Sublime

I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.

Rather, as I got sicker that winter, I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. On most days, I felt like a mechanism that moved arduously through the world simply trying to complete its tasks.

I am slowly making my way from a hypnotized engine of delusion and self-obsession to being a bit more real, a smidge more alive more often.

Almost by definition alcoholics are lousy at relationships. We melt into them in that muddied, liquid way, rather than marching into them with any real sense of strength or self-awareness. We become so accustomed to transforming ourselves into new and improved versions of ourselves that we lose the core version, the version we were born with, the v

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

I didn’t know how to be real, how to tell the truth: that was the heart of the matter. My whole sense of reality was tied into the deception, built into the façades.

I am susceptible to frivolity. I know this about myself. I love beauty; I am weak to surfaces; I am apt to mistake eccentricity for character. I drink more than I should. I love overdressing; I love staying up past midnight; I love breakfasts at all-night diners, and the Irish coffees you order when you can’t decide whether it’s night or morning.

At Westwind, for what felt like the first time, I was seeing, smelling, feeling, experiencing. This type of encounter was an engagement with reality that was precious, and quickly becoming addictive.

I wonder if this is because I need to check my shame levels daily, like a diabetic checks her insulin levels.