Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

by Sarah Hepola

  I was a college kid. I loved beer, and I loved the sophisticated sting of red wine, and I loved the fine and fiery stupor of bourbon, and sometimes I got so wasted that I poured those drinks on my head while performing songs from A Chorus Line in some twilight state I could not recall, and in the scope of the universe and all its problems, was this really—really—such a big deal?

  I didn’t quit drinking that day. Of course I didn’t. But I left the clinic with the notion that alcohol was an escalating madness, and the blackout issue was the juncture separating two kinds of drinking. One kind was a comet in your veins. The other kind left you sunken and cratered, drained of all light.

  I figured if I stayed in the middle, in the gray area, I would be OK. Blacking out was bad, but it wasn’t that big of a deal, right? It’s not like I was the only person who ever forgot a night of drinking, right? And it’s not like it happened to me that often.

  At a party I threw a few months later, a friend danced in my living room in a giant fish costume. The next morning, as we stared at the shiny fabric in a heap on the floor, she said: Why is that costume there?

  I was flooded with gratitude. Not just me. Thank God.

  In my 20s, friends called with that hush in their voice to tell me they’d woken up beside some guy. They called after forgotten wedding receptions where the open bar had proven a little too open. Not just me. Thank God.

  In my early 30s, I used to have brunch with a sardonic guy who actually bragged about his blackouts. He called it “time travel,” which sounded so nifty, like a supernatural power. He wasn’t drinking too many Long Island iced teas; he was punching a hole in the space-time continuum.

  I was laughing about my blackouts by then, too. I used to joke I was creating a show called CSI: Hangover, because I would be forced to dig around the apartment like a crime scene investigator, rooting through receipts and other detritus to build a plausible theory of the night’s events. I imagined myself crouched by the bed, wearing those blue plastic gloves and picking up each questionable item with long tweezers. This crumpled wrapper suggests our victim was hungry, I would say, holding the foil in the light and then giving it a long whiff. And this has the unmistakable smell of a Beef Meximelt.

  It’s weird how a woman frightened by her own blackouts becomes a woman who shrugs them off like an unpaid cable bill. But any heavy drinker understands the constant redistricting and gerrymandering of what constitutes an actual “problem.” I’d come to think of blackouts as a surcharge for the grand spectacle of drinking. There was something deliciously chaotic about tossing your night up into the air and finding out the next morning what happened. Haven’t you seen The Hangover?

  But there’s a certain point when you fall down the staircase, and you look around, and no one is amused anymore. By 35, I was in that precarious place where I knew I drank too much, but I believed I could manage it somehow. I was seeing a therapist, and when I talked to her about my blackouts, she gasped. I bristled at her concern. Her tone was alarmist, like the pamphlet I’d once read, but a trip to any keg party would illustrate that if blackouts doomed a person to alcoholism, then most of us were doomed.

  “Everyone has blackouts,” I told her.

  She locked eyes with me. “No, they don’t.”

  FOR MANY YEARS, I was confounded by my blackouts, but the mechanics are quite simple. The blood reaches a certain alcohol saturation point and shuts down the hippocampus. Such a peculiar word, hippocampus, like a children’s book character. I imagine a beast with a twitching snout and big, flapping eyelashes. But it’s actually the part of the brain responsible for making long-term memories. You drink enough, and the beast stops twitching. Shutdown. No more memories.

  Your short-term memory still works, but short-term memory lasts less than two minutes, which explains why wasted people can follow a conversation from point to point, but they will repeat themselves after some time has passed, what a friend of mine calls “getting caught in the drunkard’s loop.” The tendency to repeat what you just said is a classic sign of a blackout, although there are others. “Your eyes go dead, like a zombie,” a boyfriend once told me. “It’s like you’re not there at all.” People in a blackout often get a vacant, glazed-over look, as though their brain is unplugged. And, well, it kind of is.

  Although some people learned to detect my blackouts, most could not. Blackouts are sneaky like that. They vary from person to person, and from night to night, the same way one drunk might put a lampshade on her head while another might sit quietly and stare into the middle distance. There’s no red indicator light to alert your audience when the brain is off-line.

  And people in a blackout can be surprisingly functional. This is a point worth underscoring, since the most common misperception about blacking out is confusing it with passing out, losing consciousness after too much booze. But in a blackout, a person is anything but silent and immobile. You can talk and laugh and charm people at the bar with funny stories of your past. You can sing the shit out of “Little Red Corvette” on a karaoke stage. You can run your greedy hands over a man whose name you never asked. The next day, your brain will have no imprint of these activities, almost as if they didn’t happen. Once memories are lost in a blackout, they can’t be coaxed back. Simple logic: Information that wasn’t stored cannot be retrieved.

  Some blackouts are worse than others, though. The less severe and more common form is a fragmentary blackout, or “brownout,” which is like a light flickering on and off in the brain. Perhaps you remember ordering your drink, but not walking to the bar. Perhaps you remember kissing that guy, but not who made the first move.

  Then there are en bloc blackouts, in which memory is totally disabled. En bloc blackouts were a specialty of mine. The light goes out and does not return for hours sometimes. I usually woke up from those blackouts on the safe shores of the next morning. The only exception was the night in Paris, when I zapped back to the world in that hotel room. I didn’t even know that could happen, one of the many reasons the night stayed with me so long.

  We may understand the basics of a blackout, but we still don’t understand the nuances and complications. Is there any territory more vast and unknowable than the human mind? Ask anyone who’s lost a parent to dementia or watched a spouse suffer a brain injury. What we remember, and how and why: This is a complex puzzle best explained by people in lab coats and not a girl who used to drink so much Dos Equis she would dip raw hot dogs in guacamole and shove them in her mouth.

  One of the people in lab coats is Aaron White, a leading expert on blackouts. White is the program director for college drinking research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and he dispelled some of my own confusion about blackouts. I always thought my blackouts were caused by specific types of liquors. (Brown liquor, in particular.) According to White, brown liquor doesn’t cause blackouts any more than clear liquor does. It’s not the type of drink you put to your lips, it’s the amount of alcohol in the blood and how quickly you get to that level. Fragmentary blackouts start at a blood-alcohol content around .20, while en bloc blackouts start around .30.

  White is accustomed to people’s ignorance about blackouts, because ours is a drinking culture disconnected from the dangers of alcohol. “If they were selling some drug at the gas station that shut down areas of your brain so that you were functioning with amnesia, we wouldn’t have it,” White says.

  Katy Perry had a hit song about a blackout in 2011. “It was a blacked-out blur,” she sang, “and I’m pretty sure it ruled.” But White sees blackouts another way. From a clinical perspective, he explains, a blackout is like early Alzheimer’s.

  The more I learned about blackouts, the more I wondered why I’d read so little about them. I’ve read magazine articles dissecting some drug of the moment—how ecstasy or meth or heroin hijacks the brain. I’ve read click-bait stories on what new drugs your teens might be using. Mothballs, bath salts. I’ve seen scare segments on roofies, like the one I saw on th
at talk show. And yet I’ve never read a major article or seen a television program discussing blackouts. It’s a menace hiding in plain sight.

  I discussed roofies with Aaron White. Roofies aren’t a myth, he said, but studies suggest the fear outpaces the incidence. Turns out, “being roofied” often doesn’t involve roofies at all. People just don’t realize how common it is to experience a blackout. And alcohol can have troubling interactions with prescription meds. Rohypnol is in the benzodiazepine family, often prescribed for anxiety and sleep disorders. Ativan, Xanax, Lunesta—some of the most popular meds on the market—can all create an amnesiac effect when combined with booze.

  My therapist was correct. Not everyone has blackouts. The majority of people will never have one in their lifetime. But blackouts are not rare in drinking circles. In fact, they’re common. A 2002 study published in the Journal of American College Health found that among drinkers at Duke University, more than half had experienced blackouts.

  I was particularly at risk, even though I didn’t realize it. Blackout drinkers tend to be the ones who hold their liquor. If you bolt to the toilet after your third cosmo, or start snoring after your second margarita, you won’t build up enough booze in your bloodstream to shut the machine down. I was so proud of the way I could knock ’em back. I drank fast, and I drank a lot. I was a beer-bingeing Annie Oakley slinging her empties into the trash and popping off the next bottle cap with a sly smile. Wanna watch me go again, boys?

  I’m also five foot two. I need a step stool to reach some ceiling fan pulls, and yet I matched a six-foot-three boyfriend drink for drink. I also made genius decisions like skipping my dinner, trying to cut calories, because I was always scheming my way back to the size 4 dresses that hung in the back of my closet, like arrowheads from an ancient civilization.

  Behold the risk factors for blacking out: a genetic predisposition to holding your liquor, drinking fast, and skipping meals. Oh, and one more: being female.

  For a long time, blackouts were thought to be a guy thing. Of course, for a long time, drinking problems were thought to be a guy thing. But researchers now understand that women are more susceptible to blackouts than men. Alcohol metabolizes in our systems differently. Our bodies are smaller. Hormones can affect how quickly we get drunk. It’s pure biology. Nature, as it turns out, insists on a few double standards.

  The stories that men and women tell about their blackouts are different, too. All that alcohol can strip us down to our base drives. Our snarling, animal selves. I’ve heard countless tales of men waking up to find their faces bruised, their knuckles bloodied by some fit of unremembered violence.

  The stories women tell are scary in another way. As Aaron White says, “When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them.”

  I heard a saying once about drunks. Men wake up in jail cells, and women wake up in strangers’ beds. It’s not like that for everybody. But it was like that for me.

  IT WAS SPRING 2010 when I heard the term “rape culture.” I was 35, and editing a story for an online magazine, and strapped to my desk all the time, because I had to be.

  “I honestly don’t understand what this word means,” I wrote to the author, in the blunt and slightly irritated language of a frazzled editor. The feminist blogosphere where she was a leading voice could get jargony, and I took a grammar snoot’s delight in reminding writers their first duty was clarity.

  “I bristled at the term at first, too,” she responded, and sent me a link to a story called “Rape Culture 101.” My eyes scanned a long list of ways that male sexual aggression was favored over women’s safety, from movies that glamorize violent sex to the act of blaming a victim’s behavior for her own rape.

  It was one of those moments when I felt adrift from the feminist conversation. I’d only recently started calling myself a feminist. Writers at the magazine urged me to look past the baggage and the bickering around the term and address its core meaning: a belief that both sexes deserve equal opportunity and equal treatment. Back in high school, I’d been obsessed with the civil rights movement. My notebooks were emblazoned with Martin Luther King quotes. But it had never occurred to me to fight for my own gender. Maybe fishes don’t know they’re in a fishbowl, or maybe it’s easier to identify another kid’s short stick than to see the one you are holding.

  Anyway, “rape culture” didn’t track for me. Here I was, an editor at a magazine, run by a woman, working almost exclusively with female writers who wrote voluminously about female topics, and yet, we were being straitjacketed by a “rape culture”? I figured the term would sink back into the quiet halls of academic doublespeak. It spread like mad instead.

  Over the next years, “rape culture” became one of the central issues around which smart, young women rallied online. And because this corner of the Internet was my neighborhood, the clamoring grew quite loud. A quick scan of personal essay pitches I received during this time: confronting my rapist; the rape I never reported; why won’t my college students stop writing about their rapes?

  In 2011, I watched the media coverage of “SlutWalks,” a more provocative version of the old “Take Back the Night” candlelit vigils in which solemnness had been replaced by rage and a kind of punk aesthetic. Torn fishnets and f-bombs. The catalyst had been a police officer in Toronto suggesting that to avoid rape, women “should stop dressing like sluts.” The response was a roar. We can dress however the fuck we want.

  I marveled at their conviction. I mean, SlutWalks. How unambiguous is that? The organizers had clearly learned the lessons of social media and search engines, where language must have thrust. The participants were my kind of women—strong women, defiant women—though I felt a queasy mix of envy and alienation when I watched them. Maybe I missed the tigress growl of my own college years. Or maybe it’s the curse of every generation to look at those behind them and wonder how they got so free.

  The more I read about “rape culture,” the more sense it made. Rape culture was a mind-set: the default view that a woman existed for a man’s pleasure, that his desires somehow superseded her comfort in the world. I began to see it more and more. The construction workers at the Marcy stop on the JMZ train, who told me they wanted to titty-fuck me. That was rape culture. The guy on the subway who took a creepshot of my cleavage on his phone, making nausea spill over my insides. That was rape culture.

  This younger generation seemed to understand—with a clarity I never possessed—that they didn’t have to tolerate so much bullshit in the world. And I felt a little foolish, and a little complicit, that I spent so many years accepting this barbed wire as the way things are only to watch those women barreling into it, middle fingers raised.

  By 2014, the term “rape culture” had made its way to Time magazine, which ran a cover story on campus sexual assault illustrated by a university sports banner emblazoned with the words “rape.” Meanwhile, another media narrative was unfolding, this one about women and alcohol. CNN: “Why are more women drinking?” USA Today: “Binge drinking is a serious problem for women, girls.”

  To publicly connect these two narratives was to waltz into a very loaded minefield. Every once in a while, a columnist would come along and suggest women should drink less to avoid sexual assault. They contended if women didn’t drink as much, they wouldn’t be so vulnerable to danger. And those columnists were disemboweled upon arrival into the gladiator arena of public discourse. The response was a roar. We can drink however the fuck we want.

  I understood the pushback. For way too long, women had been told how to behave. Women were sick of altering their behavior to please, to protect, to safeguard—while men peed their names across history. The new motto became “Don’t tell us how to act, teach men not to rape.” The entire conversation offered a needed corrective. Women are never to be blamed for getting raped. Women are never “asking for it” because of the way they dress or what they do.

  And we women can drink however th
e fuck we want. I certainly did, and I’m not interested in taking away anyone’s whiskey sour. But reading these salvos from entrenched battlegrounds made me feel kind of alone. In my life, alcohol often made the issue of consent very murky. More like an ink spill and nothing close to a clear line.

  I knew why the women writing on these issues didn’t want to acknowledge gray zones; gray zones were what the other side pounced on to gain ground. But I kept longing for a secret conversation, away from the pitchforks of the Internet, about how hard it was to match the clarity of political talking points to the complexity of life lived at last call.

  Activism may defy nuance, but sex demands it. Sex was a complicated bargain to me. It was chase, and it was hunt. It was hide-and-seek, clash and surrender, and the pendulum could swing inside my brain all night: I will, no I won’t; I should, no I can’t.

  I drank to drown those voices, because I wanted the bravado of a sexually liberated woman. I wanted the same freedom from internal conflict my male friends seemed to enjoy. So I drank myself to a place where I didn’t care, but I woke up a person who cared enormously. Many yeses on Friday nights would have been nos on Saturday morning. My consent battle was in me.

  I HAD WANTED alcohol to make me fearless. But by the time I’d reached my mid-30s, I was scared all the time. Afraid of what I’d said and done in blackouts. Afraid I would have to stop. Afraid of a life without alcohol, because booze had been my trustiest tool.

  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. My mind could cobble together a thousand PowerPoint presentations to keep me seated on a bar stool. But when the lights were off, and I lay very quietly in my bed, I knew: There was something fundamentally wrong about losing the narrative of my own life.