Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

girl in the foldout chair who was once soul sick and shivering. I never spoke ill of AA after I left. But
I could only recommend the solution to someone else. Like telling my friend to cut out dairy while
shoving a fistful of cheddar cheese in my mouth.
During that next decade of drinking, I gravitated toward any book or magazine article about a
person who drank too much. Nothing pleased me like tales of decadence. I read Caroline Knapp’s
Drinking: A Love Story three times, with tears dripping down my cheeks and a glass of white wine in
my hand. White wine was Knapp’s nectar of choice, which she described with such eloquence I
needed to join her, and I would think, “Yes, yes, she gets it.” Then she quit and joined AA, and it was
like: Come on. Isn’t there another way?
Another way. I know there is now, because I have heard so many stories. People who quit on their
own. People who find other solutions. I needed to try that, too. I needed to exhaust other possibilities
—health regimens, moderation management, the self-help of David Foster Wallace and my Netflix
queue—because I needed to be thoroughly convinced I could not do this on my own.
By the way, the guy who got me into AA started drinking again not long after I did. He got married
and had a kid. His mid-20s revelry didn’t drag into his middle age, which sometimes happens. If you
look at the demographics, drinking falls off a cliff after people have children. They can’t keep up.
“You wanna curb your drinking?” a female friend asked. “Have a baby.”
I held on to those words into my mid-30s. I knew some speed bump of circumstance would come
along and force me to change. I would get married, and then I would quit. I would have a baby, and
then I would quit. But every opportunity to alter my habits—every challenging job, every financial
squeeze—became a reason to drink more, not less. And I knew parenthood didn’t stop everyone. The
drinking migrated. From bars into living rooms, bathrooms, an empty garage. The drinking was
crammed into the hours between a child going down to bed and a mother passing out. I was starting to
suspect kids wouldn’t stop me. Nothing had.
And I was so pissed about that. It wasn’t fair that my once-alcoholic friend could reboot his life to
include the occasional Miller Lite while he cooked on the grill, and I had broken blood vessels
around my eyes from vomiting in the morning. It wasn’t fair that my friends could stay at Captain
Morgan’s pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting
the Serenity Prayer. The cri de coeur of sheltered children everywhere: It isn’t fair! (Interestingly, I
never cursed the world’s unfairness back when I was talking my way out of another ticket. People on
the winning team rarely notice the game is rigged.)
Three weeks into this sobriety, though, I finally went back to the meetings. I found one near my
West Village apartment where they dimmed the lights, and I resumed my old posture: arms crossed,
sneer on my face. I went to get my mother off my back. I went to check some box on an invisible list
of Things You Must Do. I went to prove to everyone what I strongly suspected: AA would not work
for me.
Please understand. I knew AA worked miracles. What nobody ever tells you is that miracles can
be very, very uncomfortable.
WORK WAS A respite during that first month, although that’s like saying being slapped is a respite from
being punched. What I mean is I didn’t obsess about alcohol when I was at my job. I didn’t tell
anyone I’d quit, either, probably for the same reason pregnant women wait three months before