Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

newspaper reporter growing up among the free-clinking bottles of postwar America, Hamill built his
identity on booze. But ultimately he quit, because it was bad for business.
It was bad for mine, too. So much was lost on me when I was drinking. What we did last night,
what was said. I stopped being an observer and became way too much of a participant. I still
introduce myself to people, only to receive the brittle rejoinder of “We’ve met, like, four times.”
Memory erodes as we age. Did I really need to be accelerating my decline?
I’m not saying great writers don’t drink, because they certainly do, and some part of me will
probably always wish I stayed one of them.
I sometimes read stories by women who are using, and they speak in a seductive purr. They have
the intoxicating rhythm of a person writing without inhibitions. Those pieces can trigger a toxic envy
in me. Maybe I should do drugs, I think. Maybe I should drink again. How come she gets to do that—
and I can’t?
Mine are childish urges, the gimme-gimme for another kid’s toys. The real problem is that I still
fear my own talent is deficient. This isn’t merely a problem for writers who drink; it’s a problem for
drinkers and writers, period. We are cursed by a gnawing fear that whatever we are—it’s not good
enough.
If I stew in that toxic envy too long, I start to teeter. Those are the days when my eyes can get
pulled by a glass of champagne, throwing its confetti into the air, or the klop-klop of a martini being
shaken in a metal cup. What a powerful voodoo—to believe brilliance could be sipped or poured.
I read an interview with Toni Morrison once. She came into the literary world during the drugaddled
New Journalism era, but she never bought the hype. “I want to feel what I feel,” she said.
“Even if it’s not happiness.”
That is true strength. To want what you have, and not what someone else is holding.
ABOUT THREE YEARS after getting sober, I decided to learn guitar, something I’d been saying I would
do for years. My author’s bio used to read “Sarah Hepola would like to learn how to play guitar,” as
if this ability came from Mount Olympus. I bought an acoustic from my friend Mary, and I holed up in
my bedroom, and then I figured out why I never did this in all the years of floating on the booze barge.
It was incredibly difficult.
Strumming looked easy, but it was awkward and physically unpleasant at first. It took hours to
even form the finger strength to make a handful of chords.
“I think something’s wrong with my hands,” I told my teacher, one of the best guitarists in town.
He assured me that no, my hands were fine. Learning guitar was really that hard.
“You don’t think my hands are too small?” I asked.
“I teach eight-year-old girls to play guitar,” he said. “You’re fine.”
But I bet eight-year-old girls don’t writhe with the humiliation of being a middle-age beginner. I
was confronting the same poisonous self-consciousness and perfectionism that had kept me from
speaking Spanish when I was in Ecuador, that kept me from dancing in public when I was sober, that
kept me locked up all my life. I hated feeling stupid.
“Your problem is that you step up to every plate and expect to hit a grand slam,” a friend told me,
and I said, “Yes, exactly!” as though I were simply grateful for the diagnosis. Drinking had fueled
such impatience and grandiosity in me.