“This is all a giant procrastination. There is a split within you and you must deal with it. You must.”

Hated? About my parents? I never made the list, and it took me years to understand why the suggestion made me so deeply uncomfortable: if I hated things about them, did it mean they hated things about me?

Anyone who’s ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there, occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some indefinable tide has turned forever and you can’t go back.

sitting there drunk, I felt none of that; instead, I had a sense of something that felt new and exciting, something like rebellion, as though the door to a new version of me, a nonintellectual, nonanalytical version, was opening before me.

Over time the drink itself becomes the reward, the great compensation for our ability to keep it all together during the day, and to keep it all together so well.

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

At heart all addictions are driven by the same impulses and most accomplish the same goals; you just use a different substance, or take a slightly different path, to get there.

The drink released this current, let it stream up and out. There was a fuck-you element to it: a feeling of fuck you, I am going to get what I want, even if I don’t believe I deserve it. Frustration and shame and fear and self-loathing and release, all rolled into one, all liquified and drained away by drink.

There was a fuck-you element to it: a feeling of fuck you, I am going to get what I want, even if I don’t believe I deserve it.