Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

a while, a columnist would come along and suggest women should drink less to avoid sexual assault.
They contended if women didn’t drink as much, they wouldn’t be so vulnerable to danger. And those
columnists were disemboweled upon arrival into the gladiator arena of public discourse. The
response was a roar. We can drink however the fuck we want.
I understood the pushback. For way too long, women had been told how to behave. Women were
sick of altering their behavior to please, to protect, to safeguard—while men peed their names across
history. The new motto became “Don’t tell us how to act, teach men not to rape.” The entire
conversation offered a needed corrective. Women are never to be blamed for getting raped. Women
are never “asking for it” because of the way they dress or what they do.
And we women can drink however the fuck we want. I certainly did, and I’m not interested in
taking away anyone’s whiskey sour. But reading these salvos from entrenched battlegrounds made me
feel kind of alone. In my life, alcohol often made the issue of consent very murky. More like an ink
spill and nothing close to a clear line.
I knew why the women writing on these issues didn’t want to acknowledge gray zones; gray zones
were what the other side pounced on to gain ground. But I kept longing for a secret conversation,
away from the pitchforks of the Internet, about how hard it was to match the clarity of political talking
points to the complexity of life lived at last call.
Activism may defy nuance, but sex demands it. Sex was a complicated bargain to me. It was
chase, and it was hunt. It was hide-and-seek, clash and surrender, and the pendulum could swing
inside my brain all night: I will, no I won’t; I should, no I can’t.
I drank to drown those voices, because I wanted the bravado of a sexually liberated woman. I
wanted the same freedom from internal conflict my male friends seemed to enjoy. So I drank myself to
a place where I didn’t care, but I woke up a person who cared enormously. Many yeses on Friday
nights would have been nos on Saturday morning. My consent battle was in me.
I HAD WANTED alcohol to make me fearless. But by the time I’d reached my mid-30s, I was scared all
the time. Afraid of what I’d said and done in blackouts. Afraid I would have to stop. Afraid of a life
without alcohol, because booze had been my trustiest tool.
I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me. Not just my doubts about sex. My selfconsciousness,
my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears. I drank away all the parts that made me
human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong. My mind could cobble together a thousand
PowerPoint presentations to keep me seated on a bar stool. But when the lights were off, and I lay
very quietly in my bed, I knew: There was something fundamentally wrong about losing the narrative
of my own life.
This book might sound like a satire of memoir. I’m writing about events I can’t remember. But I
remember so much about those blackouts. The blackouts leveled me, and they haunt me still. The
blackouts showed me how powerless I had become. The nights I can’t remember are the nights I can
never forget.