In January 2019, two weeks before I landed on the sidewalk in a blackout, I wrote an essay that hasn’t—and will likely never—see the light of day. My ex-boyfriend had recently called me someone so hellbent on being heard. So I crafted a litany of every trauma, fear, and experience that no longer served me, framed through the comments of what others have told me about myself.
I think I will call this the politics of telling, or maybe the art, or even the poetics, I began.
This essay triggered four days of panic attacks, which eventually led me to urgent care. As the doctor measured my blood pressure, he attempted small talk. What do you do? He asked.
I write.
Are you any good?
I’m just okay.
Despite my newfound determination to become sober, I don’t tell the doctor the truth about how I ended up in the examination room: That I’ve been trying to quit drinking. That I told my ex-boyfriend that I was trying to quit drinking, and the ex-boyfriend said that he’d moved on. That I couldn’t quit drinking—or quit these racing thoughts about the ex-boyfriend— even though I worried I was disappearing.
Instead, I told the doctor: I was writing an essay.
Oh, so you lied, the doctor laughed. You must be a good writer.
I’m not a good writer. After five years of sobriety, I still struggle to convey the cycle of addiction, the feelings of the bottom—even the word feelings seems too weak, too trite. So far, I have only been successful (in my fiction) with metaphors related to water and mythical creatures. In one story, the character envisions herself at the bottom of the Schuylkill, tangled in a nest belonging to rakshasas, man-eaters in Hindu and Indian Buddhist literature.1 In another story, the character’s past manifests as a sludgy swamp monster.
I shouldn’t be surprised. In the spring of 2018, I would take my blue notebook to Military Park and attempt to translate the white noise in my head. How long can I go before I come up? The world had folded over me, and I’d forgotten how to breathe.
Before sobriety, I would think deeply about which traumas and fears I could place on the page and which others I would write around. My professors, mentors, and editors always knew. It’s chilly, they would comment. There’s some unchartered territory here. You’re cutting away too soon. I remember telling the ex-boyfriend, too—in my obtuse alcoholic projection—that there are some places your writing won’t go if you’re holding back or editorializing. If you’re not putting it all down.
In that essay, that last thing I ever wrote drunk, I told it all. I thought telling was a form of exorcism—and at the time, it did serve as a purge. Then, I thought telling could be an act of mourning. It must end in a burial, I wrote.
What strikes me now is the essay’s ending:
There is a danger in remembering. And I’m ready to accept.
I haven’t told this to anyone.
***
I’ve been thinking, still, about telling. I’ve spent much of my drinking years turning away from the narrative of my life, only to enter a sobriety shaped and fueled by narrative. This is the nature of Alcoholics Anonymous. When Bill W. and Dr. Bob dreamed up their fellowship for a group of drunks, they realized it came down to language: the language that gets you in the door and the language that gets you to stay. A.A., or even sobriety at large, functions on the strength of narrative. We are told to share in a general way: What was it like, what happened, and what is it like now? In this way, telling becomes a form of connection—perhaps even what feminist theologian Judith Plaskow would call the “yeah yeah” experience.2
Yet I’ve been stuck lately on how I even got to the door—something that goes beyond the standard recovery narrative of telling. Really, I’ve been searching for that moment, that moment where I wrote it all down. I got this idea from Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, in which she ends her chapter on substance use and agency with her own experiences of getting sober. The shame, despair, and messy romantic entanglements were not enough, and especially not enough to write down. Nelson had to write the phrase that alcoholics and addicts never want to hear:
It floated down to me in the form of a single sentence that I wrote down on the back flap of the book I was holding in my hand when it landed: I won’t drink anymore. The relief in writing it down—and meaning it—was so total, I’d never felt anything like it.
Nelson considers this moment a corrective to and a displacement of the line she wrote the previous day: I won’t live anymore.
Over the years, I’ve conducted excavations of the past. Evidence of my drinking and its damage was scattered throughout my fiction. During 2018, my stories were full of suicide ideation, my characters battling loneliness and self-loathing. In a still-unfinished novel, one character tumbles across Broad Street and lies bloodied in Military Park.
At one point that summer, the ex-boyfriend visited his not-yet-divorced wife and found anti-depressants in her bathroom. He told me out of grief and concern (for her). My novel’s character says to herself in the mirror: Anti-depressants sound nice.
I never realized how often I’d texted the ex-boyfriend about my drinking. Drinking—or my disease, if you consider it one—consumed our relationship, which had become a cycle of transgressions and apologies, bouts of depression and hopelessness bookended by bursts of euphoria.
Someone bought me a shot of Wild Turkey. Someone bought a whole round for a bar. I think I have mono or cancer. I can’t get out of bed. I need to control my drinking. I need to stop doing shots. I don’t know what I like anymore. I feel mentally unstable. I’m having a hard time loving myself. I’ve tried everything, and I still don’t feel good.
Finally, I told the ex-boyfriend I didn’t remember how I got home the night before. I’m frantic and bothered, yet I make this admission, astonishingly, without shame:
I’m such a hot mess!!
I’m such a drunk!!
I worry that I’m a drunk.
The ex-boyfriend replied: It was just one night.
What is the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic? Was I editorializing too much then?
I’ve long feared that I made the ex-boyfriend my higher power. Not long after we met, I asked the ex-boyfriend: Do you think our intimacy is infinite? Will we ever reach the bottom? I was sure that we wouldn’t.
The problem with the bottom is that it’s not necessarily a hard stop; it becomes home. Fiona Apple sings that the bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that you know. Nelson writes that the bottom is where one brushes up against the bareness of one’s own bare life.
When we—or maybe just I—reached the bottom, the ex-boyfriend asked: What’s the point of telling me these things?
Perhaps I’d been telling the wrong person—a painful realization for me, still. Perhaps I’d wanted the ex-boyfriend to be my corrective.
Will you pull away, I wrote in that drunk essay, the more that I tell?
***
On December 1, 2018, I downloaded a sober app to my iPhone. Why am I doing this? The app asked.
I wrote: I don’t like who I am when I drink, how drinking makes me feel, and how I abuse it to self-medicate. It has also ruined my relationships.
I return to this statement periodically in my sobriety. For a long time, it served as a reminder of what it was like. Now, it’s a reminder of what was to be.
Nelson describes her own moment of writing it down:
I was terrified of what it might mean. It was a vow to which I felt, almost despite myself, sutured.
I admire Nelson’s resilience, her ability to not pretend to understand how or why this decision became clear at that moment. I still wonder how or why this decision floated into me as I nursed a hangover at the kitchen table after a relatively benign night out in the city. Why didn’t I write this down last spring? Or last summer? Why not last year?
But like Nelson, I understood the weight of taking this vow, how it ushered me out of this void—even if I continued to fling myself back into it. I’ve resisted describing this shift as divine, if only because I am still working through those impulses and clichés.3 Nelson describes this moment as one that can only be achieved through total renunciation or subtraction.
When I began to write again in sobriety, I scrawled a Calvino quote on a Post-it note and stuck it above my desk: Revision is the subtraction of weight.4
I am still figuring out if this moment in my kitchen, when I began to subtract the weight and revise, was a rejection or an embrace of that bareness.
It would be another seven weeks before I hobbled into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, twenty pounds lighter, my right leg broken, the ex-boyfriend long gone. Why would I ever want to speak to you again? The ex-boyfriend had written in his final email to me. He kept his word.
It turns out I also kept mine.
“Dhamma Talks,” Modern Language Studies, Northeast Modern Language Association, 2023, 70-85.
However, I would hate to associate the second-wave feminist method of consciousness-raising to create a (rather utopian) notion of sisterhood with two men who wrote the “To Wives” chapter of The Big Book!
I’m hesitant about deifying or romanticizing the addict or using addiction as a religious metaphor, even though there are certainly connections to be made between mystical experiences and the spiritual awakenings proposed by A.A. or the training guides of bodhisattvas and The Big Book. Even the Buddha is nicknamed the Great Physician and (unofficially) credited for defining the (contested) disease model of addiction. Saint Teresa’s seven stages of prayer outlined in The Interior Castle could very well be the Carmelite version of the 12 steps. I’ve often viewed my first two years of sobriety as moving through the first three “mansions.” But, I will save all that for future posts.
This quote is from Italo Calvino’s book, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Mariner Books, 2016.