living in oblivion
Sarah Hepola pieces together the memories she lost after years of using alcohol as a release
What it’s like to live with an addiction.
Ialways prided myself on being a girl who drank. You know the kind: young, single, empowered. In 2005, I was (barely) making a living as a writer. I was in my early thirties, knocking back martinis with friends at bars, where we complained about work and men. Sometimes we met for Sunday brunch, where we squinted through our hangovers and laughed about bad decisions, and every once in a while someone would say, “I seriously have a drinking problem,” which always got a laugh. It was understood – it was a punchline.
But I seriously did have a drinking problem, although it would take years to admit as much. For a long time, it masqueraded as normal, big-city indulgence. We’d all woken up with a mouth like the Sahara and patchy spots in our memory. We’d all tapped out a nervous text the next morning: “Did I do anything… weird?” But it happened to me more than most.
There is no simple litmus test to identify a drinking problem, but the best place to start is to examine the evidence. To count the empties, if you will. My friends had a handful of those mornings. I had dozens. To say how many drinks I was averaging a day is problematic. For one, I don’t know the answer. Some nights I had three beers and went to bed. Others I drank until 4am and couldn’t remember how much I drank (10 drinks? 14?).
I was never a daily drinker, but I drank more than I wanted to. How many drinks depended on the day, my mood, my body size that year, whether or not I was heartbroken that week, whether there was an open bar. It’s just too hard to generalise when I’m summarising a 25-year drinking career. My drinking started early. That’s another red flag, although for decades, I considered it a bragging right. It began at home, stealing sips of beer from my parents’ stash when I was seven. I would take a few pulls from the can and spin around the living room as the buzz trickled all the way down to my toes. My parents were moderate drinkers who never caught on or even suspected. I was a straight-a student. A teacher’s pet. One of the great myths of childhood is there are Bad Girls and Good Girls, when most of us are carrying around the tool set for both. You can imagine my thrill when my private indulgence gained social currency.
By my teen years, drinking was cool, rebellious, sexy. I watched friends actually train themselves to drink. They laboured to tolerate the sourness of beer and pushed themselves not to fall asleep after two cocktails. Meanwhile, I knocked back beer after beer. (My Irish-finnish heritage might have cursed me with stubby peasant thighs, but it also gave me an effortless constitution for booze.) I was so good at drinking that I became a caretaker for those who weren’t. Holding back someone’s hair as they puked. Swapping out someone’s third drink with a glass of water. The girls with real problems were rushed to the emergency ward, dispatched to treatment centres. I felt bad for them, but I also thought: lightweights.
My consumption blossomed at university, where alcohol was our tribal ritual, but also my booster shot of courage. I always thought I’d make a strong student – arguing with men, challenging the professor – but I felt intimidated most of the time and rarely spoke in class. At night, though, warmed by the lapping fires of red wine and homemade margaritas, I could find my voice. Alcohol unlocked a bravado I had craved all my life. I had always longed to be one of those swaggering women, with their tart tongues and their lightning zaps of authority, but I was stuck in a people-pleaser’s body. Drinking gave me the lion’s roar.
It also presented new problems. I woke up some mornings with pieces of the evening missing. How did we get home last night? Why is so-and-so mad at me? I had blackouts: episodes of alcohol-induced amnesia in which you keep talking and interacting with people while your long-term memory shuts down, and the next day you have no clue what you’ve said. I had a blackout the first time I got drunk, a few weeks shy of my 12th birthday, and the following morning, my cousin
informed me in a solemn voice about all my crazy antics. Running around without trousers. Sobbing on the stairs. I felt like my body was hijacked by an evil twin: how was it possible to do something and have no memory of it?
Not everyone can have a blackout (only about 50 per cent of drinkers will, probably for genetic reasons), but they’re common in binge-drinking environments, because they’re caused by a spike in the blood-alcohol level. Drinking fast and on an empty stomach are major risk factors for blackout. So is being a woman because we tend to be smaller and our bodies metabolise alcohol slower. My blackouts became more frequent at university, where I had developed a taste for whisky and tequila, and those blank-space mornings unmoored me each time. I woke up in a panic: “What did I do? What did I say?”
The older I got, however, the less panic they induced. Friends had the occasional blackout. It was no big deal, right? My secret anguish became a new normal. Normal. We all want to be assured our drinking patterns fall on the spectrum of no-big-deal drinking, but “normal” is not a fixed point. My twenties coincided with the rise of the liberated single woman – the Carrie Bradshaw years. It was “normal” to have 10 drinks in a night. I spent my 30th birthday eating sushi and drinking so much champagne I vomited it all by midnight. It turns out this was a great metaphor for the next five years.
At 31, I moved to New York, where bars stayed open until 4am, cabs ferried me home safely as I slumped in the backseat and stores sold beer all night. The dream, right? Except it was a slow slide off the “normal” spectrum and into the “drinking problem” red zone. More evidence was accumulating: I often woke up in my apartment with no clue how I’d got home. I went to Paris on a magazine assignment and, after a night dipped in cognac, I fell into a blackout and re-emerged in the middle of having sex with a man I couldn’t even remember meeting. It was one of the most confounding moments of my life. A year later, I had to move out of my apartment after an incident where I drunkenly passed out while boiling a pot of water, and the landlord’s son almost had to break down my door with a fire extinguisher. I knew I had a problem. But I thought I could manage it.
Drinking was the centrepiece of my social life, the only path to sex and romance I knew. Can you imagine a blind date without alcohol? Can you imagine a Friday night? I’d be doomed. I developed a habit of buying a sixpack on my way home from happy hour with the girls. I just needed more. (Red flag: the constant need for more.) Drinking at home assured I’d stay out of trouble (red flag), although I shook up my purchasing pattern so no store owner ever knew how often I bought booze (red flag). I must have screwed up, though, because one day I was handing the cashier some money when he met my gaze, and the look in his warm brown eyes cut me. Was it judgement? Pity? Sympathy? Sorrow? I still don’t know, but I could tell from his look that he saw me at that moment in exactly the way I didn’t want to be seen. I never went back into his store. Screw that guy, I’d buy my beer somewhere else.
Everyone wants one piece of evidence to hold up in court so that a complicated decision becomes utterly clear: I must quit drinking. Instead, I experienced an escalating series of scrapes and near misses, humiliations and moral compromises. The epiphany was not a lightning flash so much as a dimmer switch. Friends confronted me gently. Credit card companies confronted me with no gentleness whatsoever. Although booze had long been a creative elixir, the magic stopped working. I couldn’t write anymore. With hangovers, benders and the shame in between, my work was suffering. My body was, too. I’d neglected it for years, pelting it with booze at night and carbs the next morning. I had a stomach ulcer and was 22 kilos overweight.
I quit drinking at 35. I didn’t “just stop”; I “just stopped” about 100 times. The last of my drinking years are a portrait of me on the ropes: maybe if I only drink on weekends; maybe if I only keep to wine and beer; maybe if I get a new apartment, a boyfriend, a yoga routine. I kept friends and family at arm’s length, trying to wrestle the sucker to the mat on my own. I’d quit for a week, and start up again. I’d quit in the morning and change my mind by noon. I didn’t want to be an “alcoholic” – that dirty word, so haunting and final. So I tried everything else: yoga, therapy, antidepressants. Nothing worked.
If you get desperate enough, you’ll try anything. I tried AA. The whole cliché: 12 steps, serenity prayer, all that nonsense. The even bigger cliché: it worked. And still does today. It’s been five years, and sometimes I miss drinking: the easy camaraderie, the full-body loosening. Sometimes I see a martini glass, the liquid sloshing up to the rim, and my mouth waters remembering the delirious sting of the first sip, that cool abandon.
But I don’t miss the hangovers, or the degradation, or figuring out what I did last night and who needs an apology. When I stopped reaching for a drink to fix any discomfort, I also started to find comfort on my own. My body grew healthier and happier. The stomach ulcer and my self-hatred have become manageable instead of overwhelming. I became a more reliable writer. A more reliable friend. Everything I was drinking to achieve I’ve found in my sober life: creative inspiration, closeness with people, erotic adventure and true confidence, the kind that doesn’t come from a bottle. I pride myself on knowing who I am now. That’s real power.
“After a night dipped in cognac, I fell into a blackout and re-emerged in the middle of having sex with a man I couldn’t remember meeting”