Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

and religion will remind you as well. We all want to believe our pain is singular—that no one else
has felt this way—but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not
unique. But it also means we’re not alone. One of the best sayings I ever heard someone toss out at a
meeting: If you’ve fucked a zebra, someone else has fucked two. I haven’t seen it hung next to the
other slogans yet, but I’m hoping.
The woman draws her purse onto her lap. Her life feels clouded, she says. She’s not sure who she
is, or what she wants anymore. She tells me her story, which is carved with her own particulars, but
the template is familiar. We arrive at a place of reckoning as strangers to ourselves. When she starts
to cry, she reaches for Kleenex in her purse, apologizing once more.
“You should have seen how much I cried when I quit,” I said. “Insane tears.”
“It’s hard for me to believe you were ever like this,” she says.
I try to explain to her. The despair, the frailty, the emotional hurly-burly—I lived there once, too.
And she stares at me like I’m trying to sell her something.
“It’s just that I look at you, and it’s clear you know who you are,” she says. I am wearing
sweatpants pulled from the floor, because I was running late, and no makeup. Not my most
Hollywood look. But it’s also true that I am not befogged with need and wanting anymore.
I don’t know how it happened, or exactly how long it took. But I looked up one day and
discovered, to my own shock as much as anyone else’s, that I was something approaching the woman
I might like to be.
“I was in the exact same place as you are,” I say, tears filling up my eyes. “I was lost for a very
long time.” And even if she doesn’t understand, I can see that she believes me.
As for whether she’ll stop drinking or not, I can’t tell you. I have no idea. Every sobriety tale is a
cliffhanger. None of us knows how our story ends.
But these conversations are good for me. They deliver me from my own sorrow. They remind me
of my usefulness. They keep me from forgetting. How I got here, how I climbed out. I forgot too many
things for far too long. Not just what we did last night, but who I was, where I wanted to go. I don’t
do that anymore. Now I remember.