by Sarah Hepola
I began packing up my things and shipping them back to Texas in installments. I painted the walls of my apartment back to their original white. I binged on Marc Maron interviews, five or six in a row, which were like instructional tapes on how to talk to people. Maron had been sober for years. He was open about himself, and in return, his guests would open up about themselves. The discussions that unfolded were riveting, evidence that two people, anywhere, can find common ground. I liked reminding myself what an honest conversation sounded like.
That’s what I wanted. An honest conversation. Not one where my mouth turned into a geyser of random confessions—my bra fits funny, and I once boned that bartender—but a conversation in which those superficial details faded away and we dared to tell the truth about our own suffering. This was the closeness I had always been drinking toward. I drank for other reasons, so many other reasons, but closeness was the richest reward. The part where we locked in on each other, and one person sifted out the contradictions of who they were and how they got there, and the other person just… listened.
I’m not sure when I stopped listening. Somehow it became my duty to entertain the masses. To be always on. I stopped being someone who talked with their friends and I started talking at them. Amusing anecdotes, rants deployed on cue. I wasn’t the only one. We were all out there on our social media stages with clever quips and jazz hands. This was not a cultural moment that rewarded quiet contemplation. A colleague once described our media job like this: “News happened. Are you pro or con?” Not “News happened—and should we discuss it?” But pick a side. She who judges first wins the Google searches.
Heavy drinkers are also dreadful listeners, because they are consumed with their next fix. They nod, and smile, but an inquisition is unfolding inside. How much booze is left? Would anyone care if I got another round? What time does the liquor store close?
I was trying to stay quiet for a while. Watching, reading, observing. I forgot what an introvert I could be. I had drowned that shy little girl in so many 12-packs that whenever she emerged, nervous and twitching, I was nearly choked with shame. But long before I became an attention hog who yelled about orgasms, I was a child terrified the teacher would call on me, and I needed to accept both extremes in myself so I might find some middle ground. “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Joan Didion wrote. “Otherwise they turn up unannounced.”
A week before I moved back to Texas, Stephanie and I had dinner. I hadn’t seen her much. She’d spent most of the year in Los Angeles, where her husband was filming a television show and where she was auditioning for roles she didn’t get, and didn’t tell me about, because it was easier that way.
She asked me how I’d been, and I said scared. I asked how she’d been, and she said lonely.
After dinner, we walked through the quaint West Village streets where I came each weekend to shake loose my solitude. She’d had a few hard years, and I hadn’t even noticed it. How is it possible to be good friends with a person and miss so much? But Stephanie had such early career success that, in my mind, it could only continue. Yes, being an actress over 35 was rough, and yes, rejection sucked, but she was Stephanie. My forever dream girl. Everything always worked out for her.
If you scratch the surface on anyone’s life, you find ache and pain. I don’t care who they are. They can be the Queen of England. (Especially if they are the Queen of England.) I’d been so busy envying Stephanie, trying to compete with her glow, that I stopped seeing her. I didn’t notice the times she reached out for me. “I need you back,” she once told me after too many saketinis, and I thought: Wait. Where the hell did I go?
More than a year had passed since that night. After dinner, I brought her to the bench looking out across the water to New Jersey, and she sat beside me, and we didn’t say much.
“I could not have made it in this city without you,” I said. She waved my words away before the tears had any chance. Stephanie doesn’t like these speeches. “Stop it. We’ll be just as close,” she said, and she was right.
The next week, a year to the day I got sober, I moved back to Dallas, the city where Stephanie and I once sat in a chain restaurant, promising each other we would escape to New York.
I found a crooked little carriage house, with leafy trees all around, where I made French press coffee, just like Stephanie made when I first visited her in New York. I hung the Japanese robe I first saw her wear, and I bought aviator sunglasses like the ones she had. And I smiled at all the many ways she has shown me what I hope to be in this world.
RIGHT BEFORE MOVING, I sent out an “I’m coming back!” email to my friends in Dallas. The premise was to ask if anyone had housing tips, but the real intent was to drum up enthusiasm about my return. I waited for the exclamation marks and all-caps emails to fill my in-box. A handful of people responded. Otherwise, I was greeted by the sound of wind whistling through an empty canyon.
“It’s not like I expected a parade,” I told my mom, which was another way of saying: I was totally expecting a parade, and this blows.
I worried I had screwed up by choosing to return to Dallas. I always figured I’d wind up in Austin, weird and wacky Austin, except every time I visited that town I had a nagging suspicion too many people loved it, and every time I visited Dallas, I had a nagging feeling not enough did.
Dallas had evolved from the place I grew up. More walkable areas and cool coffee shops, fewer cement slabs and soulless redevelopment. I think some part of me wanted to reckon with my past. I grew up in Dallas, so embarrassed for the person I was. Maybe I needed to assure that little girl: Hey, kid, this place isn’t so bad.
I also longed to be close to my family again. My parents had moved out of the ritzy school district and bought a modest and lovely house near the lake, with my mother’s grand piano in the bay window and a backyard filled with shade trees and a handsome dog that didn’t obey. A wisteria vine grew outside the guest bedroom window. My favorite flower, planted where any weary visitor might see it each morning. My brother had moved back to Dallas after living all over the globe—London, Italy, Iraq—and he launched a full-scale campaign to get me home. He whipped out his wallet: What will it take to get you back?
Most of us need to push away from our families at some point, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting them close again. Many people choose alternate families in sobriety. I chose my real one instead.
WHEN I LIVED in Dallas in my late 20s, my ass was hot-glued to a bar stool. The thing I knew best about my hometown was the drink specials. Now I faced a question that would greet me in any city in the country: What did people do, anyway?
On Friday nights, I loaded up on craft projects. Needlepoint. A latch-hook rug of a tabby. A cross-stitch of the cast from The Breakfast Club. I was one butter sculpture shy of a state fair submission, and I didn’t care. My hands needed occupation. I needed to do something—instead of sitting around, thinking about the one thing I didn’t get.
When you quit drinking, you are sandbagged by the way alcohol is threaded into our social structure. Drinking is the center of weddings, holidays, birthdays, office parties, funerals, lavish trips to exotic locales. But drinking is also the center of everyday life. “Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.
My old Dallas gang was a group of salty male colleagues who gathered at the bar after work. Not a bar, mind you, but the bar. “The bar” was a complete sentence. It was both a question and a command. (The bar? The bar. The bar!) I had missed those guys, and I flattered myself they might miss me, too.
“I’d love to hang out sometime,” I emailed one of the guys.
“Totally,” he responded. “You know where to find us.”
Well, shit. I suppose it was
wrong to be hurt by this indifference to the script I’d written in my mind—the one where he and I went to lunch and talked about real things that mattered.
Once upon a time, we’d gathered around that long wooden table and gulped down whatever was being served. We laughed and drank while the sun sank in the sky, and I got a high being the lone female in the foamy man cave. Those guys were all married, but that didn’t matter (to me, at least), and I never quite knew whether we were flirting, or not flirting, and I told myself both stories, as suited my needs.
I wondered if I threatened them now that I was sober. The first person to stop drinking in any group can cast a pall—like the first couple to get divorced, or the first person to lose a parent. I also wondered if they threatened me now. I watched their Facebook feeds a bit too carefully, judging them for every babbling 2 am status update, every picture of a whiskey glass hoisted into the lens. How dare they stay on Pleasure Island after I had moved away. I wondered: How long could they possibly keep this up? One of them had just won the National Magazine award for profile writing, so apparently the answer was: As long as they wanted.
It took a long time to accept that other people’s drinking was not my business. It took a long time to admit I’m the one who left the bar, not the other way around. You can’t move away for six years and come home to find all the furniture in the same place. Those guys had different lives now. New kids, new jobs. Two of them were divorced and dating 25-year-olds, which must have taken up a great deal of texting time.
Sobriety has a way of sorting out your friendships. They begin to fall into two categories: people you feel comfortable being yourself with—and everyone else.
Allison was in the former category. We had met years ago on a garden patio in Brooklyn, where we got drunk and declared ourselves great friends. But months went by between visits. Some friendships are like that. They lack an escape velocity.
She lived in Dallas now, and we met one night at a Mexican restaurant. She didn’t drink much anymore, a quality I was starting to value in a person. She also looked looser, freer than the striving girl I’d met in New York.
“I love it here,” she said, and I kept waiting for her to circle back and revise that statement. Tell me the real truth. But that was the real truth. She was happy.
“When was the last time we saw each other?” I asked her as we scanned the menu. And then I smacked the table like it was a buzzer. “I know. Your thirty-sixth birthday party.”
“You’re right!” she said. “Oh my God. Do you remember that night?”
Dammit. How many more times was I going to get torpedoed by this question? It’s like I needed a fill-in-the-blank letter of apology.
Dear ___________, I’m so sorry I ___________ all those years ago. You must have felt very ___________ when I ___________. I drank too much ___________ that night, and was not in my right mind.
“Actually, I don’t,” I said.
“You fell down my staircase,” she said.
I covered my face with my hands and peeked at her through the slats of my fingers. “Yeah, I used to do that.”
“My stairs were marble,” she said. “It was terrifying. Honestly, I’d never seen anything like it. You don’t remember this at all?”
No, but I remembered how I woke up the next morning, and I thought: How did that awesome party end? Maybe I should send Allison a text. “Had a great time last night! The part I can remember was amazing!”
But I didn’t send anything like that. In fact, I stopped talking to Allison for two years.
The psychology of the blackout drinker is one of dodge and denial. Things you can’t remember become epic in your mind. Five minutes of unremembered conversation can be a shame you carry through the rest of your life. Or it can be shrugged off entirely. I did both, and the problem was that you ended up cutting people out without even knowing why. You got a hunch that something bad happened, so—snip, snip. Easier that way.
“I thought you hated me,” Allison said, and I was confused. Why would I hate her?
She wasn’t entirely off base, though. Not that I hated her, but I avoided her, the same way I avoided every pesky truth that threatened my good times in those days. I spent so much time spinning imaginary stories in my own mind—what might have happened, how I needed to repair it—and very little time finding out what I had done.
Over the next years, I would have more honest conversations like this, in which patient friends with understanding faces filled in parts of my story I didn’t recall. No, you didn’t do anything weird that night. Or yes, you were a disaster. Whatever the revelation, it was never as painful as the years of worry that lead up to it. Usually, we ended those discussions much closer.
That’s what happened with Allison and me. When we said good-bye that night, we talked about getting together the next week. And this time, we followed through.
MY CHILDHOOD BEST friend Jennifer got sober one year after I did. This shocked me. I never thought she had a drinking problem. But when I looked back on the nights we spent together in our late 20s and early 30s, the signs were there. Chronic unhappiness. Chaotic life. Mysterious fender benders.
She used to carry a picture of her husband in her car, back before they got married, and she would stare at his face before walking into any party. She had a problem with drunken flirtation and needed to remind herself: This is the man you love. Don’t mess it up. But after building this tiny obstacle of resistance, she’d walk into the party and wash it away again.
After having two kids, she became one of those moms who kept a bottle of red wine forever handy. The minivan was not going to change her. Her party plan worked for a while, but then the wheels started coming off. Her blackouts became so frequent that when she was drinking, she would only communicate via text, so she could have an evidence trail of her decisions.
She and I had always been control freaks. Yet we both drank to the point of losing control. It sounds contradictory, but it makes total sense. The demands of perfectionism are exhausting, and it’s hard to live with a tyrant. Especially the one in your own mind.
So she quit drinking, and we found ourselves, once again, two lonely members of an outsider tribe. We began taking long walks around the lake, sharing all the stories we had not told in the years of superficial catch-up. We stayed up talking at her house, and some nights it was like we were 13 years old again, laughing so hard we almost peed, except instead of her mom telling us to keep it down we were interrupted by her daughter, dragging a fuzzy blanket. “I can’t sleep,” she would say, finger in mouth, and she would hop up into her mother’s lap, one last stint in the world’s safest place.
Talking was the glue of our world, never drinking. We were good talkers. Our conversations were so natural, so obvious. She would talk, and then I would talk, and then somehow, through this simple back-and-forth, we could start to hear the sound of our own voices.
NINE
BINGE
One afternoon, I got an urge to pull into the drive-through at Jack in the Box. Do I like Jack in the Box? Not particularly. But the urge snagged me, and before I could unsnag myself, I was on the conveyor belt that led to the drive-through’s metal box, where I ordered my carb explosion. What I noticed—as I idled there with a queasy feeling like I was getting away with something—was that absolutely no one was going to stop me. The bored teenager wearing a headset did not ask “Are you sure about this, ma’am?” The woman who swiped my credit card did not raise an eyebrow, because she had seen so much worse. There were precious few barricades between my stupid, fleeting impulse and the moment I sat on the floor of my living room with ketchup covering my fingers and chin.
“I just ate an Ultimate Cheeseburger,” I told my friend Mary. She lived around the corner from me, and she had been a champion binge eater most of her life.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Did you get the curly fries, too?”
“I can’t believe you even asked that.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie.
Of course you did.”
When addiction lives in you, it sprouts many vines. For the first year after I quit drinking, I refused to worry about food. I would do whatever it took to give up alcohol, which included a typical dependency swap: Trade booze for smokes. Or trade smokes for Double Stuf Oreos. Or Nutella. Or Double Stuf Oreos with Nutella.
A year and a half of drinking nothing should’ve made me proud. But a year and a half of eating everything in my path had left me defeated and ashamed.
“I think I need to go on a diet,” I told Mary, lobbing the words into the air before I could snatch them back. Diet: the toxic buzzword of body dysmorphia. Diet: those things destined to fail.
In the old days, a heroine in search of happiness lost weight and found a prince. But current wisdom dictates a heroine in search of happiness should ditch the prince, skip the diet—and gain acceptance. Stop changing yourself to please the world and start finding happiness within. That’s a good message, given all the ways women are knocked around by the beauty-industrial complex.
But my problem wasn’t a deficit of acceptance. It was too much. I drank however I wanted, and I accepted the nights that slipped away from me. I ate however I wanted, and I accepted my body was a home I’d never want to claim as my own. Sitting on that linoleum floor, surrounded by empty foil wrappers and my own disgust, I wondered if I could use a little less acceptance around here. Or, to be more precise: Acceptance was only half the equation. The other half was determining what was unacceptable—and changing that.
I DON’T KNOW when I stopped taking care of myself. In college, Anna used to foist vegetables on me, which was exactly what my mother used to do when I was a child. They were both healthy eaters, who saw beauty in nature’s bounty, and I was a hedonist who liked slapping away her broccoli. I had the tastes of a frat boy, or a grumpy toddler. No to vegetables. Yes to ranch dressing. I actually described the food I liked as “nothing healthy.”