Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

I couldn’t believe I let that happen. But addiction siphons so much attention, and the most precious
treasures will get tossed in the backseat: children, husbands, basic hygiene. I heard a guy once
complain about how much he wet the bed when he was drunk. But he didn’t stop drinking. He got
waterproof sheets.
And I get it. When you are alone and drinking every night till you pass out, who really cares?
I asked myself that often. Who really cares? I’d given up many things by the end. Hanging my
clothes. Making the bed. Shaving my legs. Zippers or clothing with structure of any kind. I threw
towels over spills until the towels began to seem like rugs.
And I told myself this was OK, because our society was beyond warped in its expectations of
women, who were tsunamied by messages of self-improvement, from teeth whiteners to self-tanners. I
was exhausted by the switchbacks of fashion, in which everyone was straightening their hair one year
and embracing their natural curls the next. I wanted to kick the whole world in the nuts and live the
rest of my years in sweatpants that smelled vaguely like salami, because who really cares?
It took a while for me to realize: I cared. I didn’t need to do these things because it pleased men,
or because it was what I was “supposed” to do, or because my mother clipped something out for me
from O magazine. I should take care of myself because it made me happy. Remarkably, impossibly—
it felt good.
FOUR MONTHS AFTER moving to Dallas, I went on a diet. It was one of those old-fashioned diets with
frozen fish sticks in geometric shapes, a serious throwback in the day of lemon-juice fasts and lap
bands. I walked out of the strip-mall store where I had weekly weigh-ins with all the shame of a
pastor emerging from an adult video store at 1 pm.
Why was I so embarrassed? Because I felt like a failure to both sides of the body wars. To women
for whom appearance was everything, I was a source of pity. To women for whom diets were evil, I
was a sellout.
When I was coming into my teen years, diets were nearly a developmental stage. Adolescence,
motherhood, diet, death. But by the time I walked into that fluorescent office, covered in pictures of
women in smart suits with their arms raised overhead, the word “diet” had become radioactive—
thanks in part to female writers I knew and admired, who fought against the false notion that thin was
synonymous with health. The past ten years had seen the media embrace more curves and cushioning,
all of which signaled progress—but none of which meant I needed 50 extra pounds.
Still, I worried I was letting my anti-diet friends down—as though my intensely personal body
choices needed to be their choices, too. The whole point of feminism was that we deserved the
agency of our own choices—pro-choice, in the truest sense of the term—and yet I feared my friends
would judge me as frivolous, or vain. But fearing another person’s opinion never stops them from
having one. And my focus on external judgment kept me from noticing the endless ways I’d judged
myself.
For the past decade, I did that horrible thing, resolving not to think about my weight and yet
thinking about it constantly. Every time I awoke. Every time I passed reflective glass. Every time I
saw an old friend and I watched their eyes go up and down me. At some point, no one complimented
me on anything but my hair and my handbags. I was certainly vain then; I just didn’t happen to look
like someone who should have been.