The horrible thing about being sober is you lose your excuse for being so fucked up.

know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was. Only the is.

If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn’t even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape.

I’m highly sensitive, so I would have sensed—I believed—if I were being incredibly annoying. Which is exactly how annoying people justify being so insufferable.

We can continue to live exactly as we do right now, in a heavy-lidded state of love and unspeakable compromise. Isn’t that what people do? Every day? Don’t they ache but rename it tired?

Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn’t want because they were free.

“A novel by Augusten Burroughs.” It said so, right there below the title. It was thrilling for maybe forty-seven seconds, and then the thrill drained right away. As I walked out of the store with my phone now in my pocket, I thought, It doesn’t matter what it is. We get used to it. Which is both good and bad.

I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn’t enough.

“The really fucked-up thing about being an alcoholic who doesn’t drink anymore is that on days when you really, really need a drink to take off the edge, all you get to do is wait for the edge to pass on its own.”