Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

this lunch date with her, in part to prove how together I was. I hadn’t seen her since the night I
grabbed the wine off the table in front of her friends, and I wanted to replace the unseemly memory
with a better one.
“I’m sorry I’m not very interesting,” I told her. I’m sorry. Two words I said so often I wanted to
hire a skywriter to emblazon the blue horizon with my regret. I’m sorry for everything. After lunch, I
walked Charlotte to the subway, and we hugged for a long time, and neither of us knew what to say,
so we said nothing.
Some recovering alcoholics believe you need to distance yourself from your old friends. They’re
triggers and bad influences. But what if your friends were the ones who saved you? Who closed out
your bar tab and texted with you until you made it home safely? What if your friends were the ones
who noticed when you disappeared, who rummaged around their own insides until they could find a
compassionate way to say: Enough? Was I supposed to cut them out now? When I needed them more
than ever?
A FEW MONTHS later, I walked out of Whole Foods holding heavy paper bags only to discover it was
sprinkling. I spent 30 minutes trying to hail a cab, and when I picked up the bags, their bottoms had
turned soggy and started sagging out. The absurd contortions required to carry those suckers into a
cab and up four flights of stairs to my teensy-tiny apartment was a tragedy of errors that left me
demoralized and wondering, once again: Why the hell am I living in New York?
I’d been debating the question for years. The city was too expensive. Cold, crowded, miserable.
Then again, maybe the city was the greatest on earth, and I was the one who was miserable. For a
long time, my unhappiness was a smear in which offending colors were hard to tease out. What was
the source of my sadness, and what was its collateral damage? Removing one element from my life—
alcohol—rendered my problems into black and white. The city may have been the greatest on earth,
but it didn’t feel like me. Not the new me, anyway. I was ready to move back to Texas.
My sponsor cautioned me to wait a year, because people who quit drinking are desperate to
parachute out of difficult feelings. Alcoholics are escape artists and dopamine fiends. They will dive
into strenuous exercise, wanton sex, obsessive hobbies, impulsive moves across the country to live
with people they’ve just met. The only thing I was diving into in those days was work and red velvet
cupcakes. But I took my sponsor’s advice anyway and waited a year. My long exile in relapse-land
made me question my own good judgment.
For a long time I didn’t understand the role of a sponsor. I thought of her like a teacher keeping an
invisible score sheet. “You should raise your hand more in the meetings,” she told me, and I nodded,
and then I never did it. This was how I often operated. I said yes to please you, and then I did
whatever I wanted. I thought of it as “being nice.” Now I think of it as “being manipulative.”
I apologized when I “forgot” to call her or when a suggestion she made “slipped my mind.” But I
was starting to realize this routine was bankrupt. This routine got me here.
My sponsor pushed me to be honest. Don’t make excuses. If I didn’t want to talk in the meetings,
tell her why. If I didn’t feel like calling her that day, admit as much. This approach made me tense.
What was I supposed to say? “Hey, it’s Sarah. I didn’t call you yesterday because I didn’t want to
call you.” But my sponsor said, sure, I could tell her that. It would be a great start. The point was:
Own your own feelings, skepticism, irrational rage. Stop pretending to be someone you aren’t,