"Quotable:
My mother understood that drinking was more dangerous [than smoking] and she understood why: smoking could ruin my body; drinking could ruin my mind and my future. It could eat its way through my life in exactly the same way a physical cancer eats its way through bones and blood and tissue, destroying everything.

Beneath my own witty, professional façade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt. I once heard alcoholism described in an AA meeting, with eminent simplicity, as “fear of life,� and that seems to sum up the condition quite nicely.

One of the first things you hear in AA � one if the first things that makes core, gut-level sense � is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically. The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you drink in order to transform yourself, when you drink and become someone you’re not, when you do this over and over and over, your relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear. You lose your bearings, the ground underneath you begins to feel shaky. After a while you don’t even know the most basic things about yourself � what you’re afraid of, what feels good and bad, what you need in order to feel comforted and calm � because you’ve never given yourself a chance, a clear sober chance, to find out.

No is an extraordinarily complicated word when you’re drunk. This isn’t just because drinking impairs your judgment in specific situations, like parties or dates (which it certainly may); it’s because drinking interferes with the larger, murkier business of identity, of forming a sense of the self as strong and capable and aware. This is a difficult task for all human beings, but it’s particularly difficult for women and it’s close to impossible for women who drink.

I was too cautious and inhibited and scared to give in to extremism of any kind in sobriety, emotional or otherwise. But when I drank, it happened. When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy grew bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew louder than the no.

Drinking alone is enormously self-protective, at least in theory. The solitude relives you of human contact, which can feel burdensome to even the most gregarious alcoholic, and the alcohol relives you of your own thoughts, of the dark pressure of your own company. Drinking alone is what you do when you can’t stand the feeling of living in your own skin.

There’s something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia, that disabuses you of the belief in externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid.

Booze: the liquid security blanket; the substance that muffles emptiness and anger like a clod snow.

I understood that a beer, and the one after that and the bottle of wine after that, served a very specific purpose: it kept me from that piercing conscience of self, kept me from the task of learning to tolerate my own company.
Without liquor I’d feel like a trapped animal, which is why I always had it. Without liquor I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I mean that in the most literal sense, as though my thoughts and my limbs were foreign to me and I’d missed some key instructions about how to use them.

A lot of alcoholics use the cucumber to pickle analogy to describe a phenomenon: a true alcoholic is someone who’s turned from a cucumber into a pickle; you can try to stop a cucumber from turning into a pickle, but there’s no way you can turn a pickle back into a cucumber.

You know that bumper sticker that says SHIT HAPPENS? That pretty much sums it up for me. Shit happens. So what? Why analyze it? I just don’t want to analyze it anymore.

Attaching all your hopes and fantasies to something � or someone � outside yourself almost always has disastrous results.

Al-Anon estimates that every alcoholic’s drinking affects at least four other people.

Alcoholics drink in order to ease the very pain that the drinking helps create. That’s another one of the great puzzles behind liquor, the great paradoxes. You hurt, you drink; you hurt some more, you take up the intake. I the process, of course, you lose any chance you might have had to heal authentically.

Instead of making the painful choice, instead of walking away or standing up for myself, or figuring out what I really needed, I’d drink, and the drink would make me succumb to the dynamic, succumb to the relationship and the anger.

Fact One: I drank too much.
Fact Two: I was desperately unhappy.
I had always thought : I drink because I’m unhappy. Just then, I shifted the equation, rearranged the words: Maybe, just maybe, I’m unhappy because I drink.

Better. The word seems thin, even a little deceptive. Sobriety is less about “getting better� in a clear, linear sense than it is about subjecting yourself to change, to the inevitable ups and downs, fears and feelings, victories and failures, that accompany growth. You do get better � or at least you can � but that happens almost by default, by the simple fact of being present in your own life, of being aware and able, finally, to act on the connections you make.

When you’re actively alcoholic, you don’t bother to solve problems, even petty ones, in part because you have no faith in your ability to make changes and in part because even the smallest changes seem improbable and risky. You begin to feel like you’re trapped in quicksand: any move you make threatens to drag you down farther so after a while you just stop, resign yourself to the most complete form of inertia. You get so used to being a passive participant in your own life, so used to being entrenched in the same gray rituals and patterns, that even the most trivial action seems useless and overwhelming.

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

Not drinking is a choice one makes every day, sometimes many times a day. The immediate decision is clear: either you pick up the glass or you don’t.

Alcohol is what shielded me all those years from the messy business of standing in that room with my emotions, coming to terms with my own quiet, restrained, complicated heritage, finding ways to tend to my own needs, instead of waiting for others to jump in and tend to them for me. In a word, alcohol is what protected me from growing up.

My terror that I’d be bored and lonely in sobriety abated almost immediately. In fact, as time goes on, I become more aware of how bored and lonely I was while I was drinking, and how much more textured and varied my life seems without it.

When you’re drinking, you’re too cloudy and too angry to step back. You can’t see clearly and you certainly can’t see that you have choices in how to deal with people, how to negotiate relationships.
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