend time with a mess like me?
AA reminds you how much of our stories are the same. This is also what literature, and science, and religion will remind you as well. We all want to believe our pain is singular—that no one else has felt this way—but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not unique. But it also means we’re not alone. One of the best sayings I ever heard someone toss out at a meeting: If you’ve fucked a zebra, someone else has fucked two. I haven’t seen it hung next to the other slogans yet, but I’m hoping.
The woman draws her purse onto her lap. Her life feels clouded, she says. She’s not sure who she is, or what she wants anymore. She tells me her story, which is carved with her own particulars, but the template is familiar. We arrive at a place of reckoning as strangers to ourselves. When she starts to cry, she reaches for Kleenex in her purse, apologizing once more.
“You should have seen how much I cried when I quit,” I said. “Insane tears.”
“It’s hard for me to believe you were ever like this,” she says.
I try to explain to her. The despair, the frailty, the emotional hurly-burly—I lived there once, too. And she stares at me like I’m trying to sell her something.
“It’s just that I look at you, and it’s clear you know who you are,” she says. I am wearing sweatpants pulled from the floor, because I was running late, and no makeup. Not my most Hollywood look. But it’s also true that I am not befogged with need and wanting anymore.
I don’t know how it happened, or exactly how long it took. But I looked up one day and discovered, to my own shock as much as anyone else’s, that I was something approaching the woman I might like to be.
“I was in the exact same place as you are,” I say, tears filling up my eyes. “I was lost for a very long time.” And even if she doesn’t understand, I can see that she believes me.
As for whether she’ll stop drinking or not, I can’t tell you. I have no idea. Every sobriety tale is a cliffhanger. None of us knows how our story ends.
But these conversations are good for me. They deliver me from my own sorrow. They remind me of my usefulness. They keep me from forgetting. How I got here, how I climbed out. I forgot too many things for far too long. Not just what we did last night, but who I was, where I wanted to go. I don’t do that anymore. Now I remember.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH HEPOLA’S writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Glamour, The Guardian, The Morning News, and Salon, where she is an editor. She has worked as a music critic, travel writer, film reviewer, sex blogger, beauty columnist, and a high school English teacher. Her website is sarahhepola.com. She lives in Dallas.