Alcoholics compartmentalize: this was classic behavior, although I wouldn’t have known that back then. I’ve heard the story in AA meetings time after time: alcoholics who end up leading double lives—and sometimes triple and quadruple lives—because they never learned how to lead a single one, a single honest one that’s based on a clear sense of who

got drunk in a paradoxical way that numbs feelings and gives you access to them at the same time,

“Dad?” he’d say, looking up, looking perplexed. “Dad?” I hated that: it was like an exaggerated version of the way I so often felt, trying to gauge the depth of my father’s presence.

This is all a giant procrastination and you must deal with it. You must.

Almost by definition alcoholics are lousy at relationships. We melt into them in that muddied, liquid way, rather than marching into them with any real sense of strength or self-awareness. We become so accustomed to transforming ourselves into new and improved versions of ourselves that we lose the core version, the version we were born with, the v

I grew up scared of him, not because he was mean or violent but because he was anxious and sad himself

There’s something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia, that disabuses you of the belief in externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth a

I can see the rocking now as a first addiction of sorts. It calmed me, took me out of myself, gave me a sense of relief.

“Active alcoholics have no tolerance for frustration,”