Everyone knew about my years of addiction, the dangers I had put myself in. The second time around, after 11 years sober, not even my husband knew
I am finding it very hard to write about my return to drinking. This is unexpected, given that I spent more than 10 years identifying as an alcoholic and narrating, from the podiums of church basements, the most shameful and unflattering moments of my life. The story of how you initially fell into addiction is comparatively easy to tell, because it’s widely understood that nobody chooses to become an addict, that it’s something that sneaks up on you and takes hold gradually, usually when you are too young to know better, and that quitting is an uphill battle against denial and the difficult work of coming to admit to yourself that there is a problem.
It’s much harder to tell the story of how you convinced yourself to return to a habit that you had already pushed to its limit, a habit from which you’d been free for more than a decade.
I was not under the delusion that my drinking was contextual, that my 20s had been a particularly dark time, and that things would be different in my late 30s. People had suggested this over the years – people who were not addicts themselves and who saw a commitment to lifelong abstinence as a rather extreme response to the ordinary rough patches that people experience, especially in their youth, especially when there has been a disruptive life event, like the loss of my Christian faith.
People who are not addicts seem to put a lot of stock in context, perhaps because their own drinking fluctuates according to the ups and downs of life, and because they experience alcohol as a wave of relaxation or mild euphoria that softens the world’s rough edges, not as a bolt of religious rapture that makes you want to sell all your possessions and hole up in a cave with your one precious pearl, which is how it is for those of us who were born with this disease.
So how did I convince myself to return to drinking? For a long time, I did not even understand that there was an argument taking place. There was only the hypothetical, the mental game I played to pass the time, the idle fantasies. Each bar I passed became part of the game. It got a silent vote of yes or no, depending on whether I could see myself drinking there or not. I decided I could not sit at a bar – it had to be a table. And I could not order the drink, which is to say that I could not audibly request it. This was something I only understood the first time I allowed myself to imagine the scenario in detail. I could not say the words aloud. I could not hear myself say them. It could only happen if there was a deli case next to the register, or, as I’d once glimpsed, rushing through an unfamiliar airport to make a connecting flight, self-serve taps where you could pay at an automated station.
At some point, these hypotheticals bled into planning, but the threshold between those two mental states was so subtle I did not recognise it until I’d passed over. And even then, I failed to see it as a real threat. The hypothetical was a firmly contained grammatical structure, one that was relegated to the mind, which is, as everyone knows, unreal.
Wasn’t this what I’d come to believe? I’d recently published a book about AI and human consciousness and had spent that year speaking on panels with people who insisted that our minds were fundamentally computational and determined, conclusions that were not so different, on their surface, from the meditation lectures I’d been listening to about the illusory nature of the self. It occurred to me that the whole notion of “sobriety” was a narrative construct I’d been imbuing for years with reality and substance, as though it were a concrete facet of my identity, as though there were a “self” to be sober.
This line of thinking, I can see now, rested on a crucial (and perhaps deliberate) misapprehension of these teachings. The point of recognising the “unreality” of thoughts was to avoid getting caught up in their seductive logic. I had drawn from the lectures the inverse conclusion: that if my thoughts were not real, then they could not possibly hurt me or have any effect on the real world. And if selfhood was just a story, then I could tell that story however I liked.
I was in Helsinki for work that December – a month that is, at that latitude, almost entirely swallowed by darkness. It was 15 below zero most mornings, and my eyes watered so constantly from the cold that I now remember the city as a blur of light: candles flickering in the windows of oyster bars, the green pulse of mastheads gliding into the harbour. In the mornings, magnificent plumes of pink smoke billowed out of chimneys, and during the slender hours of daylight, all the buildings were cast in a rose-coloured light that seemed to belong to both dawn and dusk. The Christmas market was set up in the middle of town, and many of the tents sold cups of glögi, the traditional mulled wine, in large metal vats.
I was doing some shopping on my last night, wandering from booth to booth, encased in my parka, looking at the wooden nativities, the long taper candles, the meat pastries. Some of the tents offered glögi in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic varieties. I was very cold. I reached for my wallet, approached one of the vendors and ordered a glass of the non-alcoholic kind. The woman behind the table did not hear me, or did not understand my pronunciation. “Which one?” she asked in English. She picked up the small chalkboard sign on which the two alternatives were listed, and when I pointed, I found my finger gravitating, without hesitation, towards the other option. It was a split-second decision, a reckless act.
That’s how it felt as I paid for the drink and took it, my heart pounding.
I told myself it was a misunderstanding. I walked towards the bin to throw it away, but before I did, I took off the lid and drank half of it, maybe more. Then I left the market and walked two blocks to a restaurant. It was there, at the entrance to the restaurant, that I felt it, though it was not euphoria or religious rapture. It wasn’t even pleasant. I felt blurry and slightly confused. I ate, and the fogginess subsided, then turned into an awful depression.
I walked back to the hotel in the cold, consumed with a Sunday-evening emptiness that I had not felt in years. It would go away if I drank more, I thought. But the strangest thing was that I did not want more. I felt precisely the way I’d heard “normal” drinkers describe feeling after a single drink: tired, sedated, eager to reclaim their clarity of mind with a coffee or a glass of water. Eleven years had passed. All my cells had since replaced themselves. Maybe it was in fact unreasonable to think I would respond the way I had in my 20s, when I was lost and miserable. I had lived for 11 years in fear of that supposed inevitability, which some part of me must have known was not the truth, but one of the many necessary fictions on which I’d built my new life.
I did not plan to drink again after that night. I had no desire to do so, and I had given up looking for the deli kiosks and self-serve taps at airports. But then, quite suddenly, a new loophole appeared, one that fate itself supplied: QR codes. Seemingly overnight, they were bolted to every table and printed on the backs of menus, initiating the miracle of contactless service that allowed you to order without speaking your sin aloud.
I was flying out of Nashville one morning, a brilliantly sunny February day that felt like spring. I’d arrived at the airport three hours before my flight and found myself, immediately after passing security, at a restaurant with QR codes on the table. A seating area below some skylights. Pop music from the previous decade over the speakers. I sat at the table and ordered a burger and a glass of white wine. The first one went straight to my head. I ordered a second before my food arrived. That was when it happened. Then or just after I’d started the third.
When I tell this story at meetings, I don’t linger on this moment, but instead flash forward several hours to the layover at O’Hare, where I switched to vodka and ended up on my knees in the women’s bathroom, vomiting into a toilet that kept flushing automatically because my head was triggering the sensor. In meetings, I talk about how I almost missed my connecting flight, and I recall the waves of shame, relief and disappointment I felt later that night, when my husband picked me up from the airport and it became clear that he did not suspect anything.
I do not talk about that moment in Nashville, finishing my second or beginning my third, when I noticed for the first time the late-morning light that fell from the skylights, purely and simply, on to the surface of my table; the warmth that came down and lifted me out of my life, out of time, and placed me in a chamber where I could see everything from a position of cosmic indifference, a perspective that captures how life must look from the vantage of eternity, where it’s possible to see how the totality of a person’s temptations, digressions and errors contribute to the compositional beauty that makes up a life. I thought about all the rules I’d made and almost laughed at how silly and stupid they were, how they belonged to the fearful, small-minded part of myself who was deluded about what really mattered, and for whom I felt enormous compassion, the way you do for a child, because even the delusions were beautiful and belonged to the expansive order of the composition.
I do not talk about this moment at meetings because I would be guilty of romanticising and elevating an act of reckless self-destruction – and also, more importantly, because words are but resounding gongs and clanging cymbals, because it is impossible to describe in language that singularity where time dissolves, and all utterance fades into light, and which entirely consumed me that morning as I sat alone, dumbstruck in the winter sunlight, wondering how on earth I had ever consented to give this up.
The following nine months were, objectively speaking, the most boring period of my entire history with alcohol. They were also the purest and most perfect. There was nothing standing between myself and the bottomless freefall of bliss. I was not trying to prove anything. I was no longer under the delusion that I could control it; the only objective was to contain it. The experience was very nearly ascetic. I limited myself to airports and hotel rooms. I never spoke to anyone, except to request the cheque or to ask, at the hotel desk, where the ice machine was, though even these small transactions were minimised by the digital interfaces that had suddenly gone up everywhere, and which appeared to have been designed specifically for people in my position, people who had slipped between the cracks of their lives and were entirely content to remain in the cracks, unobserved by the world of conscience and daylight.
I did speak to my husband, on the phone and sometimes in person, on the days when I came home not yet entirely clear. These conversations caused a great deal of anxiety, though the anxiety did not arrive until the next day, an anvil of terror and guilt as soon as I woke up, because in the moment I had been floating 10,000 miles above my body.
I had spent a decade of my life – a formative decade, the first of adulthood – perfecting the art of dissemblance, and I fell back into the groove of these tactics through sheer muscle memory. It was like riding a bicycle. Arriving home an hour before he returned, I knew instinctively to get into the bath – an old trick, one that offered a rationale for flushed cheeks, plus the tub created a barrier, as did the fragrant suds, to the smell of alcohol leaving the pores.
Each binge was a controlled explosion, safely contained from the rest of my life. I reasoned they were hurting no one, and it’s true that for a while there were few consequences. Or perhaps I am cursed with “euphoric recall” – the inability to remember the lows with the same vivid resolution as the highs. I do remember the vomiting, both during and after.
It made a difference, whether it was during or after. During was not entirely unpleasant: you kneeled and opened your mouth and your body took it from there – there was nothing to it. And you always felt better afterwards, empty and slightly more sober, ready to drink more. It was a cleansing that literalised the central promise of the intoxicated mind: that every error could be undone, that all the tapes could be reversed, that all would be well.
After was a different story. The body still took over, but it was with churning, mechanical violence – or perhaps the problem was that the mind on those wretched mornings was not willing to play along, was not able to let go and surrender to the process. You tasted everything coming up, there was no way to avoid it, and it was not the blameless liquid that had escaped so easily the night before, but all the filth that had festered in your stomach for hours, the shame of whatever you had eaten and forgotten you had eaten before passing out. The clear afterbirth that followed, pure stomach acid that burned the back of your throat and tasted like death itself, acid you had to cough to get out.
And that was not even the end of it, because there was also the empty heaving, the eternity during which you sat on the cold tile floor, praying it was over, occasionally spitting fire into a wad of toilet paper, conscious the whole time of how close you were to death, grateful only that you did not see any bile.
There was so much to be grateful for during those months. I had forgotten about this, how any period of dissolution brings you into such close proximity to the gratuitous abundance of human kindness. I had experienced it throughout my 20s: the cab driver who picked me up when I was passed out on a kerb, drove me to the address on my licence, carried me up the stairs to my apartment and laid me on the couch, where he left me unharmed. The pharmacist who could have reported me for trying to fill an expired script (the date changed by one number), and who instead saw that I was shaking with withdrawal and told me to meet her outside, where she slipped me two pills and the number of a local detox centre. The woman who stopped at my table in the rehab cafeteria, where I was sitting alone, sobbing, and told me it would get better, her voice so full of calm authority that I assumed she was a doctor or a therapist, or perhaps an angel, and whom I discovered later was a patient who’d been admitted only three days before me.
The dangers this time around were not as extreme, but I was still frequently the recipient of baffling acts of compassion. The woman at the airport bar who paid my tab when I realised I was about to miss my flight. The flight attendant who brought me aspirin when I was vomiting in the aeroplane toilet. The librarian who was so entirely forgiving when I cancelled the virtual panel she had organised on the morning it was supposed to take place, and who may or may not have bought my line about a stomach virus.
These were not heroic acts, but the kindness was so entirely undeserved – in fact, the opposite of what I deserved – that it felt like grace in its most intense form, the grace of the reformers, unmerited favour “given to the most undeserving and unworthy”, as Luther said. We should all pity those perpetually capable, functioning adults who have never experienced this grace, which is among the rare miracles of this life.
One afternoon, as I was boarding a flight, I received a voicemail from the teenage son of one of my mother’s friends. I had not spoken to this kid – I still thought of him as a kid, though he was now 18 – for several years, but I’d heard through the family grapevine that he had just completed his second or third stint in rehab. His voice in the message was sullen and compulsory; it was clear that his mother had given him my number and urged him to call. But when I called him back, soon after arriving on the east coast and checking into my hotel, I was surprised to hear real desperation in his voice.
He’d been sent to rehab this last time, he said, after an overdose that may or may not have been a suicide attempt – he was not totally sure himself – and had been thrown out of the institution for smuggling in pills. He was now back at home with his mum, trying to go to recovery meetings. There were lots of people his age who were excited about sobriety, but he did not feel that way. He said that he could not picture his life without drugs and alcohol, that it was the most depressing thing he could imagine. There was an exhaustion in his voice that seemed to belong to someone much older, not a child who had his whole life ahead of him.
I listened for a long time and then said everything I knew to say: I told him that I loved alcohol more than anything, more than any person or thing, more than God. I said the thing about addiction is that it demands everything; no sacrifice is ever enough. I said that he could have this one luminous thing, or he could have everything else, which is to say every experience, every possibility, all the ups and downs that make up a life. I said these things and meant them. I truly believed, as I sat there on the floor of my hotel room, looking out at the freezing rain, that his life would be better if he could stay on the right side of that equation, just as mine had been better for doing so. I also, at the same time, believed that if I wanted to choose the single luminous object over a rich and full life, it was my business.
He asked how long I had been sober.
Eleven years, I said.
How hard it was during that year to say that number out loud! My whole life had become a lie, though so long as I remained in the realm of language and narrative, as opposed to the inflexible mathematics of time, it was easy to believe that nothing had changed. The story of my life was one I had been telling for more than a decade, and I believed it was strong enough to sustain private infractions. Or perhaps the point of the infractions was to discover how much the story could sustain. As far as everyone in my life was concerned, including even my husband and my closest friends, I was the same person I had always been – a person who could be counted on to keep an extra set of keys to your house, or to be named the godmother to your child, or to offer wise counsel to a kid who’d just got out of rehab.
I don’t pretend to remember exactly what I was thinking during this time, or all the convoluted ways I rationalised my actions to myself, but I do remember the fundamental inability to buy into the reality of my secret life, and the inarticulate conviction that so long as the official version of my life continued without hiccup, that was what counted. I felt like a marine crustacean whose shell remained on shore, a solid proxy for its being, while the animal inside slithered off into the sea.
This is an edited extract from Will and Attention, published by Little, Brown. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
