Chapter Two: “Let’s Drink Until We Can’t Feel Feelings”
I don’t remember the first time I got drunk, but I do remember planning my first drunk. If that’s not a warning sign for alcoholism, I don’t know what is.
I started planning my first drink when I was in seventh grade, shortly before my thirteenth birthday. Like many girls, my life completely fell apart that year. I don’t know what it is about seventh grade, but I’ve heard scores of women, many of them alcoholics and addicts, swear that seventh grade was the year that did them in. My friendships became more precarious. Being cool started to become much more important than being smart, which had been my main source of validation up until that point. I got a reputation as a teacher’s pet, a brainiac, a nerd. The glasses and my Walmart wardrobe didn’t help.
I was bullied relentlessly. Coupled with the onset of depression and anxiety, which buried me like an avalanche, my long-held feelings of being an outsider, of not being good enough, of not being okay intensified, which led to the development of a savage internal monologue. An endless broken record played inside me, repeating the same messages: I was worthless, no one liked me, I wasn’t smart enough, pretty enough, anything enough, and I would never, never be okay.
I became obsessed with the idea that I needed to change myself, to become someone else. I didn’t want to be the smart, nerdy, teacher’s pet, good girl anymore. I didn’t want to follow the rules anymore. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be a bad girl. I was convinced that drinking was essential to becoming this new person, mostly because the girl I wanted to be more like drank.
I had this one girlfriend who drank all the time. She smoked cigarettes. I’d heard rumors that she’d even smoked weed. She was in trouble all the time, but she didn’t care at all, and everyone I knew thought that she was so cool. I wanted that so badly — both the ability to not care at all and the status that came with being a “bad girl.” Especially since it was in such opposition to what I’d been my whole life.
So, I started planning how I could convince her to let me drink with her and the boys she hung out with. Again, I don’t remember exactly how that first drink played out. I know that it was during the week that my parents were in Ireland. I think that I was with that girlfriend and some friends of hers. I think we drank in the woods behind my house. I think. Though I could be confusing that first time with the subsequent times, which soon happened with frightening frequency.
Though I don’t remember the circumstances of that first drunk, I do remember exactly how it made me feel. I felt beautiful, strong, funny, and excessively cool. That vicious internal monologue quieted, and I didn’t give a single fuck what any of the people I was with thought of me. If they didn’t like me, it was their loss. When I drank, all of the feelings that were too overwhelming for me to deal with were dulled, sometimes even gone. When I drank, I didn’t have to face the world. I didn’t even have to be part of the real world anymore; I could disappear into my own world where nothing mattered, where I was enough, where I felt safe, though I rarely was.
I was invincible.
When I drank I also didn’t have to occupy my body. When I took that first drink my body was a really confusing place. It had changed drastically in a very short period of time, and the way people interacted with me because of it changed as well. I was still a girl, but my body was that of a teenager.
I hadn’t adjusted to all these changes, and I still wasn’t sure how I should feel about that body. Should I appreciate that my body helped me navigate an adult world that I desperately wanted to be part of, even though I wasn’t ready, or should I be terrified of the world my body gave me access to? Should I love the attention this body got me or should I be ashamed of it? Should I love this body or should I hate it?
Drinking allowed me to escape these questions and just live without any regard for my body or myself. It allowed me to escape my feelings, my thoughts, my body, and simply exist, which is something I’d been longing for since I was a child. From that first drunk, I knew I would do literally anything to feel that way as often as possible.
In my early teens, I learned that finagling that next drink often involved using my body as leverage, and I was more than willing to put my body on the line to get what I needed. At that point, I was still too afraid of sex to use that as a tool, but I quickly learned that the hint of sex was often enough to get me a shot or a glass or a bottle.
I watched girls and young women around me, learning how they used their bodies to manipulate men and boys. I studied their coy smiles, their batted eyelashes, their downcast gazes accompanied by shy giggles, the way they leaned at the perfect angle to show a little more cleavage or thigh, the slow uncrossing and crossing of legs, the subtle brushes of cleavage against arms, the overly familiar ways their hands touched male arms, the whispers in ears, the suggestion of lips on a neck. And I saw how effective all these maneuvers were at getting them what they wanted.
Without any understanding of what I was doing, I threw myself into the dangerous world to which my very developed teenage body gave me access. I did so without caution because it meant gaining access to the thing I desired most in the world — freedom. Freedom from caring, freedom from feeling, freedom from thinking. I started employing these same techniques, more successfully than a thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl should be able to, and I started using these techniques on not just boys, but men, people who should have scared me. The need for a drink, the deep, desperate need to detach, became more important than my safety. It made me blind to the situations in which I wasn’t safe, allowing me not to care whether I was safe at all.
I became a slave to the pursuit of that freedom, and I lost any choice in whether or not I would take a drink. I needed it to be okay, to survive, and I was willing to put my body and myself on the line in any way necessary to get what I needed to survive.
Alcohol transformed me just like I thought it would. But instead of giving me a new identity, alcohol cleaved me down the middle. It created two separate lives that I struggled to maintain. I became trapped in the dichotomy of good girl and bad girl. I performed each one as appropriate. I maintained straight A’s, attended my church’s youth group, and taught Sunday School. But I was also in the woods getting drunk and high, flirting with older boys, giving my first kisses and sexual favors in exchange for both substances and essential validation. Alcohol gave me the power to be someone different, but it also robbed me of the ability to be who I truly was or even to know who I truly was.
It took me years to find out that the cost of this transformation was everything I was, everything I had.
