I thought nothing of spending most evenings in a bar, because that’s what my friends were doing. I thought nothing of mandating wine bottles for any difficult conversation—for any conversation at all—because that’s what I saw in movies and television. Glasses of white wine had become shorthand for honest communication. Clink, clink, here’s to us. I may have found the Hollywood empowerment tales of “you-go-girl drinking” to be patronizing, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t capture my value system.
Empowerment. It was an early buzzword for the twenty-first century. Everything from building schools in third-world countries to emailing pictures of your ass to strangers became empowering. For years, I kept an Onion story tacked above my desk: “Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.” The word’s ubiquity suggested how much women wanted power but how conflicted we were about getting it. Ripping your pubic hair out by the roots was empowerment. Taking J?germeister shots at the bar was empowerment. I just wish those shots had empowered me not to trip off the curb.
I did worry I drank too much. Actually, I had worried for a long time. I slipped in a club one night and bashed my kneecap. I fell down staircases (yes, plural). Sometimes I only skidded down a few steps—gravity problems, I used to joke—and then a few times I sailed to the bottom like a rag doll, and I’m not sure which is crazier: that I drank as long as I did, or that I kept wearing heels.
I think I knew I was in trouble. The small, still voice inside me always knew. I didn’t hide the drinking, but I hid how much it hurt.
I WAS 20 YEARS old when I first started worrying I drank too much. I picked up one of those pamphlets at the student health center. Do you have a drinking problem? I was in college. I was pretty sure everyone I knew had a drinking problem. My photo album was a flipbook of evidence: My friend Dave, with a bottle of Jim Beam to his lips. My friend Anne, passed out on the couch with a red Solo cup still upright in her hand. Heroic postures of sin and debauch.
But there was something troubling about the way I drank. Friends would inch-worm up to me on Sundays, when our apartment was still wrecked with stink and regret. Hey. So. We need to talk. They tried to sound casual, like we were going to chat about boys and nail polish, but the next eight words were like needles sunk into my skin. Do you remember what you did last night?
And so, the pamphlet. It was such a corny, flimsy thing. It had probably been languishing on that rack of good intentions since the 1980s. The language was so alarmist and paternalistic (a word I’d just learned and enjoyed using).
Have you ever had a hangover? Come on. I felt pity for the wallflower who answered no to this question. Drinking at least three times a week was as fundamental to my education as choosing a major. My friends and I didn’t hang with anyone who didn’t party. There was something untrustworthy about people who crossed their arms at the bacchanal.
Next question: Do you ever drink to get drunk? Good lord. Why else would a person drink? To cure cancer? This was stupid. I had come to that health clinic with real fear in my heart, but already I felt foolish for being so dramatic.
Do you ever black out?
Wait, that one. That question, right there. Do you ever black out?
I did. I blacked out the first time I got drunk, and it happened again. And again. Some blackouts were benign, the last few hours of an evening turning into a blurry strobe. Some were extravagant. Like the one that brought me to the health clinic, after waking up in my parents’ house and having no idea how I got there. Three hours, gone from my brain.
During uncomfortable conversations with my friends, I would listen in disbelief as they told stories about me that were like the work of an evil twin. I said what? I did what? But I didn’t want to betray how little I knew. I wanted to eject from those discussions as quickly as possible, so I would nod and tell them I felt terrible about what I’d done (whatever it turned out to be). The soft language of disarmament: I hear you. You are heard.
Other questions in the pamphlet were sort of ridiculous. Do you drink every day? Have you ever been sent to jail for your drinking? This was the low stuff of gutter drunks to me. I still shopped at the Gap. I had a Winnie-the-Pooh night lamp. No, I hadn’t been sent to jail, and no, I didn’t drink every day, and I was relieved to find those questions there, because they felt like exemption.
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.