Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

we’ll never know long enough to let down.
Often they said: I was like you once. I used to think that program was bullshit, too. And hearing
they were wrong made me suspect I was wrong, too.
AA was a humble program. A program of suggestions, never rules. It was a place of storytelling,
which operated on the same principle as great literature: Through your story, I hear my own.
I was also beginning to realize that getting sober wasn’t some giant leap into sunlight. It was a
series of small steps in the same direction. You say “I’ll do this today,” and then you say the same
thing the next day, and you keep going, one foot in front of the other, until you make it out of the
woods.
I can’t believe I’d once thought the only interesting part of a story was when the heroine was
drinking. Because those can be some of the most mind-numbing stories in the world. Is there any more
obnoxious hero than a dead-eyed drunk, repeating herself? I was stuck in those reruns for years—the
same conversations, the same humiliations, the same remorse, and there’s no narrative tension there,
believe me. It was one big cycle of Same Old Shit.
Sobriety wasn’t the boring part. Sobriety was the plot twist.