Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

on the picnic table out back drinking with the proofreaders and the guys from production. We played
games of “Who Would You Rather?” sorting the entire staff into people we would like to bang,
careful to never mention each other.
I didn’t write much at first. I ran the listings section and contributed third-string theater reviews
with unnecessary adjectives. The young, hotshot music critic wrote with such wild metaphors,
paragraphs like jazz riffs. I asked him once how he got so good, and he told me, “I did acid.” But he
also had what every writer needs: his own voice.
I did not. My writing was a kind of literary karaoke. I aped the formulas and phrasings of older
critics whose work I admired. I sometimes borrowed friends’ opinions for theater reviews, because I
was certain theirs were more accurate than my own. I’d sit each week in the meeting, listening to the
lineup of cover stories, wanting that spotlight so badly. But what did I have to say?
In college, I never read newspapers, which made it a tiny bit awkward to be working for one.
What did people want from their news? The Chronicle offered two primary channels, criticism and
reporting. But I had neither the deep knowledge nor the training for either. My colleagues slung their
authority around the room, while I became afraid to botch any answer. Black or refried: Which are
the superior beans?
As for my artistic tastes, I wasn’t sure about them, either. We had entered the Age of Irony. Low
culture was high culture, and the difference between loving something and hating it was razor thin.
People like me disguised our true feelings in layers of detachment, endless pop-culture references,
sarcasm. Because no one can break your heart if they don’t know it.
I pulled down the Blade Runner poster and put up a picture of the Backstreet Boys, and I forced
everyone on staff to vote on their favorite member.
“I don’t fucking know,” the cranky editor-in-chief said when I stopped him in the hallway. “The
blond one, with the nice smile.”
About nine months after coming to the paper, I got my first big assignment. I went undercover to
high school prom. The mass shooting at Columbine had taken place a few months prior, leading to a
glut of paranoid articles about “teens today,” and my story was the kind of goofy, first-person
escapade almost guaranteed to wind up on the cover.
There was one problem. I was so freaked out by the pressure I couldn’t write a word. I spent
hours staring at a blinking cursor, typing words only to erase them again. The night before the piece
was due, desperate for any fix, I opened a bottle of wine. Fuck it. Maybe this will help.
Before then, I never drank while I was writing. I might have downed a few beers while I waited
on page edits. But writing and drinking were two fundamentally opposing activities—like eating and
swimming. Writing required hush and sharpness of vision. Drinking was roar and blur.
The wine turned down the volume on my own self-doubt, which is what a blocked writer is
battling: the bullying voices in her head telling her each thought is unoriginal, each word too ordinary.
Drug users talk about accessing a higher consciousness, a doorway to another dimension—but I just
needed a giant fishhook to drag my inner critic out of the room.
That night, I drank myself into the writing zone. Words tumbled from my fingers like they’d been
waiting to get shaken loose. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. After the story came out, staff
members stopped me in the hall to quote their favorite lines.
So, of course, this became a common practice. A couple glasses to prime the pump. Sometimes, in
the privacy of my funky little garage apartment, I would drink myself blind. I purposefully did this—