Previous entries in the series can be found here.
The second time I blacked out I was nineteen, back in Kentucky for winter break of my freshman year, and discovering the true meaning of homesickness. What began in my friend’s UK dorm room with whiskey and ABBA karaoke ended with me driving home completely unaware, then sobbing/vomiting so loudly that I woke my dad up.
The next day he and I would have the first of a series of conversations on the subject of Drinking, and my friend and I would have what has now become a regular Piecing the Night Back Together Recap. I lost about three hours of the evening. Apparently we went to a frat house and some short, stubby guy—I’m a magnet for fire-hydrant-shaped men—followed me around all night. I may or may not have kissed him on the neck. And when I took the car—my father’s—to pick up Chipotle the next afternoon I noticed twin cigarette burns on the driver’s seat in a spot a few inches from my crotch.
In high school I drank with friends in their basements. There wasn’t much to do in my town, and since we were underage there was nowhere to go to do our drinking. Our houses were grouped in a tight constellation around a local park, and we’d get blasted, then play on the swing sets or ran the bases at the field till we were all tuckered out. We drank a lot, with the kind of courage that comes from having no idea how much gets you too drunk. We stored the $9 handles of locally made vodka in our cars, and the poisonous stuff retained its solar heat for hours, even when we were able to scrounge up some ice.
The first time I blacked out I was eighteen, and in my final year of high school. I was drinking that same vodka straight from the bottle, balancing my left flank on the edge of the pool table in a basement. Then suddenly I woke up and I was wearing only a soiled soccer jersey, and my back and ass were tender, painted with rug burns. The night before, my friends had dragged my naked body up the carpeted stairs and threw me into the bathtub, where I snarled, wolflike, at them and rammed my fingers down my throat to induce vomiting.
That’s the worst I’ve ever been, I think, and since then my blackout behavior changed considerably. I went from this violent savage to a charmingly unstable talk show host: a cross between Charles Bukowski and Kelly Ripa. I’m always chain-smoking while I interrogate people about “what projects you’re working on” and “what are your musical inspirations?”
I think that this shift is due mostly to a change in my relationship with drinking: why I drink and who I drink with, that sort of thing. A change in scenery. I’ve never been able to replicate the kind of subterranean comfort of those basement jags. Instead, I drink to stave off that paranoia I think most people have, that feeling that everyone around you secretly thinks you’re a joke or—worse—doesn’t think of you at all. With the help of my blackout alter ego I can blend into any social setting. I can relate to anyone.
People are always surprised when they discover the next day that I have no memory of what happened the night before. “You seemed fine,” they say. “Fine” being the operative word. I think that they don’t notice because they’re not paying attention. And there’s no reason for them to do so. If they do notice something’s off it’s normally because I’ve done something wild and a little sociopathic, but funny, like throw ice at strangers or asking middle-aged men if they’ve read Lolita.
I’ve been developing this alter ego over my four years in college, and at this point she is so fine-tuned she can respond to any crisis. I call her Cha Cha. Cha Cha is charismatic and compassionate, able to schmooze with strangers or comfort a hysterical friend. Before I go out for the night I set up my face wash, toothbrush, PJs, and a bottle of water. When I wake up in the morning Cha Cha has cleaned, clothed, and cared for me. I feel like I’m underwater for the first couple of hours, then I resurface with only traces of seasickness. Lately, though, Cha Cha has been slipping up. I’ll wake up and one part of the routine has gone awry: I’m naked or I’m so hungover I think I’ll pass out from the pain.
It used to be that once Cha Cha took over I could tackle any situation, no matter how uncomfortable or serious. One summer night, my friends and I hopped into a stranger’s car when he offered to take us anywhere in the city for $5. He was quickly pulled over and breathalyzed—quite obviously smashed behind the wheel. The policeman questioned us, and when he determined we didn’t know the man, he volunteered to chauffer us to our next location. Sitting in the backseat of his car, Cha Cha was a delightful combination of sassy and sycophantic. She fished out his wide-brimmed sheriff’s hat from behind the seat and threw it on, peppering him with questions about his training and background. By the time she arrived at her friend’s party, she had a new best friend.
Even when I was living in New York last year, Cha Cha never steered me wrong. I made it from the 6-train stop on 28th street back to my apartment three blocks over with an evening’s worth of drinks sloshing in my stomach and zero memory of the commute. However, that was the year the migraines started, and I spent the days after these jaunts in my room with the blinds drawn, watching Seinfeld and drinking coconut water.
Lately Cha Cha has been making more and more mistakes. The hangovers are getting worse, and they start around 5 PM the next day because I’m still drunk the next morning. The mysterious bruises, once a funny anecdote, are showing up larger and in more alarming places—last month I found a huge mark on my upper inner thigh. In the mornings my phone is lit up with text messages that hint at some sinister, passive-aggressive dealings with friends or boys. She never used to drunk text people, that was our agreed-upon policy. Who knows what dramas she’s been stirring up without my knowledge.
I woke up recently with a guy nicknamed Porkchop in my bed. We were sleeping head to toe, and his feet were in my face. The curtain was open and the Christmas lights above me were still plugged in; I think the sun had woken me up. We were both naked, but I was under all the covers and he was on top with just my throw blanket draped over him. I was scared. I tried hard to remember what had happened, and it only came back in brief echoes.
In the past I’d thought abstractly about having sex with Porkchop, but for me it was one of those things you fantasize about but never do. The fantasy is all you need. I knew underneath it all that if it did happen it wouldn’t be close to how I imagined it. It would probably be a nightmare. And I think I was right, although I can never know beyond the pain that came the next day when I walked or sat down or peed. I will never know what happened to me. What bothers me the most is that I’ll never really know if I wanted to do it.
Part of me feels like Cha Cha represents the best in me. She’s happier than I’ve ever been, from what I can see in the photographic records. She moves around with ease. I know that sounds meaningless but it’s something I think about often. Because I think it’s difficult sometimes to be a person, a daily person. Walking to class, figuring out what time to eat lunch, fitting exercise into my schedule. At some point I give up and stay in my room. And Cha Cha communicates effortlessly, which I find painful. She’s incredibly popular. Sometimes I walk around campus and pass people who look at me like they know me, but I’ve no memory of meeting them. They start to smile, but they recognize the look of confusion on my face and shuffle off embarrassedly. These interactions hint at a whole other world hidden from me, where I am a celebrity. I’ve tried so many times to imagine what these nights are like and I can only come up with that scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes where Marilyn Monroe is surrounded by adoring, tuxedoed gentlemen.
Cha Cha acts out my fantasies. She taps into this part of me, this need I have for a mesmerized audience. She took that daydream of Porkchop and put it into action. I’ll never know why she did it, though. She has none of the blocks I normally set for myself, the reasons to avoid conflict or intimacy. And she has very little regard for my feelings. I do think she’s an improvement from that flailing she-wolf I used to become, but in some ways she’s the same thing.
When I wake up in the afternoon, the feeling is the same. I’m battered and sick, sticky with night sweat and weak from dehydration and hunger. Those are the moments. You know when you drink a lot and then the next day your body just wakes up at 7 AM on its own? Those are the moments. I haven’t had enough sleeping time to fully heal. It’s like I’m opening my eyes for the first time after a car accident. The lights bloom in bursts through my eyelids first, my body reanimates itself one digit at a time; I’m learning again how to breathe.
And I feel completely alone, realizing that I’ve been alone this whole time. I can talk to people all I want about these moments, about the mechanics of blacking out or the agony of waking up from it, and they’ll nod sympathetically or look worried—or be worried—but it is impossible to understand what goes into this. I don’t really understand it myself.
At some point years ago my body took the reins from me. It decided that after a certain but unknown quantity of alcohol enters my system—from three beers to three bottles of wine—it’s going to shut off the lights in my brain. And then Cha Cha takes over, acting against both mine and my body’s wishes. And as she makes more and more mistakes, that part of me dislocates further. She turns on me, but I realize that I can’t do it without her. Every time I’ve tried to control my drinking I realize how much power she has even when I’m sober. How much I desperately, tenderly, and violently need her in order to be myself.
This post is a part of Step Out Of The Car, Please, a recurring and unglamorous series about DUIs and drinking problems that runs every Thursday. If you are interested in submitting a story either anonymously or under your own name for consideration, contact [email protected].
[Image via Flickr]
Tags: blackouts, dui series, step out of the car
this was so good, but I really wish it weren’t written in the present tense–which is to say, I can’t help but worry about the author.
Yes, this is so well-written and compelling, but my heart wants it to be fiction.
Darling writer, I hope you are getting help or can get help. The good parts of Cha Cha are really parts of you as well as the bad ones.
This is terrifying.
This was painful to read because it hits SO close to home. Which is to say, I have had very similar experiences. Carrie, take care of yourself, girl.
I’ve noticed women naming their blackout selves, or their rage selves, a lot more lately. It happens a lot on Bridezillas. It’s like they are trying to create plausible deniability for their own actions, and I think it’s pretty scary. I hope you are OK, Carrie.
You’re a great writer. I hope you get some help with this — you deserve it.
I am going to ask a tricky question which is meant sincerely and in earnest:
What is the value of this series?
I would like the writers and the commenters (and maybe the editors should they feel so inclined) to tell me in what way these entries are providing something of value to them. Is it to help get inside the mind of drunk drivers? If this is the case, can you explain why that is something that is important or meaningful for you to do? For the writers, what kind of effect are you hoping that your piece will have on readers? I don’t really understand why this series exists or why anybody feels these are stories that need to be told, but I am just one person! There are other people who may be deriving some kind of meaning from these stories that I do not, and I am curious to know what that might be.
I agree. I understand addiction and alcoholism are extremely complicated, but something about focusing an entire series on DUI offenders and the people who enable them doesn’t sit right with me. It doesn’t feel brave. It makes me angry. I feel queasy every time I see one of these posted. I just know too many people who have been killed or seriously injured by drunk drivers, and I don’t really see the point of this series. It seems like it’s normalizing selfish criminal behavior that goes beyond addiction.
Maybe I’m hard-hearted or hard-headed due to my own biases against drunk drivers, but I have zero sympathy for any of the writers in this series.
I think it helps bring to light that the people who struggle with addictions, who drive drunk and hurt other people, or who just black out and hurt themselves, are people just like you. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. The stories make me angry and sad and reflective. But the people who act this way (whether it’s because of a conscious decision, or a mental illness, or an addiction that they can’t control) are no less people than you or me.
I think, in short, everyone has a story to tell, no matter what you judge the value of that story to be. I, personally, enjoy hearing other people’s stories and really appreciate that this series gives a voice to people we may otherwise not want to hear from.
Yes, I was going to type a reply but it would have been exactly this reply, Paige.
There doesn’t always have to be a moral to the story.
Surely you can muster up some sympathy for Becky? (Becky was the one who got hit by a drunk driver on the anniversary of her cancer remission.)
Becky’s story is the only one I’m interested in hearing, but obviously I’m in the minority here. Thanks for your sincere response to critique, though.
With you.
I think it is helpful for those who relate, but cannot put words to it? And also helpful for those who cannot relate, to see that drunk drivers (whose actions are thoughtless & terrible, for sure) are still real people, rather than 2-dimensional cutouts attached to warning stories?
(I am question-marking not to sound snarky, by the way (I hope I don’t, anyway) but because my thoughts are a bit half-formed, & I’m kind of just putting them out there that way & hoping others will jump in)
Of course they are real people, but I can’t help but read these in the voices of the people who killed my friends and left my father with a brain injury. I don’t care that they’re real people because their “thoughtless and terrible” actions go far beyond them.
I can’t speak for everyone (obviously) but I can explain why I’ve really enjoyed this series.
each essay has had a different perspective–the person injured by a drunk driver, the person perhaps not yet in full “drinking problem” mode but who clearly has made some bad decisions due to alcohol, the person in recovery (x2), the person affected by someone else’s alcoholism, & now, the person who’s still (it seems) coming to terms with their relationship to drinking.
one of my good friends has been sober for a few years, & before that, we were drinking buddies. her recovery forced me to reevaluate some of my own choices & behaviors, & when I read pieces like these, it does the same thing–how much of this is familiar? how much COULD be familiar? another example: I’m definitely a “saver” who has a pretty high tolerance for clutter, & I find a similar value in watching the occasional show about hoarders. it’s part “there but for the grace of god go I,” part cautionary tale, part reminder that “I don’t think I have a problem” (or “other people don’t think I have a problem”) isn’t a guarantee that you don’t.
a lot of popular media valorizes drinking/getting drunk/”partying”/etc. while simultaneously depicting “actual alcoholics” as people who are completely out of control of their own lives. essays like this one help remind us that it’s a more porous boundary. before my friend explained to me that she was seeking treatment for alcoholism, I never would’ve suspected or suggested it myself (even the occasional “well geez I’ve never done THAT” reaction to her drinking stories didn’t register to me as a potential issue). the idea that someone close to you–someone who seems “fine,” maybe even someone who IS you–could be an alcoholic is something that’s worth remembering from time to time.
(obviously this doesn’t apply to people who abstain from alcohol or rarely drink it–but if you do enjoy drinking, I think there’s a lot of value in periodically doing an honest examination of your relationship to it.)
I started drafting a lengthy comment, but realized I didn’t really have anything to add. Very well put.
RELATED: Liquor Commercial Featuring Dance Party On Pirate Ship Also Includes Important Message About Responsibility
http://www.theonion.com/articles/liquor-commercia…
Thank you for this thoughtful response! I guess, as I was trying hopelessly to explain to Mallory, I am curious to know the audience of this series and the reasons why people read these pieces. Are they fellow alcoholics looking for shared sympathy? Or are they victims of drunk driving looking to get inside the mind of drunk drivers – and if so, is this proving useful or helpful to them? Or is it a sort of “there but for the grace of God go I” kind of rubbernecking? I think one thing that springs to mind when these pieces are published is the sort of Thought Catalog/endless memoir lit atmosphere that’s been around for the past number of years, where everybody has a story to tell and everybody gets called brave for doing so and I don’t always see why it’s “brave” to tell these stories or whether it serves any kind of purpose to do so. I’m interested in some of the possible values these pieces could serve beyond a simple Go Ask Alice/ “cautionary tale” trope or a “I did this bad thing, listen to me talk about it” narcissism. Thank you for taking the time to suss out some of the social contradictions or personal disconnects that this series is illuminating for you.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone called brave during this series, although it’s entirely possible I’ve missed something. I think the stories are interesting, I think it’s a subject that’s worth discussing from multiple angles, but I certainly wouldn’t call it brave, in the same way I wouldn’t call it athletic or friendly. Bravery doesn’t enter into it.
I’m someone for whom alcoholism is fairly abstract (alcohol’s not one of my vices, none of my loved ones has been hit by a drunk driver, I’m not related to or friends with anyone I know to be an alcoholic), and I appreciate two things about this series.
One is getting some insight into how and why people drink destructively. It’s simple to say “we need more and better mental health care” and “we need more and better substance abuse treatment,” but I often say that automatically, without really thinking about what alcoholism is like or how challenging it is to address. Understanding a disease is necessary for treating and preventing it.
Also, when so much of our culture casts heavy drinking as fun and cool, and the people who avoid it as square and boring, this series is a welcome antidote. I doubt it’s aiming to be a PSA (and if it were, it probably wouldn’t be so good), but I like to think that if a person who drinks too much on weekends reads this series, she might cut back a bit and avoid a full-blown disaster.
I very much doubt the readers are largely “fellow alcoholics looking for shared sympathy” – I don’t think one could find much comforting solidarity from these pieces, as they’re pretty clearly about people who drink too much and subsequently do awful things.
As a person who’s not a heavy drinker, though there’ve been alcoholics in my extended family, and not a driver, I don’t have a great deal of personal experience of these situations, and it’s pretty easy for me to think “everyone knows you shouldn’t drive drunk, what the fuck is wrong with these people”. I suppose the value of the series for me is mostly the value of any human story: here is what a person tells about themself. And yes, there’s the reminder of how close I might be at any time to the kind of error of judgement that leads to killing someone with a car: the reminder that the people who do this sort of thing are ordinary and not apparent monsters, which is to say the reminder that I need to be on my guard not to commit a similar error. That we think of ourselves as being without evil intent but control machines and structures whose power is murderous. I recognise you’re coming from a position of quite focused morality where this seems to you nothing more than ‘rubbernecking’ and ‘cautionary tales’, but frankly if we only found value in the stories of people who did only morally good things and things that related to our personal experience we wouldn’t have literature.
What amativus said. Thanks for responding and I totally do “get” it. It just is a topic that makes me sick to my stomach. I have been told before though that I’m too harsh with my friends who blur the lines of buzzed/drunk driving but to me it’s always been pretty black and white.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as too harsh when it comes to buzzed driving (which, as Hulu ads periodically remind me, IS drunk driving). Good for you.
I really struggle with this series, too, and find myself reading it with the acute knowledge that I am growing very ill with every word I read, and yet I continue to read it because discovering its value to others is important to me. And this comment made me realize what it is that is freaking me out about this: Other people’s addictions amount to more than cautionary tales, and the treatment of them as such by non-alcoholics is a huge problem that I have. We watch reality television to feel better about our lives; we observe their chaos and think, ‘thank god; I have it so together in comparison’. That is exactly what this feels like, to me. Non-alcoholics, healthy people who have the right to express parental-like concern about their safety, looking at this and saying, ‘you poor dear’ at the same time they are thinking, ‘thank god; at least I’m not that’.
But on the other hand, no one is being coerced to share their stories, one assumes. I think I am panicking because this is not AA; mainstream society has zero clue as to how to support alcoholics, and this does not feel productive to me. But people volunteer their stories, clearly, for this series, and that’s a-ok. I don’t know what their goals are — to give value to their experiences via public narrative? It’s really hard for me to fathom and I wish to judge neither the authors for their choice to publish their experiences, nor The Toast for allowing that opportunity. But I wanted to chime in and agree with those who feel this series doesn’t sit right. It’s a really tricky topic. We’re all in this big weird alcohol-promoting society together. I don’t derive value from this series, but it might very well be valuable to others; I’m nonetheless glad that this conversation has asked of others to ask themselves exactly *what* they’re finding, here.
For me, sometimes its empathy, sometimes its self-recognition, sometimes its just a compelling story. Relationships with substances are complex for many people. Personally I very much appreciate this series.
for me it’s more about understanding a mindset or behaviors or experiences that I’ve never had myself.
I don’t think it’s meant to make you excuse drink-drivers or be sympathetic or forgiving to the act of drink-driving itself. And they’ve been from different angles over the series too which I think is more interesting.
This particular one, I feel as though the author is quite frightened by what’s happening to her and I think most of us reading it are too.
While I could take or leave the DUI aspect, I really enjoy the series. Alcohol consumption is a big part of my social life and my friends’, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of sober* or self-aware reflection on the lines between enjoyment and abuse and dependence in my life.
*couldn’t resist.
It took me twenty nine years and Caroline Knapp’s “Drinking: A Love Story” to really understand that my drinking was an addiction, primarily because there was so little representation of my kind of drinking (alone, chain-smoking, crying on a patio) in the media or in art. These stories are relevant and real in a way that I don’t see as much elsewhere. That’s what gives them their value (to me, and potentially to others who are suffering from alcohol or addiction issues and haven’t yet faced them).
That book. My therapist gave that to me when I broke up with booze. It was such a help.
That book is a stunner. Just gorgeously written and beautifully realized. And I agree that it is an important depiction of an alcoholic that is not commonly made: high-achieving, controlled (in all aspects but alcohol), employed, thoughtful, serious, introverted.
I like her Appetites: Why Women Want as well. It’s about her struggle with anorexia and more broadly the ways in which self-denial is embedded into women’s socialization, etc. As a recovering bulimic, some of her fucked up anecdotes resonated more than I care to admit.
Just because you can’t see the value in this doesn’t mean it’s worthless. I think for a lot of people it just highlights the grey areas in so many of the decisions we make, and makes me think about the various times alcohol has colored my experiences. I do not think that there has to be a moral to the story, we are adults who can draw our own conclusions and it can only help to hear many different viewpoints, especially on a subject that effects so many people in different ways.
I didn’t say it was worthless. This is precisely what I was asking for: the different ways in which people are effected by this series, since it wasn’t having an effect on me. The answers have been very helpful.
I actually got a misdemeanor DUI about a year ago, and I wish I had been better informed and less prejudiced against offenders before then. If I had been less careless and stupid, and more aware of my limits, I would have realized just how easy it is to reach 0.08. I had some pretty hardcore alcohol and drug education classes in middle and high school, and I drink maybe once a month since college. I never planned to be a drunk driver, and I have known people who were injured in drunk driving accidents. Thankfully I didn’t hurt anyone or damage anything.
I attended court, probation, classes, group therapy, CoDA, community service, and a MADD panel with hundreds of people. For a while, I thought it was weird that I never ran into the same person twice. I then realized just how depressingly common of a problem it is. Hardly any of the others were young, educated women like me (who submitted to a breathalyzer and couldn’t afford a good lawyer), and I was clearly an outsider, but it would have been a waste of time to think of myself as different or better than them. That’s how I felt before, and it did me a lot of good, clearly.
Drunk driving is such a huge problem, and no one thinks that it can happen to them or to someone they care about. I don’t think that the point is to make you approve of drunk driving, I mean, what?
Anyway, thanks Nicole and Mallory for publishing this series. No one talks about it enough.
“I don’t really understand why this series exists or why anybody feels these are stories that need to be told…”
I think this particular story touches on why some people drink (or take drugs or do other behaviors) in a particularly poignant way. Like this paragraph:
“Cha Cha acts out my fantasies. She taps into this part of me, this need I have for a mesmerized audience. She took that daydream of Porkchop and put it into action. I’ll never know why she did it, though. She has none of the blocks I normally set for myself, the reasons to avoid conflict or intimacy. And she has very little regard for my feelings. I do think she’s an improvement from that flailing she-wolf I used to become, but in some ways she’s the same thing.”
I think even if you don’t drink til you black out (or even if you don’t drink at all!) there is so much this story says about the hunger to be a socially successful person–an ACCEPTED person–even if the author also knows that the price she’s paying for it is the “she wolf”. Reading this makes me look back on my own choices and my own struggle to “to stave off that paranoia I think most people have, that feeling that everyone around you secretly thinks you’re a joke or—worse—doesn’t think of you at all”. I think about the kind of dumb-in-hindsight choices I’ve made in order to be more socially successful, or think about how I DON’T make those choices and, at the end of the day, still don’t know how to be a “real” person.
I’ve never drunk to the degree the author has, and I don’t, objectively, think this is a good way to deal with her problems. But I also don’t think that’s what the article is FOR. The author knows this isn’t good, but she also doesn’t see her way out of the hole, yet. And, unfortunately, that’s what living is like sometimes. Not everyone is able to read, say, Captain Awkward at the right time in their life.
Oh dear. I could have written this in college, except for the last bit—luckily I never had any kind of alcohol dependence issues. I only ever drank because I was trying to fit in, and every blackout just served as a reminder of the fact that I would never be able to drink and have fun like everyone else—so every blackout (thankfully not too many) was another step on my road to never having more than 1–2 drinks in a sitting. I hope that this young lady can banish Cha Cha once and for all; you don’t need her, I promise.
Toast, this is a lot of stories in your weekly recurring and unglamorous series about DUIs and drinking problems.
A lot.
I’m not quite sure what you mean, I’m afraid. What is a lot of stories in our weekly series?
“What bothers me the most is that I’ll never really know if I wanted to do it.”
this was me early this year, and that incident along with the increasingly outrageous hangovers finally put me over the edge — I stopped getting drunk, because I was scared of how dependent I was becoming and how bad it was making me feel. it’s only been half a year but I already don’t miss it. maybe for some people getting wasted all the time can be a fun, baggage-free activity but for me it became a burden, and it took me a long time to realize it. it was making me do stupid shit and hate myself. like someone else said, at some point the hangovers aren’t worth it anymore.
I still enjoy a drink or two and am friends with drinkers (and non-drinkers!), so: the world doesn’t end when you cut back (this was one of my big fears).
and to sort of answer an above question about why people would read this series: stories like this are important in my eyes, because there is a culture that normalizes this type of drinking. it takes some wide open eyes and a lot of bravery to be able to say: this is a problem for me, even if it looks “fine” to you.
I hope you can find some peace. you may not believe it now but you are way cooler than Cha Cha.
I just want to say that personally, I find this series incredibly interesting and important, and I am very glad each time I see a new one pop up. Alcohol and addiction can be so complicated and confusing and there are so many different ways in which the subjects can affect a person.
Also, I think that those who see these kinds of things as uncomplicated and black-and-white should, in some ways, consider themselves lucky. Now, I am not saying, for instance, “Drunk driving may or may not be a bad thing”. Of course it is a bad thing. But if you have never found yourself to be confused by your own actions or felt unable to control them, or if you have never simultaneously been deeply in love with and deeply terrified of a person…well, that makes life a bit simpler for you.
This is well-written and the first of the DUI series to really scare me, if being scared is the same as recognizing a bright red thread running through fabric.
Thanks for writing.
To me, the utility of this series is that it confronts the cultural hypocrisy associated with addiction, by pointing out that (smart, funny, gifted) women like us, women whom we would want as friends, women who _are_ us and our friends, struggle with/against alcoholism. Are damn near destroyed by it, or come close enough to scare themselves and us.
For people who grew up with addiction or have struggled with it themselves, that’s probably toweringly obvious. But for those who didn’t, I think it’s worth saying and I like that it’s being said here, that there’s room for it in our collective story.
I very much doubt the readers are largely "fellow alcoholics looking for shared sympathy" – I don't think one could find much comforting solidarity from these pieces, as they're pretty clearly about people who drink too much and subsequently do awful things.
As a person who's not a heavy drinker, though there've been alcoholics in my extended family, and not a driver, I don't have a great deal of personal experience of these situations, and it's pretty easy for me to think "everyone knows you shouldn't drive drunk, what the fuck is wrong with these people". I suppose the value of the series for me is mostly the value of any human story: here is what a person tells about themself. And yes, there's the reminder of how close I might be at any time to the kind of error of judgement that leads to killing someone with a car: the reminder that the people who do this sort of thing are ordinary and not apparent monsters, which is to say the reminder that I need to be on my guard not to commit a similar error. That we think of ourselves as being without evil intent but control machines and structures whose power is murderous. I recognise you're coming from a position of quite focused morality where this seems to you nothing more than 'rubbernecking' and 'cautionary tales', but frankly if we only found value in the stories of people who did only morally good things and things that related to our personal experience we wouldn't have literature.
Thank you so much for sharing this story, Carrie. It was beautifully written and the content really resonated with me.
As someone who has periodically checked in about her drinking habits, I find this series an essential counterpart to (and antidote for) the blithe pro-alcohol stance on the Awl Network. (Obviously there have been pieces from time to time about alcoholism or that godawful Drynuary but taken as a whole, it’s lots of booze lots of fun.) thank you
Yes, I was going to type a reply but it would have been exactly this reply, Paige.
There doesn't always have to be a moral to the story.
This is so dead on, it could have been written by me. It was written FOR me, and for the millions of women suffering this torturous existence everyday. I am lying here, naked, confused, covered in strange bruises, alone. I stumbled upon this post while fickling about my phone, searching for any sort of distraction. What I found was the truth. My reality. I hope last night was my last dance with “cha cha”. She’s a real bitch lately.
Thank you, Carrie. Just for today (maybe, hopefully) I wont feel like im standing alone in a crowd of heros.