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

“I loved drinking alone in distant bars, staying on speaking terms with my own solitude.”

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

“The greatest desire of alcoholics is they want to drink like normal people and it’s not going to happen.”

— Joe Balzer

And so I sipped my one glass of red wine.  Just one.  And I let it roll along the sandpaper of my tongue.  And the wine was better this way.  Tiny sips.  And it floated through my bloodstream like a warm front.  And it would not be an overstatement to say this felt like the very point of existence.  To savor each moment.

Then I ordered another glass.

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

“I felt stuck, though.  Stuck in a life that was easy and indulgent and yet I could not get enough in my mouth.”

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

Sometimes we wondered aloud if ours was the right path.  Weren’t we supposed to be building something of meaning?  We were 29 years old, the same age my mother was when she had me.  Lindsay talked about his father, who had moved all the way from Australia and started his own business.  What had we done?

But then we’d go to the bar and just repeat what we’d done the night before.

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

A year later, I quit drinking.  Not forever, but for 18 months, which felt like forever.  And in that stretch of sobriety, much of my happiness came back to me.  Weight dropped off my hips.  My checking account grew heavy with unused beer money.

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

“I finally understood alcohol was not a cure for pain; it was merely a postponement.”

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

If I want a drink because I’ve had a hard day and ‘deserve’ a drink, or if something bad has happened and I want a drink to ‘escape’ from it then I don’t drink. Ever. That is the rule. You can only have a beer that is just a beer. When you are not drinking it for any other reason than it tastes nice.

The Unifying Theory of Alcohol
Dan Kieran