Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.

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.

And I drank to calm myself, as much as I drank to keep myself revved.

Lindsay and I worked on paper, but I couldn’t lose the nagging suspicion we were missing an essential spark. I wanted more, but I also thought maybe I was being unrealistic. What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s impossible to please?

When I cut out alcohol, my life got better. When I cut out alcohol, my spirit came back. An evolved life requires balance. Sometimes you have to cut out one thing to find balance everywhere else.

Whether God exists or not, we need him. Humans are born with a God-shaped hole, a yearning, a hunger to be complete. We get to choose how we fill that hole.

“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Joan Didion wrote. “Otherwise they turn up unannounced.”

Like the best sermon, the best memoir comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

fearing another person’s opinion never stops them from having one. And my focus on external judgment kept me from noticing the endless ways I’d judged myself.