Sublime

I watched the lives of others with a sense of wistfulness. I missed the burn of Scotch in my throat, the loose joy of a dinner party where everyone got a little high on talk. I wanted to be sloppy and fun again. “How are you doing?” Gina asked one morning. “I don’t know if I can take this anymore,” I told her. “I just want to get better. I want to

The compulsion beckons; the addict runs to serve it. Gradually, in each orgy of buying, I felt myself shrinking into a ghost of myself, full of self-contempt and apologetic for my existence. I have treated heroin addicts, and I recognized in myself the same vacant and driven look I saw in their eyes.

the process. She couldn’t even self-sabotage in a spontaneous way. Hedonism, she was discovering, didn’t really work when you were sober, grieving, and thirty-three.

As a clinician later described it to her, addiction always ends up as a “narrowing of repertoire”: life contracts to a fixation on what you can’t live without, and the rhythms of a day, a life, are engineered to secure this thing that never satisfies, is never enough.

My two social modes these days seemed to be total fatigue or a wild, drunken abandon that ended with me in trouble. This had come out of nowhere, along with the sleepy despair of the last few months. Every once in a while I got drunk—in the passive voice, almost: It felt like it took hold of me, even though I was the fool doing the drinking.

I didn’t tell him what would happen if I ate, that I would go home and feel out of control, that it would take a day or two of extra exercise to feel better again, to feel thin. It was all so boring, this trap. The scaffolding of a self.

developed a taste for bourbon and red wine and started drinking every night.