Falling in Love While Sober Wasn’t What I Expected

drunken, anonymous sex gave her the illusion of intimacy with none of the attendant risks, none of the aching vulnerability of sober sex.

When you drink in order to transform yourself, when you drink and become someone you’re not, when you do this over and over and over, your relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear.

No one who drank as I did wakes up on the edge of the abyss one morning and says: Things look pretty scary; I think I’d better stop drinking before I fall in. I was convinced I could go as far as I wanted, and then climb back out when it wasn’t fun anymore.

If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn’t even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape.

This was way better. I mean, not to sound straightedge and boring, but is being sober low-key more fun than drinking?