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Sandra Butler's avatar

.I never thought about stopping until that night I spent in jail for drunk driving. The matron was kind, offering me an extra paper thin blanket for the damp San Francisco night, but all my stories about myself as a social drinker evaporated in the shock and shame of it. Me? In jail? I had been in jail many times, but it was always on purpose. Getting arrested was a part of my political life. A source of pride. Not this time. Now I was on a steel shelf, huddled under two unsuccessful covers, dizzy, still drunk, cold and trying to avoid the three other women in the holding cell. Thankfully, they wanted to avoid me as well. Each of us is there because something that was supposed to work---didn’t. The drug deal that fell through. The boyfriend who got mad. The customer who wouldn’t pay. The runaway who got caught. And me, the woman who marched, picketed, demonstrated and even got arrested in the service of these women with whom I was now sharing a cell.

I think in retrospect it was the dissonance that kept me from constructing yet another story about what had happened that would allow me to avoid identifying the heart of the story. My drinking.

Drinking accompanied my life, but anxiety did as well. Of course they’re both loosely related, anxiety and the drinking, although I began drinking as a public way to be chic. In 1954 I thought sophisticated people wore lovely clothes in fine restaurants while holding a Chesterfield. I didn’t have to know anything, do anything or be anyone to appear elegant. Just a drink and a cigarette signaled your all around suaveness. Plus my parents drank every night.

Then, in my 20’s, I discovered I actually felt shorter, smarter and more confident when I had a drink and a cigarette which was a triple plus. And off I went, careening down the decades, my props at the ready.

After my divorce, I had a long ivory cigarette holder imagining panache which I now embarrassedly recognize as a touching pretentiousness especially when my alcoholic tastes still ran to rum and Tab. But the shorter, confident and smarter me continued to be emerge with each drink, although now I shudder at decisions that I imagined were daring and kind of in-the-know-ish which were risky, and several potentially dangerous.

But while I wasn’t becoming shorter, I was becoming smarter, had returned to college and my confidence was growing. Eventually, after the third try, I stopped smoking. One prop down, one left to go.

Over the years, my neck and everything else began to soften. My drinking had progressed to gin and bourbon, expanding in periods of stress and receding in more emotionally stable periods. But even the receding periods were becoming more than I needed for that rush of alls right with not only the world but with me-ness I sought.

I remember reading that alcohol allows you to know what it is you feel without the necessity of actually feeling it. My insights during my drinking years were rich and deep and complex. But gin and tonic allowed them to remain astonishing, oft repeated insights. No change required.

Then I got cancer. In my neck. And a surgeon had to make an incision to cut it out. Now my neck is soft with a scar across it. And my partner died. And my children started to make their own mistakes. And I was growing older and older. Soon after my sixtieth birthday, I stopped drinking. Knowing I would never be able to be a moderate drinker, I removed choice from the equation and stopped. For nearly a year I drank a cold Fresca in a chilled wine glass at 5:00 which helped. But after a while I didn’t need that either. I was left alone with myself, nothing to remove me from where I was.

The nearly twenty four years since then have been some of the best of my life.

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Neko Case's avatar

I'm the same as you, booze hates me. Hahaha! I have begun to really enjoy virgin cocktails make with different flavored shrubs, which are yummy fermented vinegar. I can't really tolerate sugar either so the shrub with bubbly water has been a refreshing celebratory beverage.

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