A rose by any other name… –
Dec. 29, 2019 – Shortly after that first meeting, I took a group of friends to dinner to come out with it. Over quartini of Italian reds and one very obvious mocktail, I explained my alcoholism and promised that nothing would change; I was still me. I could still sit down in a restaurant and inhale the fumes of a Nebbiolo without imbibing, my sickness would not impede our good times, I would not ruin the party. After dinner, we walked to a friend’s apartment to smoke pot before going out to a bar. My girlfriend C, who was on her third or maybe fourth glass of wine, sat next to me on the couch. She leaned in close, and with her hot, alcohol-soaked breath, explained how she wasn’t like me, how she could take alcohol or leave it. What was odd was that in the five years of our friendship, I’d never seen her leave it.
There was something jarring and humiliating about the conversation, something I couldn’t put my finger on then but can now because the same scenario would repeat itself time and again: Alcoholism was a word that invited other people to use me as their own personal navigation system. The word helped people make sense of my terrible relationship with alcohol so they could make sense of their own terrible relationship with alcohol, or at least know what their terrible relationship with alcohol was not. The thing was, the term alcoholic didn’t do much for me except eat away at the things I’d spent the last six months trying to build, like being a woman who could be trusted with herself.
