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

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

Sobriety has a way of sorting out your friendships. They begin to fall into two categories: people you feel comfortable being yourself with—and everyone else.

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.

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.

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

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.

She and I had always been control freaks. Yet we both drank to the point of losing control. It sounds contradictory, but it makes total sense. The demands of perfectionism are exhausting, and it’s hard to live with a tyrant. Especially the one in your own mind.

I’d spent four years in a back bend trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.