Drinking: A Love Story

The drink released this current, let it stream up and out. There was a fuck-you element to it: a feeling of fuck you, I am going to get what I want, even if I don’t believe I deserve it. Frustration and shame and fear and self-loathing and release, all rolled into one, all liquified and drained away by drink.

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 can see the rocking now as a first addiction of sorts. It calmed me, took me out of myself, gave me a sense of relief.

her lack of information on this subject signaled some fundamental weakness or failure on her part.

The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic’s body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic’s.

I still don’t know, today, if that hunger originated within the family or if it was something I was simply born with. In the end I don’t suppose it matters. You get your comfort where you can.

The truth gnaws at you. In periodic flashes like that I’d be painfully aware that I was living badly, just plain living wrong. But I refused to completely acknowledge or act on that awareness, so the feeling just festered inside like a tumor, gradually eating away at my sense of dignity. You know and you don’t know. You know and you won’t know, and

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

These were tiny realizations, perceived as the little oddities of others, but they spoke to a quality of spareness in our house, a shying away from things sensual, a certain difficulty with indulgence. I snooped through that bathroom with a combination of longing and disdain, sensing that my family was different and that I wasn’t supposed to want s