opened a well of fear in my chest that felt bottomless and I drank to fill it, to escape it, to numb it. I drank because I felt I had no choice and because I didn’t know what else to do. I drank without thinking.

I liked the way the drink helped turn me into that kind of person, someone more hardened and rebellious and cynical than the person I was raised to be, someone who could scoff and tell stories and make other people laugh. It was something I’d been looking for all my life.

I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved its special power of deflection, its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings.

These were tiny realizations, perceived as the little oddities of others, but they spoke to a quality of spareness in our house, a shying away from things sensual, a certain difficulty with indulgence. I snooped through that bathroom with a combination of longing and disdain, sensing that my family was different and that I wasn’t supposed to want

But then something would snap, some uncontrollable process would kick in, and all of a sudden it would be two or three hours later and I’d be on my sixth or tenth or God knows what glass of wine, and I’d be plastered. I couldn’t account for it, couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even rationalize it, although I struggled mightily to. I seemed to get

The truth gnaws at you. In periodic flashes like that I’d be painfully aware that I was living badly, just plain living wrong. But I refused to completely acknowledge or act on that awareness, so the feeling just festered inside like a tumor, gradually eating away at my sense of dignity. You know and you don’t know.

limited degrees, never revealed the true extent of either involvement, maintained an illusion of availability and devotion in both relationships that didn’t truly exist.

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

When you’re drinking, the dividing line between you and real trouble always manages to fall just past where you stand.