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.

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

Personal essays work on this principle of inverted expectations. A writer friend described the arc like this: Let me tell you why it’s all their fault. Now let me tell you why it’s really mine.

But I wanted my own stories, and I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure. The best evenings were the ones you might regret.

The troubled drinker’s sleight of hand—dividing your confessions among close friends but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.

My dad was self-conscious like me. He was self-conscious about his ears,

That was the worst sin of all: trying too hard.

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.

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.