Category: SOBRIETY

  • I can’t remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something. Something. And you realize that a lot of it is, um—cigarettes, you know, pacifiers. And I’m running from feelings. I’m really, really happy to be done with all of that. I mean I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know—things I wasn’t dealing with. I was boozing too much. It’s just become a problem. And I’m really happy it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I’ve got my feelings in my fingertips again. I think that’s part of the human challenge: You either deny them all of your life or you answer them and evolve.

    Brad Pitt Talks Divorce, Quitting Drinking, and Becoming a Better Man (via highsnobiety)

  • How about alcohol—you don’t miss it?

    I mean, we have a winery. I enjoy wine very, very much, but I just ran it to the ground. I had to step away for a minute. And truthfully I could drink a Russian under the table with his own vodka. I was a professional. I was good.

    So how do you just drop it like that?

    Don’t want to live that way anymore.

    Brad Pitt Talks Divorce, Quitting Drinking, and Becoming a Better Man (via highsnobiety)

  • “That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

    —Charles Bukowski, Women

  • “I think I knew I was in trouble.  The small, still voice inside me always knew.  I didn’t hide the drinking, but I hid how much it hurt”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “Be kind to drunk people, for every one of them is fighting an enormous battle.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “Alcoholism is a self-diagnosis. Science offers no biopsy, no home kit to purchase at CVS. Doctors and friends can offer opinions, and you can take a hundred online quizzes. But alcoholism is something you must know in your gut.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me…My self-consciousness, 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…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.

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “So I drank myself to a place where I didn’t care, but I woke up a person who cared enormously.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget