Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

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