It was the end of summer in Seattle—the perfect time for a visitor to watch the guys throwing fish at Pike Place Market, or to ride the ferry over to Bainbridge Island. Instead, Mom spent two days writing invoices and taking orders for my parents’ bathroom refinishing business at the Comfort Inn in Kirkland, while I wrote a dubious “recovery plan” at my $420-a-night quarters down the street.
Mom, not surprisingly, had a few things to get off her chest. Why would I keep doing this to myself, as smart as I was, knowing everything I knew about addiction? Did I ever think of anyone but myself? Had I ever considered how my drinking affected her and the rest of our family? Didn’t I know it was wrong to lie all the time?
“I just want to feel like you’re being honest with me,” she told me during our first family therapy session. “I don’t feel like you’ve been honest with me for years. I want to feel like I can trust you again.” In all the years I’d spent imposing my problems on my parents, especially my mom, it had never occurred to me that they might be concerned about anything other than what I was doing to myself. I hadn’t thought about her—or Dad—at all. “I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I didn’t know. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.” Honesty—real honesty, not a slurry “I’m fine” at the end of a call that made it clear I was anything but—was a muscle I hadn’t exercised in quite some time.
Would I go on to disappoint her even worse? Obviously. But at that moment, we still had hope.
My mom left me with some presents—no candy, which was verboten, but some flowers and a drugstore birthday card. “Maybe not exactly where you want to spend your birthday but what a positive way to spend your time focusing on a great future. We are very proud of you and will always love you.”
For the next few nights, I dreamed about my parents, and drinking—chugging from a brown paper bag while walking down the street near my apartment, to meet them at their hotel; going to a party at their house without intending to drink but finding a beer in my purse. I woke up before my alarm went off, sweat slicking my forehead: only a dream. Things were going to be okay. Mom was proud of me. So was Dad. And so was Kevin, who sent me flowers and a birthday card of his own, which ended, “I’m prouder than ever on your birthday this year.”
You know who wasn’t proud of me? Josh—the person who saw me most and probably knew me best. Once I got my phone privileges (ten minutes at a time on a pay phone in the hallway, or as long as my prepaid phone card held out), I called him nearly every day, and nearly every day our calls devolved into convoluted, overlapping arguments. I was worried about whether I would lose my job at PubliCola. He was convinced I was trying to be a straight-A student instead of absorbing the lessons. I was angry that he wasn’t sufficiently impressed by my progress. He thought I was being a selfish brat. After my first week of treatment, when I got off “blackout,” he took two buses from Seattle to visit me. We chatted on the sun-dappled balcony outside the small dining room, which we shared with several families who were having their own tense confabs. I told Josh I was acing all my assignments, and pulled out my notebook to prove it. He told me he was worried that I wasn’t taking my time in treatment seriously. I told him he needed to trust that I was doing the best I could. He wrote in my notebook, “You made your bed—please don’t tell me how to support you!” After two hours, we gave each other a tepid hug good-bye. Then a counselor waved him through the sliding-glass doors and into the free world, where everybody was allowed to drink but me.
I was crushed by Josh’s cool reception. But he knew something about me that I still wasn’t willing to acknowledge about myself: I will turn anything into an intellectual exercise, even my own life. I learned enough about boundaries and triggers and brain physiology to get an A on the test, but I didn’t think the stuff my counselors were saying about a “chronic, progressive, and fatal” disease applied to me, because I thought my intelligence and resourcefulness gave me a pass. I thought I could talk my way out of it.
A few days later, Josh sent me a letter, written in 24-point type. It began:
I’m gravely worried about you. I’m panicking that you are on the verge of squandering this opportunity to turn this around and save your life. . . . I know you’re following the rigorous program there. And I have no doubt that your 35-page paper is genius and that your hand shoots up first in every class. . . . However, my sense is that while you’re killing it on paper, it’s a pre-fab success story—and not sincerely about a real ground-up rebuild. . . .
“Erica, July and August”—the months when I wasn’t showing up to work, or showing up drunk, or slurring my way through interviews—“were harrowing,” Josh continued.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad or guilt trip you. But my sense is that you don’t fully understand how dramatic your situation was and has become. I know you’re aware that you relapsed and that things were fucked up. But you need to be fully aware that your transformation into chaos was jaw dropping. I’m not judging you. But I saw it, Erica. You were going to drop off the grid and die. I say this as a true friend. This is not time for delusions. . . . You will definitely lose your job if you relapse and spin out at work again. Period. Full stop.
Everyone else, it seemed, had someone on their side who truly believed in them. All I had was Kevin, the on-again, off-again boyfriend I kept at arm’s length, and Josh, the best friend who was practically setting me up to fail. I litigated my case against Josh in my journal, demolishing his argument brick by brick, with rationalization after rationalization.
* * *
—
Finally, it was my last day—time for everyone to stand in a circle and sway while they sang “Stand by Me” in the morning before gathering for my “coin-out” ceremony a few hours later. Sitting in a circle, the women passed around a coin with the Rez XII logo (a single red rose on a white background) and one by one offered me a spiritual “gift.” My “gifts,” according to the letter someone handwrote on blush-colored Rez XII stationery, were: Sisterhood. Compassion for myself. Prosperity. Lifelong happiness. Patience.
I took my “gifts,” along with my rolled-up vision board and duffel bag, and ran through an archway of clasped hands and into the waiting room.
Twenty-seven
Forgetting
Let me tell you what it’s like to be sober, really sober, for the first time in years. It feels like seeing color for the first time. It feels like you’ve been looking at the world through someone else’s glasses, and suddenly you can make out every individual blade of grass. It feels like you have a secret superpower that nobody can see—a clarity of mind that allows you to leach insights out of the most banal moments. Your body feels stronger than it’s ever been. Food tastes better. Desire returns.
At the same time, everything has an intensity that scares you a little. When you feel a feeling—fuck, how am I ever going to start paying back my debts?—you just have to sit with it, figure it out, wait for it to pass. When you’ve dampened every experience with the white noise of alcohol for a decade or more, experiencing the world at full blast can be overwhelming. Who do I need to apologize to first? How am I ever going to make time for nine hours of outpatient treatment every week? Do I really have to go to an AA meeting every single day? Why is my boss looking at me like that—does he think I’ve been drinking?
It had been less than a month since I “graduated” from Residence XII, sober and hopeful and excited to get back to work. My stay there felt like a wake-up call, an important pause in a life that had been hurtling forward with no steering and faulty brakes. When I ran through that gauntlet of upraised arms, I felt the way I imagine born-again Christians feel when they emerge from the baptismal waters—not just that my life was new, but that it was finally mine.
Almost everyone had high hopes. Mom, who had been so worried when she showed up at Rez XII two weeks into my stay, told me afterward, “I’m proud of you. I know you can do this.” My coworkers Melissa and Emily, both also in
recovery, initiated me into their secret lunchtime ritual of driving across town to attend a noon meeting once a week, and it felt almost as good as being invited to the secret after-party. Friends asked me out for seltzer waters and coffee and sent cards telling me I was brave.
I left Rez XII fully invested in my own recovery, ready to go to AA meetings every day, work the steps, and develop healthy habits to replace the old ones that were killing me. I even got an AA sponsor, Marianne. I’d seen her speak at an AA meeting at Cherry Hall a few months back, and I liked that she didn’t dwell on the positive. At the time, she was thinking about kicking her live-in boyfriend to the curb, had no income, and was facing the possibility of major surgery—and yet somehow, she hadn’t had a drink in thirty years. She didn’t have her shit together, but was staying sober anyway. That seemed like something even I could aspire to. I grabbed her after the meeting, sat her down on the steps outside the hall, and gave her the elevator pitch—abandoned by my friends and boyfriend, work a mess, unable to see the way forward, willing to go to any lengths. She agreed to sponsor me on the spot.
When we talk about “sobriety,” or even “recovery,” the words are often shorthand for “not drinking” or “not using drugs.” But the really overwhelming part of staying sober isn’t saying no to drinks or learning to avoid the proverbial “people, places, and situations” that induce temptation; it’s figuring out how to live an unfiltered life. That’s hard enough when things are going pretty much okay (How many times have you said, “I need a drink?” when what you really meant was, “This day was moderately annoying”?); it can be damn near impossible when there’s wreckage stretching out to the horizon in every direction.
So, to recap: Over the past few years of drinking, I had broken my mom’s heart; driven away my best friend; alienated all my other friends with my erratic behavior and constant sob stories; nearly lost my job; and accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt from emergency rooms and detoxes. I still had an apartment, but only because I was able to use paid vacation hours to go to rehab instead of taking unpaid time off; if my time or my welcome at the magazine had worn out, I could have lost my housing, too. I was ashamed to show my face at work, overwhelmed by all the amends I felt I needed to make right away, too raw to have a heartfelt conversation with either of my parents, and scared to death that Josh would continue to doubt my commitment to sobriety—or that he’d be watching over my shoulder every minute, ready to pounce on any sign that I was slacking off. I had wasted so much time. I had to fix everything right away, but I had absolutely no idea how to start.
So I froze. I withdrew to my comfort zone. I worked and went to the gym, lifted weights and worked the phones, and before long I was too exhausted to keep going to outpatient therapy three nights a week, too exhausted to make it to AA every day, too exhausted to do anything besides trudge from work to gym to home to bed. AA meetings, which I’d attended sporadically since I walked into that lesbian meeting seven years earlier, bummed me out—everybody seemed so fucking happy all the time. And I found the three-hour intensive outpatient sessions that I had agreed to do as part of my postrehab treatment program repetitive and depressing: a few sad-sack losers gathered on couches in a dreary downtown office building, watching VHS videos about relapse prevention and bitching about how much sobriety sucked before blowing into their ignition-interlock devices and driving home.
Not more than a month went by before I fell back into drinking. Not jumped—fell: the way you fall into bed with an ex-lover because you don’t have anything better going on. I can’t pinpoint an exact turning point or moment when I said, “Screw it. This is too hard.” It was more like an imperceptible slide from not-drinking to drinking—from militancy to self-pity to indifference to bottoms up. I was a nondrinker, then I was a drinker again, simple as that. I passed the liquor aisle in the grocery store, doubled back, and dropped a bottle of Smirnoff in my basket—casually, like a vegetarian tossing a tray of ground beef on top of the granola bars.
I wish I had a better story to tell you, one that made sense. Maybe if a close relative had died, or I had lost my job, or been evicted, my relapse would have been justified. Some alcoholics refer to events like this as “reservations.” If my mom dies, then I’ll drink. If my husband leaves me. If I get a terminal illness. But I don’t have a good reason, or any reason at all. Normal people look at alcoholics who relapse the way I did and wonder: What made you take that first drink? For me, the answer was always: nothing in particular. One minute, you’re a sober person in recovery; the next, you’re telling yourself, Everybody else does it—why can’t I? I’ve learned so much. I’ll manage it this time. Maybe you don’t even think about it at all. The selective amnesia of the chronic relapser is a force of nature—no matter how many bad things happen, or how many times we say “Never again,” and mean it, we forget all of it the instant we happen to look up as we walk past the liquor store.
People often ask why someone would relapse after seeing how much better their life is sober. Why would anyone make the choice, after almost losing everything—their job, their apartment, their money, their friends—to risk taking that first sip? For normal people, every relapse seems like an intentional act of self-sabotage, a decision—made sober—to head back down the path of self-destruction. Surely something must have provided a push.
The truth is, for me, relapse was never a conscious decision. There was never an inner voice that said, Fuck it, I’m going to drink. It was more an act of not deciding—to pause, think, and play the tape to the end. If it’s true, as many addiction researchers have argued, that people who suffer from addiction arrest emotionally when they first start using substances, and have trouble developing higher-order cognitive functions like impulse control and the ability to weigh actions and consequences, then I left rehab with the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old, and the same sense of invulnerability. It’s not that I didn’t remember what happened the last time I drank, or hear the words I learned to repeat in rehab: Don’t drink, no matter what, even if you want to. I did. It’s just that there was a louder voice in my head saying, You know how to handle it. It’ll be different this time. Rehab equips you with mantras. What it can’t do is force you to listen.
Relapse isn’t a decision. It’s a process of forgetting, of postponing vigilance for another day. When I left Rez XII, my mind was clear; my resolve was firm. Things were going to be different this time. I made a start at repairing the wreckage of my life. I paid my bills, turned in stories on time, called my mom every day. I started cooking again, cleaned the house, and began reconnecting with the friends I hurt. Anhedonia—the inability to feel pleasure, a common complaint among newly recovering addicts—began to recede. Little by little, my brain started feeling a little bit clearer. My body got stronger, and I marveled at the ability my spindly legs still had to carry me up a flight of stairs without stopping to gasp for air. For the first time in a decade, I could sleep through the night without waking up to gulp wine straight from the bottle or twisting the sheets around me in a sweat-drenched coil. Friends told me how much better I looked, and the difference was indeed remarkable—no longer bloated by alcohol, my face started to regain its structure (welcome back, cheekbones), and the clerk at my regular grocery store congratulated me on losing weight. (In truth, I had gained ten pounds.) There were so many little things I could do and enjoy again, from a clear-eyed conversation with my mom to the taste of hot strong coffee, with two Sweet’n Lows and a glug of cream.
But there was a price to pay for my new mental acuity, too. Even as I learned to take satisfaction from catching up on the news and taking out the garbage before it started to stink, I began to comprehend the enormity of the wreckage I’d created. I looked at my medical bills and wondered, How can I possibly deal with this sober? I started to resent the self-imposed rules that constrained my existence. I joined my friends after work for happy hour and pouted resentfully over my seltzer. I walked pa
st an endcap of two-buck Chuck at Trader Joe’s and reached reflexively for a bottle of sauvignon blanc before pulling my hand back sullenly, remembering: not for you anymore. I sat around on Friday nights and imagined all the fun everybody else was having out there without me, laughing over beers at the bars where I used to be the center of attention. I trudged to AA meetings at Cherry Hall, where they’d remind me: It’s just one day, one hour, one minute at a time. Pray, go to meetings, and don’t drink in between. Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink.
And then, over time, I started forgetting why I stopped. The memory of the last horrifying thing I’d done (nodding off at my desk; forcing Josh to drive me to the hospital for the false-alarm heart attack) began to fade, and I started to look around and think, I’m no different from everybody else. If anything, I was smarter, more accomplished, and more driven than most of the people around me. I thought nothing of working eighty-hour weeks if that’s what it took to meet my deadlines, and I’d never failed to do anything I set out to accomplish, from talking my way into my first job to talking my way out of dodgy situations. With startling alacrity, I stopped seeing all the reasons that I shouldn’t drink—reasons I’d found utterly compelling, like being told explicitly that I’d lose my job if I relapsed again—and started seeing all the reasons I should. I didn’t think about what it felt like to guzzle wine from a cardboard container in a bathroom stall and hope I didn’t just throw it all up again. I thought, instead, about how comforting it felt to clutch a glass of wine at parties, or to slug from a passed flask at a beach bonfire in December.
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