by Sarah Hepola
“I’ll probably be back one day,” I told my friend, but I’m not sure I meant it, because ten years almost did pass, and then I was like: Screw that.
Screw that. For years, this was my attitude toward AA, the place that reached out its hand to me when I was on my knees. But becoming a professional drunk demands you distance yourself from the girl in the foldout chair who was once soul sick and shivering. I never spoke ill of AA after I left. But I could only recommend the solution to someone else. Like telling my friend to cut out dairy while shoving a fistful of cheddar cheese in my mouth.
During that next decade of drinking, I gravitated toward any book or magazine article about a person who drank too much. Nothing pleased me like tales of decadence. I read Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story three times, with tears dripping down my cheeks and a glass of white wine in my hand. White wine was Knapp’s nectar of choice, which she described with such eloquence I needed to join her, and I would think, “Yes, yes, she gets it.” Then she quit and joined AA, and it was like: Come on. Isn’t there another way?
Another way. I know there is now, because I have heard so many stories. People who quit on their own. People who find other solutions. I needed to try that, too. I needed to exhaust other possibilities—health regimens, moderation management, the self-help of David Foster Wallace and my Netflix queue—because I needed to be thoroughly convinced I could not do this on my own.
By the way, the guy who got me into AA started drinking again not long after I did. He got married and had a kid. His mid-20s revelry didn’t drag into his middle age, which sometimes happens. If you look at the demographics, drinking falls off a cliff after people have children. They can’t keep up. “You wanna curb your drinking?” a female friend asked. “Have a baby.”
I held on to those words into my mid-30s. I knew some speed bump of circumstance would come along and force me to change. I would get married, and then I would quit. I would have a baby, and then I would quit. But every opportunity to alter my habits—every challenging job, every financial squeeze—became a reason to drink more, not less. And I knew parenthood didn’t stop everyone. The drinking migrated. From bars into living rooms, bathrooms, an empty garage. The drinking was crammed into the hours between a child going down to bed and a mother passing out. I was starting to suspect kids wouldn’t stop me. Nothing had.
And I was so pissed about that. It wasn’t fair that my once-alcoholic friend could reboot his life to include the occasional Miller Lite while he cooked on the grill, and I had broken blood vessels around my eyes from vomiting in the morning. It wasn’t fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan’s pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer. The cri de coeur of sheltered children everywhere: It isn’t fair! (Interestingly, I never cursed the world’s unfairness back when I was talking my way out of another ticket. People on the winning team rarely notice the game is rigged.)
Three weeks into this sobriety, though, I finally went back to the meetings. I found one near my West Village apartment where they dimmed the lights, and I resumed my old posture: arms crossed, sneer on my face. I went to get my mother off my back. I went to check some box on an invisible list of Things You Must Do. I went to prove to everyone what I strongly suspected: AA would not work for me.
Please understand. I knew AA worked miracles. What nobody ever tells you is that miracles can be very, very uncomfortable.
WORK WAS A respite during that first month, although that’s like saying being slapped is a respite from being punched. What I mean is I didn’t obsess about alcohol when I was at my job. I didn’t tell anyone I’d quit, either, probably for the same reason pregnant women wait three months before announcing their baby. Nobody wants to walk that shit back.
Our office in Midtown became a demilitarized zone for me. What was I going to do, drink at my desk? There was nothing festive about that place. In the depth of the recession, we had moved from an airy loft with brushed-steel fixtures to a bleak cubicle farm with gray carpets and dirty windows. A tube sock sagged the end of an aluminum slat on the Venetian blinds, a bizarre artifact from the previous tenants, and we were all so demoralized and overloaded that it was months before anyone thought to simply reach out and pull the thing down.
The work kept my hyperactive brain buckled in for a spell, though. A friend described her editing job as being pelted to death by pebbles, and when I think back to that summer, all I see are rocks flying at my face—contributors whose checks were late, writers growing antsy for edits. I spent half of the workday combing ridiculous stock pictures to illustrate stories. Woman with head in her hands. Woman staring out rainy window. Woman tearing out hair. A montage of the personal essays I was running, and also my life.
Around noon, I’d reach out to my deputy editor Thomas. “Lunch?” I’d type.
He’d type back, “Give me a sec.”
“This is bullshit,” I’d type with mock impatience. “You are so fucking fired right now. FUCKING FIRED, DO YOU HEAR ME?”
“Ready,” he’d type back.
We’d walk to a chain restaurant in the ground floor of the Empire State Building, where I ate a burrito as big as a football, and Thomas calmly explained to me why I was not going to quit my job that day.
Sober folk have a phrase for people who quit drinking and float about with happiness. In the pink cloud. I was the opposite of that. I was in a black cloud. A storm cloud. Each day brought new misery into focus. New York: When did it get so unbearable? People: Why do they suck so bad? Sometimes, when I was riding the subway, I would think about burying a hatchet in a stranger’s skull. Nothing personal, but: What would it feel like? Would their head sink in like a pumpkin, or would I have to really yawp and swing the hatchet to get it in?
I was not great company, and so I retreated into my apartment. I turned down dinner parties. I excused myself from work events. I listened to podcast interviews, the texture of conversation without the emotional risk. The voices of Terry Gross and Marc Maron filled my apartment so often my neighbors must have thought they were my best friends. And I guess, during those lonely months, they were.
I visited my chic, unsmiling hairstylist in Greenpoint to get my hair done. Nothing like an old-fashioned makeover to turn that grumpy black rain cloud to blue skies. I sat down in her vinyl swivel chair, across from a giant full-length mirror, and was startled by my own reflection: dumpy and sweaty, my chunky thighs spread even wider by the seat. I looked so buried. And as she snipped and measured around my shoulders, all I could think was: I want to rip off my own face.
When she was done, she handed me a mirror to see myself from multiple angles. “It looks amazing,” I told her. I wanted to die.
No, I did not want to die. I wanted to fast-forward through this dull segment. I want to skip to the part when I was no longer broken and busted up. Was that day coming? Could we skip this part and get there soon? I’d spent years losing time, nights gone in a finger snap, but now I found myself with way too much time. I needed to catapult into a sunnier future, or I needed to slink back to a familiar past, but what I could not bear was the slow and aching present. Much of my life has been this way. A complete inability to tolerate the moment.
But the moments were adding up. Day 32. Day 35. Day 41.
One small gift was that I did not crave cigarettes. I detested the smell, and even the thought of smoking made me nauseated. It made no sense. I smoked for more than two decades, sometimes two packs a night, but without the booze in my system to build up the nicotine craving, I couldn’t have cared less. And yet I would have clawed up the walls to get a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. In case anyone needed a reminder that addiction is complex and variable, there it is. What we long for, what our bodies crave, is as individual as the whorls of our thumb.
I was reminded of this in the AA rooms. One day this guy said, “I just can’t believe I’ll never do blow off a hooker’s ass again.” He wasn’t being funny. His face
was in total despair. I felt terrible for that guy, because it was the same heartbreak I experienced every time I passed a craft cocktail bar or read about the local-beer renaissance. Paradise lost, motherfucker.
Each Sunday evening, I walked out to the Hudson River, and I sat on whatever bench was unoccupied by families or nuzzling couples, and I stared across the glistening water at New Jersey. This was crazy to me—a whole other state visible from where I sat—and I tried to imagine what came after the fast-forward. My future fantasies were not unique. The boyfriend with brown eyes and shaggy hair, the writing award, the lather of love and admiration. But what occurred to me as I sat on the bench was that the fantasies all had one thing in common. I was someone else in them.
What a poignant commentary on my own self-worth—I recast myself in my own daydreams. I wondered what it would take to change this. If I could ever collapse the space between my imaginary self and the human being sitting on the bench. Was it even possible? Because you can be a lot of things in this world, but you can never be another person. That’s the deal. You’re stuck with yourself.
I STARTED GOING to a meeting in my neighborhood every morning at 7:30. That was a dicey hour for the girl who struggled to get to work at 10 am, but it was a good alternative to hiding in the closet. I liked the location of that meeting, which was a big airy room inside a pretty church, with a chandelier and a door in back that opened onto a leafy courtyard. I got there at exactly 7:30 am to avoid itchy small talk. Otherwise, people would descend on me in the coffee room, and they would say things like, “How are you doing today?” and it was like: Jesus, stop prying.
The meetings weren’t bad. I liked listening to stories about people’s last gasps. Overdoses, alcohol poisoning, swerving down roads in a blackout. There were riveting narratives, but it was also astonishing what the human body could endure. And I couldn’t believe how articulate people were. As I listened to them share some epic tragedy or riff on some philosophical point, I wondered: Where is this speech coming from? Are they reading from a teleprompter?
I struggled to string words together. I always assumed people who quit drinking snap into shape. But often they fall apart, which was certainly what happened to me. I was experiencing classic signs of withdrawal. The hammering heart, the slow response time, the sensation of moving underwater. But I didn’t understand it at the time. I just knew I felt sluggish and stupid. I wanted to be strong and forceful again.
On the 15-minute walk to the church each morning, I started scripting out what I was going to say in the meeting. I wanted people to know I was intelligent and well spoken like they were; I didn’t want to remain silent and unknowable. I buffed and polished my revelations, rehearsing them in my mind: I used to think drinking made me more interesting, but then I realized it made other people more interesting. I liked to insert a twist when I shared, a surprise ending of sorts. Personal essays work on this principle of inverted expectations. A writer friend described the arc like this: Let me tell you why it’s all their fault. Now let me tell you why it’s really mine.
I took my seat in that pretty room, and I spent the first 30 minutes practicing my script and the second 30 minutes scouring the room for my next boyfriend. You’re not supposed to do this, but I did it anyway. Fuck you, I was there at 7:30 am, and I could do whatever I wanted. I had been single for nearly three years—the better part of a presidential term. I’d never been around so many lonely, haunted men in broad daylight. Any halfway decent one was a candidate for my future spouse. I listened to the guys share their inner turmoil, and I leaned toward them in my seat, already coming to terms with their deficiencies. I could date a bald man. Forty-five isn’t that old. But then he would gesture to show the glint of a wedding ring or mention the girlfriend back home, and I’d sink back into my chair, defeated.
One morning, a guy I’d never seen before showed up to tell his story. He was thin and lanky, with a five o’clock shadow, a leather jacket, and boots. He had acne scars on his face, like the bad guy in Grease, but he had the eloquence of a natural-born speaker. What struck me were not the details of his story but how he told it. He inhabited his own body. He never raised his voice, but he pulled me toward him with each word dropped into a room of anticipation. I stopped looking at the clock. The chaos in my brain was replaced by a tight spotlight containing nothing but him.
On the subway ride to work, I could not let go of that guy. I wondered how he felt about living on a farm in upstate New York. We could commute into the city during the week, spend weekends reading books in bed to each other with nothing in the background but the chirping outside. We should probably date first. There was a new upscale comfort food place I’d been meaning to try.
I realized I was moving fast, but I also knew—I knew—that I was destined to find a boyfriend in those rooms, and I was not saying it had to be this guy, but there were several qualities to recommend him. He was sober, for one thing. He did not have a wedding ring, for another. I could love a man with scars on his face. I would not be embarrassed by his leather jacket and his boots. And he probably didn’t even realize how verbally gifted he was. I had so much to teach him.
I promised myself I would talk to him should he ever come back. Really enjoyed your story. Wanted to chat with you more about that thing. A week later, he did come back. Like we were in a romantic comedy, he came back! And my heart did a triple lutz to find him across from me. The meeting that morning was a round-robin discussion, and he was at four o’clock and I was at 7, and when it was his turn, he offered the same effortless poetry I’d heard earlier. Except this time he talked about his boyfriend.
Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o’clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayon. I was still beating myself up when the round-robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face.
The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my days surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me?
“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “I was just reminded of something very painful.” And I guess that wasn’t a lie.
IN AUGUST, ALMOST 60 days after I stopped drinking, Anna went into labor back in Texas. This was the best news in ages. I kept my phone with me at all times, even taking it to the bathroom.
In our early 20s, Anna and I had a pact. If one of us got pregnant (and there were a few scares), we’d move in together and raise the kid. We’d both become mothers at once. I understood Anna had a different partner now, and I would not be required to throw my fate in with hers. But I still wanted to be available, because I had been unavailable for so long, dominating our phone conversations with my own self-pity.
I heard the double beep in the early afternoon, and the news popped up on my screen. Alice. Seven pounds. Healthy. And I typed back on my phone, “See? I knew it was a boy!”
During her pregnancy, Anna and I had a playful banter about the gender of her child, which she refused to find out beforehand, and I wanted to make her laugh. I’ve never been satisfied with being like other people, throwing yet another “congratulations!” on the pile.
But she didn’t respond. I kept checking the phone, waiting for the news of her laughter. After a few hours of not hearing back, though, I began to question my strategy. Maybe that joke wasn’t so funny. Maybe jokes were better suited for less momentous occasions, ones that didn’t involve IV drips and hospital beds and squalling newborns covered in goo. That evening, my phone did not beep. It did not beep many, many times.
The next day at work, I became so consumed by remorse I couldn’t concentrate. I dragged Thomas to lunch, and I explained the whole saga.
&n
bsp; “She’s probably very busy with the baby,” he said. Thomas was not quite indulging in this crisis as much as I’d hoped. “I’m sure it’s fine,” he said, although he winced slightly when he said it, which meant the joke might have been more wrongheaded than I’d feared. I tried out the story on three more people. They all told me it was no big deal, and I was pretty sure they were all lying.
I grew panicky. Was it possible to crater 15 years of friendship with one poorly timed text? I suspected I was overreacting, even as I spun out, but I had spent so many years apologizing for things I did not remember that I had lost faith in my own goodness. Every pocket of silence felt like fingers pointed at me. Certain newly sober people will swallow the world’s blame. Everything ever done must be their fault. Just add it to their bill.
I sent Anna an overnight care package, a collection of pop-up books for Alice. The Hungry Caterpillar. The Little Prince. The House on Pooh Corner. A few days later, though, I decided this was not enough. I compiled another box of gifts, kitschier this time. Apparently I wanted to be the first person in history to win back my best friend with a CD containing lullaby versions of Bon Jovi hits.
I was obsessed with my tiny failure. Why hadn’t I just said: I’m happy for you. I’m here for you. Congratulations. Would that be so hard? What was wrong with me?
For years, I’d hated myself for drinking, but I didn’t expect to hate myself this much after I quit. My self-loathing was like a bone I couldn’t stop gnawing. Pretty soon, it morphed into anger at Anna. Didn’t she understand what I was going through? How could she cut me out like this? Such an opera of despair. No wonder I drank, I thought. It made my own self-created drama disappear.
About a week after the delivery, Anna finally called. I was reading in bed one lazy Saturday with Bubba curled up alongside me when I saw her name on the phone. My breath hitched as if the call were from a long-lost boyfriend.