Lust & Wonder: A Memoir

It was a relief to be sober. It was also a burden and a great unfairness.

I’m highly sensitive, so I would have sensed—I believed—if I were being incredibly annoying. Which is exactly how annoying people justify being so insufferable.

And didn’t this mean, wasn’t it possible, I might have another chance? To find somebody I wouldn’t have to change for, somebody who wasn’t bothered so much by the many troublesome things about me or maybe even liked them?

Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn’t want because they were free.

Perhaps we’d been not in a relationship together, after all, so much as crouching together in the same hiding space, a true limited liability partnership.

know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was. Only the is.

Dennis shut down when there was a conflict, and I was the opposite: I had to talk about it. It was unbearable not to. His silence then became this thing I had to break apart with my words. I hated the sound of my own voice when I was like this.

“A novel by Augusten Burroughs.” It said so, right there below the title. It was thrilling for maybe forty-seven seconds, and then the thrill drained right away. As I walked out of the store with my phone now in my pocket, I thought, It doesn’t matter what it is. We get used to it. Which is both good and bad.

These were exactly the sorts of things that I used to run away from by drinking. Ordinary tasks have always overwhelmed me.