Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

I had this great idea: I should try antidepressants. And another great idea: I should toss the
antidepressants and join a gym. And another great idea: What about a juice cleanse? And another, and
another.
My body was starting to break down. After an average bout of heavy drinking, I would wake up in
the mornings feeling poisoned, needing to purge whatever was left in my stomach. I would kneel at
the toilet, place two fingers down the back of my throat, and make myself vomit. Shower, go to work.
I had to quit. I would try for a few days, but I never got further than two weeks. I became paranoid
I was going to lose my job. Whenever I sat down to write, the words wouldn’t come. The pressure
and the doubt and the stress could no longer be sipped away. I was completely blocked.
“I’m going to get fired,” I told my boss one afternoon, freaking out over a late deadline.
“Look at me,” she said. “You are not going to lose your job.” And she was right.
But she lost hers. The second layoff came a few weeks later, in August of 2009, and when the list
of the damned was read, my boss’s name was on it, along with half the New York office. I couldn’t
believe it. All those months I was convinced I’d be axed, and I was one of the only survivors.
Why did they keep me? I’ll never know. Maybe I was cheap. Maybe I was agreeable. Maybe my
name never got pulled from the hat. I suspected my boss never let them see how much I was
floundering. She protected me, and she got the pink slip. I was left with my job, my fear, and my guilt.
After work, I went straight to the bar. I had built up a week of sobriety at that point. But no way I
was staying sober for this bullshit.
STEPHANIE WAS THE one who finally confronted me. She took me to dinner at a nice little Italian
restaurant in Park Slope. She adjusted the napkin in her lap with pretty hands that displayed a
gargantuan diamond.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. The bugle call for a horrible conversation. She needed to talk to
me because, at a gathering at her place, I burst into tears talking about the layoffs while we all
smoked on the balcony. “You kind of freaked people out,” she said, which stung, because I thought
everyone had bonded that night.
She needed to talk to me because, at a recent dinner, I told the story of a hideous romantic breakup
with such heart-wrenching detail that one of Stephanie’s friends held my hand on the way back in the
cab. That’s how moved she’d been. Meanwhile, Stephanie diverted her sigh into her hair. She’d
heard the story three times before.
For the past few months, I had been hearing about girls’ dinners and group trips taken without me,
and I thought, well, they probably knew I couldn’t afford it. I tried not to get my feelings hurt. No
biggie, it was cool.
But sitting across from Stephanie, I began to realize it was not cool. Something was badly wrong
between us. And it wasn’t some minor incident on the balcony, or a cab, but the long string of
incidents that came before it. Discord is often an accumulation. A confrontation is like a cold bucket
of water splashed on you at once, but what you might not realize is how long the bucket of water was
building. Five drops, a hundred drops, each of them adding to the next, until one day—the bucket tips.
“I don’t know what you want,” she said. The words scraped her throat, which spooked me,
because she was not a person whose composure faltered. “What do you want?”
And I thought: I want fancy trips and a house in the Hamptons and long delicate hands that show