Drinking: A Love Story
A man I know named Alex describes himself as a gregarious introvert: he can't stand being alone, can't stand sitting quitely with his own thoughts, and yet he is terribly shy. So when he discovered drink, in high school, he thought: Ah, the elixir. He could talk to anyone after a beer or two or three. The deep thing that made him grimace and squirm, the part that felt like a dry, steady itch of discomfort, just washed away. His whole being seemed to fall into place.
p 65
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 msised some key set of instructions about how to use them. I used to feel that way on Sunday mornings, when I'd wake up alone in the apartment with n othing before me but unstructured time. Here I am, in my aprartment. Here I am, puttering through the kitchen. Here I am, washing a dish and setting it on the rack. Here I am... conscious of being alone, conscious of my breath and my own skin and my own thoughts; here I am, waiting waiting waiting and if I keep doing this, if I don't find some way out of my own head, I'll die of boredom or go insane or explode at any moment.
p 114
Drink alcoholically for long enough and you start to get the feeling that things in life just happen to you, as thought you're living in a video, or reading from a script that someone else has written. Life becomes a big, unwieldy set of scenes and all you can do is play your part: enter stage left; exit stage right; read the lines; just pray the critics haven't made it to the show. To an alcoholic, deception is an intergral part of the script, the key element.
p 195
Reality sets in at last, chips away at denial. Some of us lose our jobs, or our spouses, or our children. Some of us get into car wrecks, or are ordered by judges to go to AA. For a man I know named Richard, hitting bottom meant reaching a level of self-loathing so deep that all he wanted to do was kill himself, and then hating himself even more because he didn't have the guts to do it... If you saw him on the street, even when they were drinking, you'd never know a thing. Hitting bottom is usually something that happens internally, where no one else can see it.
p 217
My professional identity was the only part of my life that seemed intact, and words felt like my one solid link to the world, my sole route to a kind of contact that had integrity. I thought about Ernest Hemingway, who'd killed himself with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and about James Agee, who died of alcoholism at the age of forty-five. I had a dark, heavy sense of resignation, inevitably, as though I were in a box and simply couldn't get out.
p 238
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, to 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.
p 258
Really good book.
p 65
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 msised some key set of instructions about how to use them. I used to feel that way on Sunday mornings, when I'd wake up alone in the apartment with n othing before me but unstructured time. Here I am, in my aprartment. Here I am, puttering through the kitchen. Here I am, washing a dish and setting it on the rack. Here I am... conscious of being alone, conscious of my breath and my own skin and my own thoughts; here I am, waiting waiting waiting and if I keep doing this, if I don't find some way out of my own head, I'll die of boredom or go insane or explode at any moment.
p 114
Drink alcoholically for long enough and you start to get the feeling that things in life just happen to you, as thought you're living in a video, or reading from a script that someone else has written. Life becomes a big, unwieldy set of scenes and all you can do is play your part: enter stage left; exit stage right; read the lines; just pray the critics haven't made it to the show. To an alcoholic, deception is an intergral part of the script, the key element.
p 195
Reality sets in at last, chips away at denial. Some of us lose our jobs, or our spouses, or our children. Some of us get into car wrecks, or are ordered by judges to go to AA. For a man I know named Richard, hitting bottom meant reaching a level of self-loathing so deep that all he wanted to do was kill himself, and then hating himself even more because he didn't have the guts to do it... If you saw him on the street, even when they were drinking, you'd never know a thing. Hitting bottom is usually something that happens internally, where no one else can see it.
p 217
My professional identity was the only part of my life that seemed intact, and words felt like my one solid link to the world, my sole route to a kind of contact that had integrity. I thought about Ernest Hemingway, who'd killed himself with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and about James Agee, who died of alcoholism at the age of forty-five. I had a dark, heavy sense of resignation, inevitably, as though I were in a box and simply couldn't get out.
p 238
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, to 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.
p 258
Really good book.