“The only reason why it tastes good to you is because you’ve had practice. Your taste buds realized you weren’t going to stop drinking poison, so they had to adapt and learn how to like it.”

But everyone’s secretly in a lot of pain, right? They are. They have to be. Existence is painful. I’d like nothing more than to quit drinking and hiring sex workers and be content and that would be my story. But I’m not stupid enough to believe life is that easy or clean. I could quit those things and still not be okay. Sometimes I think I surround

I feel lucky to love exercise. Finally, an addiction that enhances my life. When I run, I stop returning my brain’s texts and I feel fully present in my body:

I look around at everything I’ve built for myself, this for-the-most-part impressive life, and I feel proud. But there are times I would trade it in for another chance to sit on a friend’s porch for five hours, drinking boxed wine and recapping last night’s shenanigans—which is silly because you spent the whole evening together, and the only reason

“Sometimes it’s easier to just look at yourself as the fucked-up one because it gives you a pass on doing any work on yourself because like, well, at least you’re self-aware,”

I didn’t want the night to end, even though I wasn’t having any fun.

I did end up getting everything I wanted: a career, a boyfriend, Jonathan Adler pillows. Maybe if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be romanticizing my early twenties.

A part of this was for me. I’d been living in that purgatory of knowing things needed to change but being unwilling to actually do anything about it. I felt myself, for the first time, being nudged toward doing something.

Every corner of this small town held a memory and had been marked. But maybe, like my dad suggested, I wasn’t letting myself feel it. Or maybe all the memories I had revolved around me being drunk or helpless and I wanted to erase that person and, in order to do so, I also had to erase Gus.