Every thought I’d ever had, every fear, every moment of shame and unhappiness, every lie I’d told, every moment I wanted to forget was suddenly laid out like a uniform I didn’t want to wear. Each indignity, each horror given its own spot, its own moment to be recognised.
The third thing is just how long the days are. I realise how much time I spent drunk, sleeping, or sleeping off being drunk. I can’t believe how many hours are actually in a day. And the nights are the worst: in the daytime there are work and tasks, but at night, when everyone winds down in the only way most people know how, you’re left looking at the hours ahead of you, working on your fifth coffee of the day.
I don’t want to tell anyone I’ve stopped drinking and so I try to hide it. We go for a work dinner to a restaurant in Chelsea, the first since I’ve become sober. I order my soft drinks quietly, resisting the urge to sneak a shot in there. As everyone else gets lightly pissed, I stay stone-cold sober and my anxiety spirals. I’m hyperconscious of everything I say, how buttoned-up I remain when everyone else’s shoulders start to sag. How fun I used to be. I leave at the earliest opportunity, knowing I still have a long night ahead. I’m awake until the early hours every evening, staring at the cracks in the ceiling I never noticed before.
I dream of booze; I fantasise about it. I think about how it tastes, how it feels, how it smells, the beauty of the three-drink buzz. I become obsessed with it. I start mainlining Red Bull, clearly not willing to let go of the buzz in one form or another. I clutch the cans in my hands, comforted by how they crinkle and crumple under my fingers.
The friends who know try to be supportive. Some don’t understand. ‘I’d rather not end up sectioned again and/or choke on my own vomit,’ I try to explain on the days that those feel like my only choices.
I try AA repeatedly, even though so much of it goes against everything I believe and feel. Every time it’s asked if someone’s new, I raise my hand, trying my best to participate, to show up. I flinch at the AA talk, the talking of ‘picking up’ and ‘using’ and ‘keep coming back’ and ‘a chronic, progressive disease’ – a disease I absolutely had and if I didn’t think I had it that was just a sign of my sickness.
I go to one meeting in a tiny room up several flights of stairs near Penn Station on a Friday night, where I’m the youngest person in the room by many years, and a man with twenty-five years’ sobriety tells us how he almost killed his family when he drove drunk. I go to one in a church basement downtown on a Saturday night. It’s been a tough week, and I cry and cry through the meeting, through the tales and the pain, which sometimes all feels too much, too raw. Three women approach me afterwards, offering up their telephone numbers, telling me to keep coming back. There’s one in the Village on a Sunday afternoon, just next door to an Irish bar screaming its booze specials on a board outside; this one’s populated by club kids and artists and the stories feature even more ego and selfishness. I take my friend Rachael to one in Brooklyn, an open meeting so I don’t have to go alone, and we spend the entire session eye-rolling at the dramatic retellings of one-night-only benders that indicated alcoholism, a few drinks in college equalling a problem for life.
One of the main tenets of AA is admitting to complete and utter powerlessness. Five of the twelve steps mention God. Recovery is impossible without submitting to a ‘higher power’.
‘Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way,’ warns the official AA literature ominously.
I can’t declare myself given over to a higher power. It isn’t even that I don’t believe in anything. I do. Ever since I was a little girl seeking safety in the church across the road. I believe that something exists that is above, bigger. So, it isn’t belief that I lack; it’s a willingness to declare myself powerless, without any will or self-control or impact on my own life.
Maybe it’s abundantly clear to everyone else that I am, in fact, powerless. That I have no hold on anything happening to me, or to anyone around me, but I still can’t do it, can’t say it. I’ve always believed that everyone is responsible for their own life, for whatever they get themselves into, and the lengths that you need to go to, to drag yourself out. This demand to admit to a lack of control over my own life feels like a betrayal of everything I am, everything I believe in. A betrayal of my independence.
Instead I make a vow to my niece. The vow is simple: ‘I will always be there for you.’ How can I fulfil that promise if I oversleep? If I forget to set my alarm? If I miss my plane, my train? If I can’t remember? If I dive willingly into the darkness away from you.
The first test: a family party I’ve flown back to England for. The room hums with lubricated laughter and I so desperately want to join in. To be the fun, carefree one,
