by Terri White
She’s taking me to my first AA meeting on the outside, in a church uptown. Chairs pulled into a circle around a circle around a circle. She sits down next to me, and I can feel pairs of eyes land on me as we sit. A question: ‘Is there anyone who is here for the first time?’ I raise my hand. A nod that I take as permission, invitation to speak.
‘Hello,’ I say, voice shaking. ‘I’m Terri and I’m an alcoholic.’
It still feels like a lie as I say it. An exaggeration at best. It still gets stuck in my throat. But they would say it is my disease talking, so I plough on.
‘Two weeks ago today I got drunk until I blacked out, like I normally do. I ended up overdosing on pills given to me for borderline personality disorder that I didn’t take.’
Tears hurtle out of my eyes and charge down my cheeks. A few of the other members are exchanging looks, or at least I think they are, but again, my disease is controlling my perception, twisting what I see. What I think I see.
‘I woke up with two empty pill bottles; I’d taken both, and before I knew it I’d been committed. Then I spent a week in a psych ward. I got out of the hospital this morning. This is my first AA meeting in the world outside. I’m going back to work tomorrow. I really want to drink but I know I can’t. This isn’t the first mess I’ve found myself in because of drinking. I’ve broken bones, cracked my skull, vomited on myself, wet the bed. I ended up in a police station …’
I list my indignities like last week’s shopping list. This is the deal, right? I hand over the last soiled shreds of my privacy, dignity, and they give me back happiness and the chance to wake up and not want to die within a handful of seconds.
Even though I’ve disconnected from the talking, performing part of me, I cry even more, my shoulders shaking. I feel outside of myself and yet consumed by grief, sadness and humiliation. I eventually slow my breathing and the woman leading the group looks at me awkwardly.
‘Erm, we’re not at the sharing part yet. It’s not time for you to speak.’
The room splits in its reaction: group one looks at the floor; group two looks at me with a mixture of sympathy and mortification. Group three, a smaller group, looks away with irritation.
I try to make myself as small as I possibly can in my chair, horrified, replaying every second, every word I just spoke. Minutes when everyone apart from me knew I was fucking up, but no one knew quite how or when to tell me. I don’t speak again.
The speaker for this meeting, a young attractive brunette who’d been the leader of group three comes over to me.
‘Hey,’ she says, with a hard stare. ‘You know, you’re not supposed to do that. And I know you’re new but the best thing you can do right now is listen.’
I nod, chastened. I can’t believe I’ve been in Outside World AA for all of six hours and have already royally fucked it up.
‘Take my number and call me if you need to chat,’ she says, with the sound of a woman with a gun barrel nestled in her spine. I take it, save it, and then as soon I’m back out on the street outside, greedily swallowing air, I delete it.
There are a few things you learn when you stop drinking. First, booze is everywhere. Every billboard, every advert on the telly and on the subway; every article, story, song; every film, every TV show, every conversation. The giant glass of vodka, condensation on the glass, hovers over my head, poised to drown me. The glass of wine you pour yourself for that heartfelt conversation, the one for relaxation, the one for grief, the one for joy, the one for sadness. There is a glass for everything.
The second thing you learn is that not being able to artificially improve yourself, your perception of the world, the version of yourself you put out into the world feels impossibly weird. You’re raw and naked, like a newborn baby, no longer the chemically enhanced you. Now the startling sensation of air meets thin skin. And there’s absolutely nowhere to hide.
Every thought I’d ever had, every fear, every moment of shame and unhappiness, every lie I’d told, every moment I wanted to forget was suddenly laid out like a uniform I didn’t want to wear. Each indignity, each horror given its own spot, its own moment to be recognised.
The third thing is just how long the days are. I realise how much time I spent drunk, sleeping, or sleeping off being drunk. I can’t believe how many hours are actually in a day. And the nights are the worst: in the daytime there are work and tasks, but at night, when everyone winds down in the only way most people know how, you’re left looking at the hours ahead of you, working on your fifth coffee of the day.
I don’t want to tell anyone I’ve stopped drinking and so I try to hide it. We go for a work dinner to a restaurant in Chelsea, the first since I’ve become sober. I order my soft drinks quietly, resisting the urge to sneak a shot in there. As everyone else gets lightly pissed, I stay stone-cold sober and my anxiety spirals. I’m hyperconscious of everything I say, how buttoned-up I remain when everyone else’s shoulders start to sag. How fun I used to be. I leave at the earliest opportunity, knowing I still have a long night ahead. I’m awake until the early hours every evening, staring at the cracks in the ceiling I never noticed before.
I dream of booze; I fantasise about it. I think about how it tastes, how it feels, how it smells, the beauty of the three-drink buzz. I become obsessed with it. I start mainlining Red Bull, clearly not willing to let go of the buzz in one form or another. I clutch the cans in my hands, comforted by how they crinkle and crumple under my fingers.
The friends who know try to be supportive. Some don’t understand. ‘I’d rather not end up sectioned again and/or choke on my own vomit,’ I try to explain on the days that those feel like my only choices.
I try AA repeatedly, even though so much of it goes against everything I believe and feel. Every time it’s asked if someone’s new, I raise my hand, trying my best to participate, to show up. I flinch at the AA talk, the talking of ‘picking up’ and ‘using’ and ‘keep coming back’ and ‘a chronic, progressive disease’ – a disease I absolutely had and if I didn’t think I had it that was just a sign of my sickness.
I go to one meeting in a tiny room up several flights of stairs near Penn Station on a Friday night, where I’m the youngest person in the room by many years, and a man with twenty-five years’ sobriety tells us how he almost killed his family when he drove drunk. I go to one in a church basement downtown on a Saturday night. It’s been a tough week, and I cry and cry through the meeting, through the tales and the pain, which sometimes all feels too much, too raw. Three women approach me afterwards, offering up their telephone numbers, telling me to keep coming back. There’s one in the Village on a Sunday afternoon, just next door to an Irish bar screaming its booze specials on a board outside; this one’s populated by club kids and artists and the stories feature even more ego and selfishness. I take my friend Rachael to one in Brooklyn, an open meeting so I don’t have to go alone, and we spend the entire session eye-rolling at the dramatic retellings of one-night-only benders that indicated alcoholism, a few drinks in college equalling a problem for life.
One of the main tenets of AA is admitting to complete and utter powerlessness. Five of the twelve steps mention God. Recovery is impossible without submitting to a ‘higher power’.
‘Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way,’ warns the official AA literature ominously.
I can’t declare myself given over to a higher power. It isn’t even that I don’t believe in anything. I do. Ever since I was a little girl seeking safety in the church across the road. I believe that something exists that is above, bigger. So, it isn’t belief that I lack; it’s a willingness to declare myself powerless, without any will or self-control or impact on my own life.
Maybe it
’s abundantly clear to everyone else that I am, in fact, powerless. That I have no hold on anything happening to me, or to anyone around me, but I still can’t do it, can’t say it. I’ve always believed that everyone is responsible for their own life, for whatever they get themselves into, and the lengths that you need to go to, to drag yourself out. This demand to admit to a lack of control over my own life feels like a betrayal of everything I am, everything I believe in. A betrayal of my independence.
Instead I make a vow to my niece. The vow is simple: ‘I will always be there for you.’ How can I fulfil that promise if I oversleep? If I forget to set my alarm? If I miss my plane, my train? If I can’t remember? If I dive willingly into the darkness away from you.
The first test: a family party I’ve flown back to England for. The room hums with lubricated laughter and I so desperately want to join in. To be the fun, carefree one, for a couple of hours at least. To feel light, alive. I start to plan: going to the bar when no one else is there. Saying the ‘Red Bull’ portion of the sentence far louder than the ‘double vodka’ bit. As I wait, I become surrounded. There’s every chance I will be discovered. I walk away and the edge is dulled.
When the buffet makes its way out, I take my chance. But by the time I get to the bar, a voice inside me is screaming no. My mouth begins to move but the empty air around me receives something unexpected. I’ve listened to the voice; I’ve walked away.
The question I keep turning over in my palms, to find a satisfactory answer to, is this: am I an alcoholic? On the side of yes: my doctors (any doctors), the people in AA, most Americans I speak to. On the side of no: most Brits I speak to, some of my best friends.
I look up one of those alcoholic checklists – ‘Am I An Alcoholic Self-Test! Instant results!’ – the ones that allow you to self-diagnose by answering twenty-six simple questions including:
Have you ever been unable to remember part of the previous evening, even though you didn’t pass out?
When drinking with other people, do you try to have a few extra drinks when others won’t know about it?
Do you sometimes feel uncomfortable if alcohol is not available?
When you’re sober, do you sometimes regret things you did or said while drinking?
Do you ever feel depressed or anxious before, during or after periods of drinking?
The results are always the same. Congratulations! You’re an alcoholic! Well, technically, it says: ‘You have a serious level of alcohol use and alcohol-related problems and should seek professional help’.
There is a disclaimer – rubbing up against a report on drug and alcohol deaths – declaring that ‘the results of this self-test are not intended to constitute a diagnosis of alcoholism’.
The binary choice is suffocating. I know I have a problem, but the rule is that you only really know you have a problem when you admit you’re an alcoholic. But I don’t think I am. I’m depressed, stitched together with fragments of trauma, desperate to escape what has often been an unbearable reality – even when it looked like everyone else’s idea of something much more than bearable – sometimes for a minute, sometimes for an hour, sometimes forever.
A problem, yes. A long-time, long-term problem, yes. Waking up clothed in a house I didn’t know, next to a man who wasn’t the one who’d handed me another glass in another room just before it all went black. The first morning I woke up lying on a wet mattress, my first thoughts going to the waterproof sheet with a screeching, beeping alarm that would go off when I wet the bed as a child, rendering me too scared to fall asleep.
While I work it out, I try my best to follow the programme but the depression that hurtled me down the rabbit hole in the first place is still peering over the edge. I feel more isolated than ever now I’m not drinking. I try not to go to bars or restaurants, because the temptation is too strong, others’ enjoyment of lubrication too infectious. I want a drink probably more than I ever have done in my life but there is one thing more than any other keeping me on the straight and narrow: the rehab centre I must go to three times a week.
When I attend for the first time, I’m given a list of client rules. They are many. From the sensible/reasonable (‘no weapons, no violence, don’t come high’), to the petty (‘no beverages in the elevator, no chewing gum’) to the puritanical (‘no open tanks, middies, short shorts or skirts, and clothes with drug/alcohol symbols or sexual/lewd references are not permitted’).
I’m given a brusque case worker whom I see twice, though the second time they can’t remember meeting me the first. Three times a week I leave work early and have three hours of treatment – two different groups for ninety minutes. I’m placed with the ‘professionals’ group for the first one – those who are high-functioning and in a professional career – and in a general group for the second. I hate both. Every minute. Every word. Everyone knows each other, has been in the programme for some time and supports and advises each other. There’s genuine warmth between them. I’m the new person and am constantly told that I have to earn my time. I barely speak in either group and am not expected or asked to. Some weeks neither group leader talks to me even once. I leave each group feeling isolated and ashamed and like a fake.
Each visit comes with a urine test for a tox screen – weeing with the door open so they can be sure it’s mine. This is what mainly keeps me clean. The shame of failing and the fear of the consequences.
I have heart-stopping dreams, dark-edged nightmares, of the police coming to my apartment to take me back to the hospital. I know I can’t go there again. But when I do inevitably fall, I fall far, arms open, scrambling for air.
The worst relapse: a Sunday. I’ve been sober twenty-three days. I’m due to interview an actor in Midtown. Our allotted meeting time comes and goes and I receive a message to say that he’s sorry but he got the day wrong and won’t be joining me. I’ve been sitting in the restaurant for an hour, sipping sparkling water. The waiter comes back over as I hang up the phone.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘They’re not coming.’
‘Do you want to stay for a drink?’ he asks.
Without even considering my answer, I order a martini. As I watch the bartender make it – cutting and curling the lemon, rolling the glass in ice, mixing the spirits – I think about calling out and cancelling it a hundred times. But I don’t; I can’t. I’m intoxicated just watching his hands move. I sit completely still and force myself to stay silent. When the waiter brings it over, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Droplets run down the outside of the glass and before I can change my mind, I’m gulping it down, swallowing it hard.
The first gulp burns, but then the second soothes. The alcohol instantly hits me and my head is flooded with warmth and obscene happiness. I order a second and a third and leave the restaurant hungry for more, only leaving because order number four is what draws concern in a nice restaurant. I walk out into the street, weaving a little now, feeling the sun on my neck, on my back, over every inch of my skin.
I feel like I’ve been given my superpower back; I’m full of life and hope and optimism. I realise how empty I’ve felt for the last three weeks. How hollowed out. I flag a cab and head downtown, finding a dive bar on the Lower East Side that people like me can seek refuge in. I order a pint of beer and a whiskey shot. Then, as always, I feel the trickle, the stain of sadness beginning to spread inside, into every bit of me. Reaching up through my bones, infecting my body and my brain, until all of the joy has been drained out and I’m just a black hole.
I call my friend Rachael though I don’t know what I say. I think I say I’m in trouble. I might have told her that I want to die again. Because right then and there, I do. Because here I am, back again so soon. Back, peering into the abyss I’ve climbed out of so many times before.
I’m loaded and lost and can’t see or speak properly to tell her where I am, but somehow she still finds me and we’re in the back of a yellow cab and she’s talking to me and I think I’m cryi
ng. She takes me to my apartment and puts me to bed, sitting in the darkness of my living room all night in case I choke on my own vomit. When I wake in the morning, she’s gone, but has left a message for me, written on a take-out receipt and sellotaped to a cabinet in the front room. It says simply, ‘You are loved’, and I cry and cry when I read it. I don’t believe it, don’t feel it, but the possibility feels like something.
A week later, I do something I’ve very rarely done in any city, never mind a foreign one I could be deported from: I order cocaine directly from a dealer. I then go to the liquor store on Avenue A with bullet-proof glass between you and the clerk. I buy the biggest bottle of strong vodka, drink it and take the cocaine on the floor of my bathroom, while methodically plotting how I will die.
Each time I go back to rehab, fail the test and say, ‘I relapsed’, the group leader sneers and rolls his eyes:
‘You actually have to have sober time under your belt to be able to say you relapsed. You just keep using.’
Then he moves on to the next person with a flick of his eye. I feel worthless and ashamed. A nothing. A nobody. I stop going to rehab, stop going to AA.
I decide that I’m not, in fact, an alcoholic. I just want to die. And booze seemed like the quickest, easiest, most efficient way to do it. I remember the nights that I took note of how much it took to kill others who’d drowned in booze and made sure I was poured out the same amount. In the moments before it went black, the resignation and relief would fall. And then rise again when I woke, flinching in the sunlight, still here. Next time, I think. Next time. I up my amounts, switch to liquor, and still the results are the same.