For the People Doing Dry January...

I See You.

January 10, 2020. Life is Normal AF.

I wake up one morning and can’t remember how I got in bed with my 13-year-old daughter, Edie. 

I brush my teeth trying to figure it out. 

I make iced tea. 

I eat raw salmon from the fridge with my fingers. 

I make lunches for the kids and send them off to school. I still can’t remember. 

As I’m sitting here writing this, I don’t remember. 

I try to piece it together - I binge-watched Schitt’s Creek with David the night before. Then, I’m waking up in my daughter’s room. 

What did I say to her? Was she awake?  

Was I awake? 

Is this what people call a black out? 

Fuck. Did I black out? 

My drinking has been consistent and copious. Every night, at home. Holidays, with people. Without people, professionally and not professionally. Back before the pandemic I was eating out more often. Drinking out more often. Drinking while I cook at home. And cooking at food events where a glass of something is exactly what you need to cut through the balls-to-the-wall energy of putting out food. 

I start thinking about the first drink around 4pm. This is when I feel us moving toward evening. When I want to manually downshift from the day. The worries, the shit. Or when everything is damned wonderful. It doesn’t matter. It’s all an excuse to drink. Sometimes I don’t wait for evening, or for David to come home. Sometimes I start by myself in the kitchen, cooking dinner. I get out the tequila, a nice big glass that sometimes I leave in the freezer to frost over. Lots of ice. Lime, a generous squirt. It’s mostly tequila though. I am not shy about my pour. 

I cook and talk to the kids. I listen to their problems. I drink. The sound of ice tinkling in the glass is like people I love murmuring behind me at a party. Familiar strains. Comfort. We go over song lyrics to the musical one of them is doing. I watch handstands and lop-sided cartwheels. I applaud and clap. I yell at my son as he and our pitbull tear through the house, knocking everything over.

Then David comes home and I make him a drink. In my mind, it’s like the way Joan Holoway would’ve made her man a cocktail. Hips swinging, in a red brocade dress with heels, the ones with the peeky toe and the ankle strap. Tits up, a silver-rimmed round retro-60’s cocktail glass in my hand, ice tinkling against the glass. I have my rituals, like the way an addict gets her spoons in order, her flame going, the satisfying clink of ice, the sound of liquid pouring, the slicing of lime, the squeeze, the juice on my fingers, the anticipation of that first sip, the glorious come-down that rolls in and through me. It works its way through my limbs and out my pores.

Bliss. Just bliss.

I make the drinks and deliver David’s to him, with a little board filled with sliced soppressata, cold soft-boiled eggs, a handful of macadamias, manchego, a few cornichon. Isn’t that how you love your partner? Plying them with things that make them feel good? Plying them with things that make them feel good until they die of all your love?

He says something nice, runs his finger along my thigh. And because I can justify my second glass, which David probably thinks is my first glass, I’ll make another for myself just the same way. 

I am mellow now. A little buzzed. A little fucked up but in a good way. We sit for dinner - a chaotic sit-down affair with all the kids and a couple of their friends -  kung pao shrimp for David, Edie and I. Panko-crusted chicken fingers for Raffi and Desi and their friends. Kung pao tofu for our then-vegan, Lucy. Teenagers want to leave the table and I get eye rolls when we say no. Everyone is talking about their day, arguing, getting up, sitting down, jostling for the right to be heard next.

David goes to the backyard to cycle and lift weights. I clear the plates. I’m alone in the kitchen with the bowls and the dirty woks. I hate doing the dishes, but I love being alone with the dishes. You understand? I’m on my way to my third drink.

I fall into a quiet abyss over the sink. I can no longer feel the near-constant thrum of my amygdala miss-firing over and over. When I’m buzzed, my brain quiets. It’s not barking at me. The booze turns off the ticker-tape, and for this, I am grateful. It is not telling me everything sucks; your life sucks, your talent sucks, your parenting sucks, you suck, you have always sucked, the sucking will suck you under.

The Suckety-suck-suck-suck is turned off. Finally. I am so so good.

When I’m finished, I make myself and David another and melt into the sofa with my laptop and all of you on the internet. The binge-watching is an important and glorious component of this process. It all goes hand-inland. Mind Hunter, the third go-round of Games of Thrones, Gentified, The Americans, Succession.  It’s a true mathematical equation,  alcohol + binge-watching = complete absorption into the sofa and my own numb brain cloud. 

One of the things I have come to know about myself is how deeply I like to retreat to my mental spaces. I have a truly fertile imagination, honed as an only child. I can live in my head and be okay there. The real world is harder. The alcohol cordons me off from the world so I can be in exile. It’s beautiful, really.

I  drink my drink.  I watch my shows. I get up and make us both a new one.  

“Make it light one for me, babe,” David yells after me. 

I make his light and mine heavy. 

I am fully into binge drinking territory, and I’m just having a regular night. 

The little kids cuddle with me on the couch. They prop their socked feet up on my legs. It’s good. It’s always good with my babies. I am with them, loving on them. But this is cheating and I know it. This is the only kind of interaction I am offering them. There is nothing else.

I take Desi to bed. Kiss her, snuggle. I try not to fall asleep when I read to her. But I drift off when she drifts off, and have to rouse myself and plod back out to the living room. In order to stay up I’ll have to keep drinking. So I make myself another while David is tucking in Raffi.

I’m lit now. I’m not Joan Holloway anymore, with her hip-swing and her decolletage. I am Dorothy Parker begging for a cocktail in an insane asylum. 

Same Day. Suckety-Suck-Suck-Suck.

It’s 9pm. I’m no longer mellow. 

I’m grouchy. Tired, but decent at hiding my tipsiness.  If one of the kids leaves a big mess, I find it and bitch about it. I stomp around the house, muttering about the mess, the extra work. Had I found the mess at 5pm, I would have the kids pick it up and move the hell on. But now, I’m a drunk and I’m grouchy and I dwell on it.  If Lucy and Edie, my teenage girls, have some unmet need, like Lucy needs help making a late-night snack in the kitchen, I see it as an interruption in the pursuit of my drunken-ness instead of seeing it as an opportunity to connect with a teenager, who has finally left the confines of her room-cave and is open to interacting with me. 

And Edie’s anxiety - my amygdala is her amygdala - gives me reason to climb into bed with her, earlier than normal. I’m there to help her process her anxiety. This is a lovely part of my being a drunk. I snuggle up to my kid and listen to her with her head on my stomach. But too many times, she tells me the next day, I fall asleep and she ends up handling her fears alone.  

By 10pm, if I’m not asleep someplace,  my brain is starting to shut down.

“I’m tired,” I say as if the day and it’s work did this to me. 

I’m pickled. David might know but then again he might not. We don’t discuss it.

At 3am, I will pop up awake. Dry like a dusty lake bed, and feeling like a bag of garbage in my bed. The alcohol fucks with all your insides equally, and there is nothing glorious or beautiful happening when your body is expelling all that poison. 

“I am killing myself,” I repeat to myself, sitting on the toilet.

I let the wave of guilt cover me. My youngest is four-years-old.  My oldest is fifteen. I might not even see Desi graduate highschool or Lucy fall in love for the first time. I’m going to miss all the milestones, all the shit worth living for. 

“I have to stop,” I say under my breath. 

It seems so strange to me why I’m drinking like this at all. I mean, things are good. David and  I are in love - actively, sweetly, sensuously in love - after 14 years of marriage. We have disposable income. We like our careers. The kids are doing okay. We are all healthy. We are surrounded by a beautiful community that we love and who loves us back. We have manageable problems. I do not have to numb myself. 

But even as I think it, I know that this is about….

Suckety-suck-suck-suck.

“I have to stop,” I say adamantly this time.

And I mean it at 3am. 

I worry about it for a few minutes. I drink half of the Pellegrino right out of the bottle. I stare at the ceiling. Suckety-suck-suck-suck. Until I sleep. In the morning, I pull myself together, forget about the middle of the night, and do it over and over again, calendar year after calendar year. 

I am going to lose my liver. I imagine it happens the way a transmission can just drop off a car. 

January 10th, 2020. Edie’s bedroom. 

I read somewhere that when you die from the effects of alcohol and drugs, medical people sometimes call it a “disease of despair.” I do not want to die from a disease called despair. 

I quit drinking. 

“I don’t know if I’ll drink again,” I say to David. But truly, I can’t imagine not having booze in my life. The words come out but I don’t believe them.

I’m already thinking I can find the work-around. 

David - best husband in the world - hears me, as good partners do. He decides to no longer drink at home or when we go out together. I recognize immediately I will not be able to do this without his support. I am immensely grateful.

I quickly learn that giving up booze is not so much about not drinking, as much as it is about changing every single fucking facet of my life, so it isn’t focused on alcohol. I notice how much of my time is spent thinking about drinking. Preparing to drink, finding a drink, making the drink, choreographing the evening so I can get a drink and how much I worry and strategize, when I can’t get to the liquor store, when I know we don’t have any in the house.

When I stop drinking we have to re-invent everything. Total life overhaul. When we go on date nights, we peruse bookstores, instead of hitting bars. We eat food from the Shaanxi province in a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant, inside a supermarket in Chinatown, that doesn’t sell booze. We get a massage. Another time, it’s a taco truck, a bookstore and a Love Store.  

Sex toys become my new Paloma.

Pellegrino over ice with a lime is my cocktail.

Two months into sobriety: I’m going through a series of firsts as a non-drinker. The first dinner at a restaurant with friends who order multiple bottles of beautiful wine. First time refusing that drink and having an explanation when the host persists. First dinner party where I cook and everyone around me is slammed. First night out with food industry pros who know how to throw down and expect me to follow along. Writing that first restaurant piece without circling the wine list and beer selections. First night after cooking at a culinary event and wanting to relax into that after-service, come-down with my colleagues, where we get a little sloppy and talk and post-mortem the happenings of the night.

And there is always the question: What if someone passes me an Espolon over ice with a slice of lime. What if the tinkle of the ice cubes call me?

“Have one. You aren’t an alcoholic.”

I might be. I might not be. I don’t know. 

2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 . New Normal.

I have three drinks during this first sober year.

I have even fewer the next. And outside of date night, fewer the next.

We embark on a new normal. No drinking at the house for either of us. This is pretty easy because there are fewer get togethers during and after the pandemic. I write a book, so more isolation. I get very used to only having two drinks once a week, every date night. Two tequilas over ice with lime. Two and done at a dive bar called The Red Dwarf. It is a ritual we love and can handle.

This works. For years.

Until it doesn’t.

Fall 2023. The Pop.

A 1993 New Yorker essay by Joan Acocella discusses the writer and notable drunk Dorothy Parker. Acocella tells us that in her poems, Parker gives us hope and then, yanks it out from under us.

“You can see it in all her work,” Acocella writes, “most obviously in the poems. Line by line they go, telling us about pretty things, about flowers and keepsakes and love, until they come to the last stanza or the last line. Then Parker delivers the sucker punch.”

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
One perfect rose. . . .

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Acocella goes on to write: “She inflates the balloon, then pops it.”

It’s not a perfect analogy, but Acocella’s line about the balloon stopped me. The balloon that fills to bursting and then is popped with a needle is straight out of the substance dependency playbook. To have this great bulging pressure build up in the nervous system, an emotional abcess, and then have it pop, burst, run free. All that pressure giving way to relief.

Pop the balloon.

Alcohol does that.

I publish a book. I am out in the world. I am anxious. I have to be on, in the ways public people have to learn to show up for others. This feels new and scary and like I could fuck it up. There are so many opportunities for embarrassment, to let people down who also put so much into the writing and production of this book. It makes me want to recede again. I worry and stress about a lot of unknowns.

I drink before my book signing, just one drink. I chase the drink with a Xanax. I get through every public appearance without vomiting or passing out. I do not embarrass myself completely. Total win.

Can we talk about the pop? I think about “the pop” a lot.

That moment when the tension is forcibly broken apart by the drug - pop! - and the juices run free and clear and my whole body releases, the stress abcess drains. The balloon is flaccid and no longer pushing on me. Even as I talk about it, I feel it and long for it.

So, I’m back to dry January.

Not because I am back to my former days of hard drinking - I am not - but because I think about drinking now in a way I haven’t in a long time. Because I allowed it back in without regulation or boundary this year.

When I see the bottles left from the holiday parties, I think: “No one will know.”

Anytime you have to do something in secret, it’s good to ask why. It’s good to say it out loud and give it life so you can deal with it. Self-awareness is indeed a super power.

I am an addict - an addict of nearly everything good that can become compulsive - booze, skin pulling, skin picking, nail biting, nicotine, social media, love, sex, food, any drug that turns off the suckety-suck-suck, makes me numb, turns off my brain and gives me subdued, cloudy relief so that I am bendy, untextured. Quiet. 

Still, I keep at it. My life, our lives, are not despair.

____________________________

END NOTES:

Right before we stuffed our faces with dim sum on New Years. Happy New Year!! (From bottom left, counter clockwise, Edie, Raffi, Carlos, Desi, Lucy, David and me)

I’d love for you all to read this AMAZING review of my book from John Birdsall who writes the Shifting the Food Narrative newsletter (check out his excellent essay about how Friendsgiving is rooted in queerness) and is the author of the much-lauded James Beard biography, The Man Who Ate Too Much. John has been published everywhere and has two James Beard awards to show for it. I’m sure you can imagine my glee about his enthusiasm for the book.

If you are in Vegas, I will be in conversation with food historian, Sarah Lohman, talking about her book, Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods. Please come out to the Writer’s Block Book Shop, this Saturday January 6th, 2024 @ 7:00PM - 8:30 PM.

And thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim