Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

Mine was a recipe for unhappiness. I was fixated on my weight but unwilling to do anything about
it. And I couldn’t do anything about it while I was drinking, because booze left me roughly 1,200
calories in the hole four times a week. There’s not a miracle diet in the world that can pull you out of
that quicksand. In fact, when I did try to diet, I made a mess. Cutting out carbs and swapping beer for
liquor is a trusty formula for blacking out.
So I went the old-school route. Calorie restriction. Reasonable portions. Water, not diet soda.
Half the steak, not the whole steak consumed and instantly regretted with a sigh and one hand on my
belly. After a lifetime of “all or nothing,” I needed to learn “some.”
The weight fell off me. Fifty pounds in six months, as if it never wanted to be there. I was
astonished by the lack of trauma this entailed, after all those years of bad-mouthing diets as a form of
punishment and deprivation. And the scale couldn’t tell the whole story of my change. I woke up, and
I felt happy. I stopped avoiding cameras and old friends. My underwire bra no longer dug into my
belly, which was a constant source of grump. When I passed a mirror, I was startled by the person I’d
become. Although perhaps it was more accurate to say: I was startled by the person I could’ve been
all along. The person I had buried.
Self-destruction is a taste I’ve savored much of my life. The scratch in my throat left by too much
smoking, the jitteriness of a third cup of coffee, the perverse thrill of knowing a thing is bad and
choosing it anyway—these are all familiar kinks, and one feeds the other. But was it possible to
change my palate—to crave something good for me, to create an inspiration spiral instead of a shame
spiral?
I started making my bed each morning, even though I was going to climb in it later at night. I
started washing the dishes in the evenings, because I liked waking up in a clean house. I started going
to yoga, which is an entire practice of learning to support your own body.
“You’re stronger than you realize,” my pink-haired yoga instructor told me one day, as I wobbled
my way through a handstand, and I started thinking she might be right.
I turned on physical exercise a long time ago. I was a kid who loved the slap of dirt on her hands,
but middle school gym was a reminder of my early puberty and late-round draft pick status. I
withdrew indoors, into films and books and fizzy bottles. I hissed at organized sports and hid from
any activity that broke a sweat, and what I mostly thought about my body is that I wished I didn’t have
one. I preferred virtual realms. Email, phone, Internet. To this day, I love writing in bed, covered in
blankets. Like I’m nothing but a head and typing fingers.
So I started inhabiting my own body again, because it was not going to go away. I rode my seafoam
green bike along the wide tree-lined avenues of my neighborhood. I took long walks, in which
my mind dangled like a kite string.
People noticed when I lost weight. You look so healthy. You look so great. And as much as I
enjoyed these compliments, I feared them as well: that they would go away, or that I was too greedy
for them in the first place. It made me uncomfortable how much my weight loss changed my perceived
value. After I quit drinking, I saw the world differently. But after I lost weight, the world saw me
differently.
It was like I’d suddenly become visible, after years of camouflage I didn’t know I was wearing.
There is something undeniably attractive about a person who is not hiding—in clothes, under extra
weight, behind her addictions. My mother and Anna were right all along: There was great beauty in
nature.