Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

saying in midsentence. My dad loses his balance when he stands in one place too long. Neurological
problems in his feet. One evening, his legs give out while we’re standing in a line, and he slumps to
the ground right next to me, as though he’s been shot. I can’t help noticing the effects of aging are an
awful lot like the effects of drinking. Loss of balance. Loss of consciousness. Loss of memory.
We spend all these years drinking away our faculties and then all these years trying to hold on to
them. When my friends share stories about their parents fighting Alzheimer’s, I hear echoes of my
own behavior. He keeps taking off all his clothes. She won’t stop cussing. He disappears in a fog.
A life is bookended by forgetting, as though memory forms the tunnel that leads into and out of a
human body. I’m friends with a married couple who have a two-year-old. She is all grunt and grab, a
pint-size party animal in a polka-dot romper, and we laugh at how much she reminds us of our
drunken selves. She shoves her hands in her diaper and demands a cookie. She dips one finger in
queso and rubs it on her lips. Any hint of music becomes a need to dance. Oh, that child loves to
dance. Spinning in a circle. Slapping her big toddler belly. One eye squinted, her tongue poking out of
her mouth, as though this movement balances her somehow.
I recognize this as the freedom drinking helped me to recapture. A magnificent place where no
one’s judgment mattered, my needs were met, and my emotions could explode in a tantrum. And when
I was finally spent, someone would scoop me up in their arms and place me safely in my crib again.
I wonder sometimes if anything could have prevented me from becoming an alcoholic, or if
drinking was simply my fate. It’s a question my friends with kids ask me, too, because they worry.
How can they know if their kids are drinking too much? What should they do? I feel such sympathy for
parents, plugging their fingers in the leaky dam of the huge and troubling world. But I’m not sure my
parents could have done anything to keep me away from the bottomless pitcher of early adulthood. I
was probably going to find my way to that bar stool no matter what. Addiction is a function of two
factors: genetics and culture. On both counts, the cards were stacked against me. Still, I know, I was
the one who played the hand.
There is no single formula that makes a problem drinker. I’ve heard many competing stories.
Parents who were too strict, parents who were too lax. A kid who got too much attention, and a kid
who didn’t get enough. The reason I drank is because I became certain booze could save me. And I
clung to this delusion for 25 years.
I think each generation reinvents rebellion. My generation drank. But the future of addiction is
pills. Good-bye, liquor cabinet, hello, medicine cabinet. A kid who pops Oxycontin at 15 doesn’t
really get the big deal about taking heroin at 19. They’re basically the same thing. Growing up, I
thought substance abuse fell into two camps: drinking, which was fine, and everything else, which
was not. Now I understand that all substance abuse lies on the same continuum.
But I’m not sad or embarrassed to be an alcoholic anymore. I get irritated when I hear parents use
that jokey shorthand: God, I hope my kid doesn’t end up in rehab. Or: God, I hope my kid doesn’t end
up in therapy. I understand the underlying wish—I hope my kid grows up happy and safe. When we
say things like that, though, we underscore the false belief that people who seek help are failures and
people who don’t seek help are a success. It’s not true. Some of the healthiest, most accomplished
people I know went to both rehab and therapy, and I’ve known some sick motherfuckers who
managed to avoid both.
When I sit in rooms with people once considered washed up, I feel at home. I’ve come to think of
being an alcoholic as one of the best things that ever happened to me. Those low years startled me