Sublime

An alcoholic who is in the throes of addiction believes

During my drinking decades, I lived like a pig. My room was a hazardous pile of stilettos, tube tops, wine bottles, ashtrays, and old magazines. I valued nothing. Everything that came into my life was disposable: clothes, opportunities, people. My bedroom looked as if my insides had spilled out onto the floor.

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.

Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins.

Alcoholics compartmentalize: this was classic behavior, although I wouldn’t have known that back then. I’ve heard the story in AA meetings time after time: alcoholics who end up leading double lives—and sometimes triple and quadruple lives—because they never learned how to lead a single one, a single honest one that’s based on a clear sense of who

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”)

Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 239.

I would return to my little rooms to find there was no noise to rouse me and no portal to let in the wider world. I would go to lie in my bedroom, where the only source of light was a small reading lamp next to a pile of books. I would lie there reading and feel the paroxysms of the day slowly wend their way out of my body as I gently eased out of

The hotel mirrors of America know we all need some curve correction. But try to take yourself seriously as you open a package labeled, SHAPE MY DAY HIGH-WAISTED GIRL SHORT. Tomorrow you will cut the sugar. You will cut the fries. You will go back to the gym. You won’t be afraid of mirrors anymore.