Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

Addiction was the inverse of honest work. It was everything, right now. I drank away nervousness,
and I drank away boredom, and I needed to build a new tolerance. Yes to discomfort, yes to
frustration, yes to failure, because it meant I was getting stronger. I refused to be the person who only
played games she could win.
The first time I played a song in its entirety—“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses—I felt
like I’d punched a hole in the sky. I blew off work that day, shut down my phone. I sat in my bed and
played the song over and over again, till my hands were cramped and red-purple grooves ran like
railroad tracks across my fingertips.
The feeling was so immaculate I didn’t want to taint it with the anxiety of performance. The next
week, during our lesson, I kept my instructor talking, hoping I could burn out the entire hour with
questions before we got around to playing. About 30 minutes in, he turned to me and said, “OK, let’s
hear you.”
The ache of those words: Let’s hear you. It put a plum in my throat to be the person who wanted
to play but could not bear to play. To want the microphone but to stand in the back. To know there is a
book in you but to never find the nerve to wrestle it out. I was so screwed up on the issue of
performance. It’s like I didn’t want anyone to hear me, but I couldn’t shut up. Or rather, I wanted
everyone to hear me, but only in the way I wanted to be heard, which was an impossible wish,
because nobody ever followed instructions.
My hands shook when I strummed through the song, but my teacher strummed along with me, like a
father with his hand barely holding the bicycle seat. We sang together, sometimes finding the harmony
parts, and afterward he said, “You’re a natural.” He probably said that to everyone, but I liked that he
said it to me.
“This is more like a portable karaoke machine for me,” I told him, smoothing my hand along the
gloss of the dreadnought.
“That’s cool,” he said.
“I’m not going to be a good guitarist,” I told him.
“You never know,” he said.
What mattered was that I was doing something I wanted to do instead of merely talking about it.
Later, in the safety of my bedroom, my fingers started to find their way. Sometimes I could make
chords without even looking at the strings, and I began to develop a kind of faith, a reaching without
fear. The afternoon could slip away when I was like this: three hours, gone without looking once at
the clock.
I loved being reminded that losing time didn’t have to be a nightmare. It could also be a natural
high.
IT’S CRAZY I used to think all writers drink. When you quit, you notice how many don’t drink anymore,
or never did. This is true for every creative field. Throw a stone in Hollywood, and you’ll hit a sober
person. Rock stars, comics, visual artists—they learn sobriety is the path to longevity. Any tabloid
reader knows that walking into certain AA rooms can be like stumbling into a Vanity Fair party,
which helped kick the fame delusion out of me.
I was a child who worshipped celebrities—Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, River Phoenix—
each of them was a hero to me. I spent way too many of my younger years grasping for whatever fame