Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (20 page)

“Actually, I don’t,” I said.

“You fell down my staircase,” she said.

I covered my face with my hands and peeked at her through the slats of my fingers. “Yeah, I used to do that.”

“My stairs were
marble
,” she said. “It was terrifying. Honestly, I’d never seen anything like it. You don’t remember this at all?”

No, but I remembered how I woke up the next morning, and I thought:
How did that awesome party end? Maybe I should send Allison a text. “Had a great time last night! The part I can remember was amazing!”

But I didn’t send anything like that. In fact, I stopped talking to Allison for two years.

The psychology of the blackout drinker is one of dodge and denial. Things you can’t remember become epic in your mind. Five minutes of unremembered conversation can be a shame you carry through the rest of your life. Or it can be shrugged off entirely. I did both, and the problem was that you ended up cutting people out without even knowing why. You got a hunch that something bad happened, so—snip, snip. Easier that way.

“I thought you hated me,” Allison said, and I was confused. Why would
I
hate
her
?

She wasn’t entirely off base, though. Not that I hated her, but I avoided her, the same way I avoided every pesky truth that threatened my good times in those days. I spent so much time spinning imaginary stories in my own mind—what might have happened, how I needed to repair it—and very little time finding out what I had done.

Over the next years, I would have more honest conversations like this, in which patient friends with understanding faces filled in parts of my story I didn’t recall. No, you didn’t do anything weird that night. Or yes, you were a disaster. Whatever the revelation, it was never as painful as the years of worry that lead up to it. Usually, we ended those discussions much closer.

That’s what happened with Allison and me. When we said good-bye that night, we talked about getting together the next week. And this time, we followed through.

M
Y CHILDHOOD BEST
friend Jennifer got sober one year after I did. This shocked me. I never thought she had a drinking problem. But when I looked back on the nights we spent together in our late 20s and early 30s, the signs were there. Chronic unhappiness. Chaotic life. Mysterious fender benders.

She used to carry a picture of her husband in her car, back before they got married, and she would stare at his face before walking into any party. She had a problem with drunken flirtation and needed to remind herself:
This is the man you love. Don’t mess it up.
But after building this tiny obstacle of resistance, she’d walk into the party and wash it away again.

After having two kids, she became one of those moms who kept a bottle of red wine forever handy. The minivan was not going to change her. Her party plan worked for a while, but then the wheels started coming off. Her blackouts became so frequent that when she was drinking, she would only communicate via text, so she could have an evidence trail of her decisions.

She and I had always been control freaks. Yet we both drank to the point of losing control. It sounds contradictory, but it makes total sense. The demands of perfectionism are exhausting, and it’s hard to live with a tyrant. Especially the one in your own mind.

So she quit drinking, and we found ourselves, once again, two lonely members of an outsider tribe. We began taking long walks around the lake, sharing all the stories we had not told in the years of superficial catch-up. We stayed up talking at her house, and some nights it was like we were 13 years old again, laughing so hard we almost peed, except instead of her mom telling us to keep it down we were interrupted by her daughter, dragging a fuzzy blanket. “I can’t sleep,” she would say, finger in mouth, and she would hop up into her mother’s lap, one last stint in the world’s safest place.

Talking was the glue of our world, never drinking. We were good talkers. Our conversations were so natural, so obvious. She would talk, and then I would talk, and then somehow, through this simple back-and-forth, we could start to hear the sound of our own voices.

O
ne afternoon, I got an urge to pull into the drive-through at Jack in the Box. Do I like Jack in the Box? Not particularly. But the urge snagged me, and before I could unsnag myself, I was on the conveyor belt that led to the drive-through’s metal box, where I ordered my carb explosion. What I noticed—as I idled there with a queasy feeling like I was getting away with something—was that absolutely no one was going to stop me. The bored teenager wearing a headset did not ask “Are you sure about this, ma’am?” The woman who swiped my credit card did not raise an eyebrow, because she had seen so much worse. There were precious few barricades between my stupid, fleeting impulse and the moment I sat on the floor of my living room with ketchup covering my fingers and chin.

“I just ate an Ultimate Cheeseburger,” I told my friend Mary. She lived around the corner from me, and she had been a champion binge eater most of her life.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Did you get the curly fries, too?”

“I can’t believe you even asked that.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. Of course you did.”

When addiction lives in you, it sprouts many vines. For the first year after I quit drinking, I refused to worry about food. I would do whatever it took to give up alcohol, which included a typical dependency swap: Trade booze for smokes. Or trade smokes for Double Stuf Oreos. Or Nutella. Or Double Stuf Oreos with Nutella.

A year and a half of drinking nothing should’ve made me proud. But a year and a half of eating everything in my path had left me defeated and ashamed.

“I think I need to go on a diet,” I told Mary, lobbing the words into the air before I could snatch them back. Diet: the toxic buzzword of body dysmorphia. Diet: those things destined to fail.

In the old days, a heroine in search of happiness lost weight and found a prince. But current wisdom dictates a heroine in search of happiness should ditch the prince, skip the diet—and gain acceptance. Stop changing yourself to please the world and start finding happiness within. That’s a good message, given all the ways women are knocked around by the beauty-industrial complex.

But my problem wasn’t a deficit of acceptance. It was too much. I drank however I wanted, and I accepted the nights that slipped away from me. I ate however I wanted, and I accepted my body was a home I’d never want to claim as my own. Sitting on that linoleum floor, surrounded by empty foil wrappers and my own disgust, I wondered if I could use a little less acceptance around here. Or, to be more precise: Acceptance was only half the equation. The other half was determining what was unacceptable—and changing that.

I
DON’T KNOW
when I stopped taking care of myself. In college, Anna used to foist vegetables on me, which was exactly what my mother used to do when I was a child. They were both healthy eaters, who saw beauty in nature’s bounty, and I was a hedonist who liked slapping away her broccoli. I had the tastes of a frat boy, or a grumpy toddler. No to vegetables. Yes to ranch dressing. I actually described the food I liked as “nothing healthy.”

My brother is defiant like this, too, which suggests either a genetic predisposition to Ultimate Cheeseburgers or a rebellion against the bean sprouts and barley of our food co-op childhood. Kids often dive into the indulgences their parents place off-limits: television, sugar, sex. And I became an adult who actually enjoyed carpet bombing her gut with processed meats. “The next time you eat a fast-food burger, I want you to really
think
about it,” a friend once said. So I did. And I thought: This is great!

Of course, I had the added pressure of growing up female in the diet culture of the ’80s. After the age of 12, food stopped being sustenance and turned into guilt, sin, reward, penance, entertainment, love. Cramming food into my mouth brought a rush of rebellion, but I was never sure who I was fighting. My mother? The advertising industry? Jane Fonda? (Poor Jane Fonda. She was only trying to help.) Whoever I intended to punish with that routine, the only one who got hurt in the end was me.

Our bodies carry the evidence of our neglect. By the time I stopped drinking, I was nearly 50 pounds overweight. I had
ulcers that felt like the lit end of a cigarette held up to my stomach lining. I had a mysterious rash splashed over my arms and legs. I had two twisted knees that cried out when I descended stairs, a painful reminder I literally could not support my own weight.

I never thought of myself as neglectful. I’d been a single woman living in New York City, after all. I took care of myself
all the time
. I opened tightly sealed jars by myself, banging a spoon against the metal until it relented, and I installed shelves in my kitchen, using a power drill and torpedo level to hang them properly. I couldn’t fob off the finances to my spreadsheet-oriented husband. My wife never did the laundry. (Actually, the women at the drop-off dry cleaner did my laundry, and I thank them.) I carried the responsibility of rent and work demands on my own tensed shoulders, and the way I eased those knots was to reward myself with a nice bottle of wine at the end of a long day. Maybe a six-pack as well.
This
was taking care of myself: a conscious decision not to shame myself for my own roaring appetites.

Go to any spa, and you’ll see the same philosophy at play.
It’s time to take care of
you
finally—here’s a glass of champagne.
When it comes to selling the luxury experience, alcohol is more central than warm hand towels and tinkling water sculptures. They serve booze at beauty salons, high-end stores, resorts, upscale hotels. What’s the most famous perk of flying first class? Free drinks, of course. Alcohol is the ultimate in pampering.

But “pampering myself” all the time led to a certain sloth. I let cat food tins languish in corners, and I let bills go unpaid. In Brooklyn, I was sleeping with a guy who used to come over at 3 am, and in between tokes on his one-hitter one night, he said, “Baby, you need a new couch.” I looked closer and was startled
by what I saw: My velvety red futon had become filthy with splotches of soy sauce and red wine. There was a strange crust on one cushion that might have been cheese. It’s not a good sign when your stoned fuck buddy is giving you decorating tips.

People who don’t take care of themselves will also struggle to take care of others. One night, I came home so blind drunk I left the front door flapping open, and at some point, my cat walked out into the night right before my eyes.
My cat.
The one I was beyond paranoid about keeping indoors. The one I loved with such ferocity I thought I might go insane if anything happened to him. The next morning, I was in a panic trying to find him, only to open the front door and see him sitting on the stoop, looking up like:
Where have you been?

I couldn’t believe I let that happen. But addiction siphons so much attention, and the most precious treasures will get tossed in the backseat: children, husbands, basic hygiene. I heard a guy once complain about how much he wet the bed when he was drunk. But he didn’t stop drinking. He got waterproof sheets.

And I get it. When you are alone and drinking every night till you pass out, who really cares?

I asked myself that often.
Who really cares?
I’d given up many things by the end. Hanging my clothes. Making the bed. Shaving my legs. Zippers or clothing with structure of any kind. I threw towels over spills until the towels began to seem like rugs.

And I told myself this was OK, because our society was beyond warped in its expectations of women, who were tsunamied by messages of self-improvement, from teeth whiteners to self-tanners. I was exhausted by the switchbacks of fashion, in which everyone was straightening their hair one year and embracing their natural curls the next. I wanted to kick the whole world in the nuts and live the rest of my years in
sweatpants that smelled vaguely like salami, because
who really cares
?

It took a while for me to realize:
I cared.
I didn’t need to do these things because it pleased men, or because it was what I was “supposed” to do, or because my mother clipped something out for me from
O
magazine. I should take care of myself because it made
me
happy. Remarkably, impossibly—it felt good.

F
OUR MONTHS AFTER
moving to Dallas, I went on a diet. It was one of those old-fashioned diets with frozen fish sticks in geometric shapes, a serious throwback in the day of lemon-juice fasts and lap bands. I walked out of the strip-mall store where I had weekly weigh-ins with all the shame of a pastor emerging from an adult video store at 1 pm.

Why was I so embarrassed? Because I felt like a failure to both sides of the body wars. To women for whom appearance was everything, I was a source of pity. To women for whom diets were evil, I was a sellout.

When I was coming into my teen years, diets were nearly a developmental stage. Adolescence, motherhood, diet, death. But by the time I walked into that fluorescent office, covered in pictures of women in smart suits with their arms raised overhead, the word “diet” had become radioactive—thanks in part to female writers I knew and admired, who fought against the false notion that thin was synonymous with health. The past ten years had seen the media embrace more curves and cushioning, all of which signaled progress—but none of which meant I needed 50 extra pounds.

Still, I worried I was letting my anti-diet friends down—as though my intensely personal body choices needed to be their
choices, too. The whole point of feminism was that we deserved the agency of our own choices—pro-choice, in the truest sense of the term—and yet I feared my friends would judge me as frivolous, or vain. But fearing another person’s opinion never stops them from having one. And my focus on external judgment kept me from noticing the endless ways I’d judged myself.

For the past decade, I did that horrible thing, resolving not to think about my weight and yet thinking about it constantly. Every time I awoke. Every time I passed reflective glass. Every time I saw an old friend and I watched their eyes go up and down me. At some point, no one complimented me on anything but my hair and my handbags. I was certainly vain then; I just didn’t happen to look like someone who should have been.

Mine was a recipe for unhappiness. I was fixated on my weight but unwilling to do anything about it. And I couldn’t do anything about it while I was drinking, because booze left me roughly 1,200 calories in the hole four times a week. There’s not a miracle diet in the world that can pull you out of that quicksand. In fact, when I did try to diet, I made a mess. Cutting out carbs and swapping beer for liquor is a trusty formula for blacking out.

So I went the old-school route. Calorie restriction. Reasonable portions. Water, not diet soda. Half the steak, not the whole steak consumed and instantly regretted with a sigh and one hand on my belly. After a lifetime of “all or nothing,” I needed to learn “some.”

The weight fell off me. Fifty pounds in six months, as if it never wanted to be there. I was astonished by the lack of trauma this entailed, after all those years of bad-mouthing diets as a form of punishment and deprivation. And the scale couldn’t tell the whole story of my change. I woke up, and I felt happy.
I stopped avoiding cameras and old friends. My underwire bra no longer dug into my belly, which was a constant source of grump. When I passed a mirror, I was startled by the person I’d become. Although perhaps it was more accurate to say: I was startled by the person I could’ve been all along. The person I had buried.

Self-destruction is a taste I’ve savored much of my life. The scratch in my throat left by too much smoking, the jitteriness of a third cup of coffee, the perverse thrill of knowing a thing is bad and choosing it anyway—these are all familiar kinks, and one feeds the other. But was it possible to change my palate—to crave something good for me, to create an inspiration spiral instead of a shame spiral?

I started making my bed each morning, even though I was going to climb in it later at night. I started washing the dishes in the evenings, because I liked waking up in a clean house. I started going to yoga, which is an entire practice of learning to support your own body.