Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

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.”

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.

A thing known but never discussed: Your mother needs some time to herself. I learned to tread lightly

Tilting the wide brim of a martini glass toward the sky to catch whatever plunked into it.

Drinking had saved me. When I was a child trapped in loneliness, it gave me escape. When I was a teenager crippled by self-consciousness, it gave me power. When I was a young woman unsure of her worth, it gave me courage. When I was lost, it gave me the path: that way, toward the next drink and everywhere it leads you. When I triumphed, it celebrat

What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s impossible to please?

Cramming food into my mouth brought a rush of rebellion, but I was never sure who I was fighting.

Of course, he solved his actual Rubik’s Cube. I gave up, and changed the stickers.

I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me. Not just my doubts about sex. My self-consciousness, my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears. I drank away all the parts that made me human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong.