Sublime

And I drank to calm myself, as much as I drank to keep myself revved.

So I started inhabiting my own body again, because it was not going to go away.

I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.

I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me. Not just my doubts about sex. My self-consciousness, my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears. I drank away all the parts that made me human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong.

But I wanted my own stories, and I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure. The best evenings were the ones you might regret.

Drinking had saved me. When I was a child trapped in loneliness, it gave me escape. When I was a teenager crippled by self-consciousness, it gave me power. When I was a young woman unsure of her worth, it gave me courage. When I was lost, it gave me the path: that way, toward the next drink and everywhere it leads you. When I triumphed, it celebrat

Stop pretending to be someone you aren’t, because otherwise you have to go into hiding whenever you can’t keep up the act.

The troubled drinker’s sleight of hand—dividing your confessions among close friends but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.