Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [75]
“Why don’t you try and not drink tomorrow?” she suggested.
I couldn’t believe my life had dried up to the point of taking advice from a woman who once scribbled and left a note on a sleeping homeless man on the F train that read “You matter.” A woman who had only a few years before invited me to her graduation from a self-help program called LifeYes!, where we met all the graduates in a hotel ballroom in midtown and they all had their eyes shut as “Greatest Love of All” played. When Whitney shut up, they opened their eyes, and you, their friend, stood in front of them as they all sobbed uncontrollably about you weren’t sure what. Self-help was a bad, bad place as far as I was concerned. The term itself was bad. It wasn’t helping yourself, it was just the opposite. If you could help yourself you wouldn’t be in a ballroom with all these other losers, you’d be home, solving your problems. Why didn’t they call it “can’t help self” or just “fucking help me”?
I also disliked the word “recovery,” despised the “language of the heart,” and recovery slogans. It all reminded me of those posters in the high school guidance counselor’s office: a picture of a kitten on the end of a rope with “Hang in There!” underneath. It reminded me of secretaries with little notes posted around their desks to get them through the weeklong fake laugh of office life. People who needed little pictures of monkeys skateboarding and toddlers walking down a hall in high-heeled shoes were probably the same people who went to church and went on “journeys” all the time. The same people who thought everything happens for a reason. Dumb people. The only self-help book I saw in our house was I’m OK, You’re OK, which lived in a drawer of Mom’s night table, like a hotel Bible, untouched. That and The Inner Game of Tennis were about as deep into self-help reading as my parents went. The aesthetic of sobriety was “god-awful,” my mother would have said, no style at all, no “flair.” Half their friends had been electroshocked when they couldn’t get their shit together. Maybe after going to Catholic schools and then seeing the Democratic vice presidential nominee and family friend Thomas Eagleton and other friends torn to shreds for admitting depression, my parents felt the only thing worse than alcoholism and depression was to get help for them.
The thing is, I had no other options. A few days later I said out loud, “I’m an alcoholic.” And I felt like it was the first honest thing I had said in my life. Like the last thing I ever wanted to say. It made me nervous but I knew it was something I had been looking for my whole life. Not sobriety of course, but the truth.
I thought, Well, if I’m considering killing myself here, maybe I’ll give this sobriety a chance. I always thought I would drink less, drink better, stop slugging people when I got my shit together. I drank because of my problems and once those went away I wouldn’t drink so much. But I agreed to reverse the logical order of things and quit drinking first in order to get a handle on those problems. Not for a lifetime. Just to solve my problems with a clear head, and then I could drink normally again . . . or, you know, for the first time.
I DIDN’T TELL ANYONE I wasn’t drinking, because if I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want anyone to know I had wanted one more thing and couldn’t hack it. And if I didn’t ultimately want to quit drinking, I wanted to go back to drinking in peace without being teased endlessly about the time I said I was quitting. My whole life had felt like a good story—something in which I participated in order to create something that could be used for conversation later. Was I using what had happened in my life to create art or was I making things happen to create art? This got harder to stomach: “Jeanne, tell the story about the boss who tried to kill you with the lead pipe!” Be entertaining. Stories. For the benefit of others. How did people latch on to emotionally healthy people? They seemed elusive, like trying to scale a smooth interior wall of a museum. How would anyone latch