knew that every morning, ten minutes after waking up, I felt like I was dying. I would say to myself, You felt like you were dying yesterday. But you didn’t die. So even though you feel like you are dying today, you probably won’t die. But intellect couldn’t refute the panic attacks.
What was happening, I later learned, was a hybrid of untreated anxiety and morning withdrawals from the same alcohol that temporarily quelled it. A psychiatrist diagnosed me with panic disorder and gave me benzodiazepines. Then I became dependent on both the benzos and the alcohol. I blacked out every night. I woke up in strange beds. My legs were covered with bruises from my blood having been so thinned by vodka. I couldn’t do anything without being drunk or on pills. The thought of going to coffee with another human being while sober seemed impossible. I was either fucked up on drugs and alcohol or I felt like I was dying.
One thing that’s especially sad about alcoholism and drug addiction is the way something so beautiful and sacred turns so ugly. The thing that saved my life, that made the world magical and livable, had turned on me. Alcohol and drugs worked so perfectly until they didn’t work anymore. I kept trying and trying to get back to that beauty, back to the being okay.
I knew that I was tying knots that I would someday have to untie. I knew that I was going deeper and getting worse. But if you were in my head, had experienced my overwhelming feelings, you would drink too. If you felt like me, you would stay fucked up. The act of not drinking was an impossibility.
Then when I was twenty-five I got sober. I had begun practicing yoga. I didn’t know it at the time, but my yoga teachers, Lisa and Yasmin, had, like, thirty years of sobriety between the two of them. I would come to class every day, high and hung over. They would smell the alcohol leaking out of my pores and gently bend me into my next pose. One day, one of them said something to me. She said, You don’t have to drink. I was like, Yeah right. That was it. That was all that was said and we moved on.
A few months later I had a bad weekend. It wasn’t that extreme, just sort of your usual weekend for the average twenty-five-year-old alcoholic/addict. I woke up in the bed of a person who I’d sworn I would never sleep with again. I lied to my boyfriend about my whereabouts. I dragged the person who I swore I would never sleep with again to the pharmacy. I sweated in line filling drug prescriptions. I decided to maybe only drink beer from then on. I drank a beer at eleven a.m. I started drinking liquor by evening. I got fucked up again that night. I went home in a cab at three in the morning with a bar bottle of Amstel Light in my hand. I couldn’t leave it behind, because god forbid I waste any of that precious nectar. I didn’t know that it would be my last drink.
The next morning I was in my teacher’s yoga class again. I cannot say what happened. I only know that I heard her voice inside my head. She wasn’t speaking but I heard it. I remembered what she had said to me, that I did not have to drink. I’d been called many names in my addiction: an alcoholic, cunty McDrinksalot, drunk slut. But no one had ever said it like that to me before. That I didn’t have to drink. Something clicked inside me. I wondered, what if I really didn’t have to drink? What about just for that day?
After yoga I went to brunch with some people. I didn’t drink, which was crazy. I always drank at places where you weren’t even supposed to drink. So how was it that I wasn’t drinking at brunch, where drinking was sanctioned? It was the first of several miracles. The next day I didn’t drink either. Or the next day.
Of course, I didn’t quit everything. I continued to take pills: those prescribed to me and those not prescribed. I picked up weed again. I remember sitting by a fireplace in upstate New York, fucked up out of my mind on morphine, thinking, This sobriety is great.
Then, one night, I was walking home in the East Village where I lived. I passed