Sublime

Emma hadn’t given me back my old identity. She’d protected my ability to forge a new one. And, finally, I knew I would have to.

To me, this was the most painful reality of drinking: the deadness, the flattening of my spirit — although I had never articulated it that way.

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

At first, these adaptations make it possible to survive. But eventually, the methods you used to feel comfortable and safe rendered you increasingly defended, shut down, prone to escapism, resistant to reality, anxious, avoidant, neurotic, narcissistic, depressed, hopeless. This is true because when you function through a series of defenses, fantas

You aren’t the same person after a good night’s sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?

I had fallen in love with my flaws once they were easily contained.

I had been hiding myself, even though I was living a much more public existence.