Drinking: A Love Story

That kind of behavior is driven by an information-as-power equation, a wish to see yourself as an insider, a person equipped with Certain Facts.

“Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.”

This is all a giant procrastination and you must deal with it. You must.

a way of overcompensating: we learn to pretend we have opinions because deep in our own hearts, we really don’t.

My whole sense of reality was tied into the deception, built into the façades. To be honest would have meant dismantling the whole structure, all the assumptions and impressions about myself I’d worked so hard to create: I’m together, in control; I’m the person you want me to be. To tell the truth would have meant disclosing my full self, owning up

I had a fantasy of myself drinking just then, not drinking in the sophisticated, martini-glass sense but in the raging, obliterating sense, drinking to get drunk, drinking in order to yield to that rebellious urge and show everyone in the room just how angry I was, just how out of place I felt, just how self-destructive I could be in response.

very few people who drink alcoholically can learn to feel like powerful players in their own lives; all the strength comes out of a bottle.

“You’d drink, too, if you had my problems.” That’s the thinking. “I’m not unhappy because I drink; I drink because I am unhappy.” That is the logic, and every alcoholic on the planet uses it.

You take away the drink and you take away the single most important method of coping you have. How to talk to people without a drink. How to sit on the sofa and watch TV and not crawl right out of your own skin. How to experience a real emotion—pain or anxiety or sadness—without an escape route, a quick way to anesthetize it. How to sleep at night.