writing – Off-Dry

Day 1,944*: Likability Comma Mine

October 20, 2018October 20, 2018alcoholism, feminism, friendship, writing17 Comments

The asterisk above is because after I labeled my last one Day 1,917, Belle commented that she had it as 1,931. She’s way more likely to be right than I am, so I’m adjusting. It’s actually the second time in the history of Off-Dry that I’ve realized the day count was off. You wouldn’t think it would be so difficult–well actually, if you met me (or if you’ve read my book), you might see that cold hard facts are… not my strong suit, okay?

Anyway, hi! Happy My Day 1,944! I wanted to share a new essay by an incredible writer named Lacy Johnson. It’s called “On Likability,” and it’s about the ways that we–all of us, but especially women–limit and contort and lie about ourselves in the service of being liked by everyone. It’s such a good read: brilliant and rousing and almost comically timely for me, because the threat and fear of being disliked have been coming up a lot in my life recently as part of what I, and now you, will call BathGate.

BathGate started when I took–wait for it–a bath a couple of weeks ago and got so caught up in scrolling through Instagram on my phone that I lay in the tub while the water ran out and for twenty minutes afterward. I thought it was kind of funny, and I also realized it had been the most purely enjoyable half-hour I’d had in ages, or at least since I heard Brett Kavanaugh yell “I like beer!” a hundred times on national television. So I posted about it on Facebook. Soon after, another writer–someone I’d only ever had the warmest interactions with, a “book twin” in that her own debut came out shortly before mine did, so we often shared advice and anxieties over navigating the process–asked in a public comment if I was “trying to be offensively white feminist.”

I assumed she was joking at first. But she wasn’t. She further commented that the post epitomized white privilege, that I was bragging about having time to lie in the bathtub “while other women are trying to figure out how to survive.” She said I gave off Mean Girl vibes and by the way, other women writers were sending her private messages agreeing that both my bath and my general deal were alienating.

It was so out of the blue, and so hostile, that I didn’t know what to make of it, and requests for more context got me nowhere. So I did what I always try (and sometimes fail) to do with criticism that feels off-base: assume that a kernel of it might be true, hold that kernel lightly, and see what develops.

Because, yeah. I was born into a white, middle-class, two-parent family. Through no merit of my own, I started life on second base. That fact alone brought me a lot of opportunities to either seize or waste. I seized them, and then I worked my ass off to make the most of them–but that’s work that less privileged people might have never even gotten the chance to take on. I’m not struggling to survive (except internally). The world gives me the benefit of the doubt at all turns (as long as it won’t inconvenience a white man). I’m the kind of woman who people probably assume reads Goop. (I’ve actually never read Goop, but I get that I still seem goopy.)

In other words, I’m sure I embody white privilege sometimes. I just didn’t think I was doing it by taking a flipping bath.

So I moved on…for a day. And then the new Tana French book I’ve been excited about came out, and I wanted to ask Facebook who else was reading it, and I seriously froze up. Would it sound like I thought all women could afford to buy new hardcover books, or that women had lots of time to read? My mind kept returning to those private messages my bath objector had described, to what people might be saying about how out of touch I was, thinking real women had two seconds for Tana French.

I told John I was kind of freaking out. “Okay, so that’s loony,” he said. “Reading books is a normal, standard thing that women do.” So I wrote the post–partly because I really wanted to know, but also not to let petty bullying spook me–but all along I was silently chastising myself for being an instant-gratification, hardcover-buying jerk who wants to read mysteries while the world burns.

A few days later I went to a play, and it was such a joyous experience that I wanted to tell the world about it. But it was a big national touring production, not cheap to attend. I wondered if I should mention in the post that it was the first time I’d been to the theater in six or seven years, just to forestall the impression that it was an everyday thing for me. Again I imagined what the unnamed women would be saying about me in PMs and group texts, and I said it in my mind for them:

“It must be nice to have time to go to the the-a-tah.”

“Oh, she’s on the main floor, too. No second-balcony seat for Miss Entitlement.”

“How many meals for a poor family could the price of that ticket cover?”

*****

That night I had a dream about being back in sixth grade, on the losing side of a girl triangle. You know what I mean, right? You remember.

*****

The next day, I recalled how much time I’d spent in early sobriety thinking about likability, mine. As I started venturing into the world with a clear head, I realized I’d spent decades contorting myself into whatever shape would make me most likable to friends, colleagues, and goddamn random acquaintances at any given moment. Being liked was, if not my deepest need, certainly my loudest one. It meant acceptance, which meant community, which meant safety. So I did all the things I thought would secure those things. I agreed with all sides of a discussion; I never asked for help; I made myself so mild and unthreatening and self-deprecating that no one else would ever need to knock me down, because I’d already done it for them.

And then I quit drinking and realized that if I was going to make it, I had to let that definition of likability go and replace it with one that gave me room to have ambitions and needs and edges and a little fucking self-respect. (Which didn’t at all mean abandoning decency and kindness and sensitivity, mind you–just the desperate need to be everybody’s go-to gal, their faithful retriever, their frictionless mascot.) Later, when I started to write again, it became even clearer that if I couldn’t live with the risk of some people disliking me, I could probably still have a nice little writing career but I would never be able to do the kind of work I really wanted to do.

That’s what settled it. Because I didn’t drag myself back from the edge of oblivion to chicken out of doing the kind of work I really want to do.

By the way, that’s one reason I deliberately didn’t shy away from the topic of privilege in Nothing Good Can Come from This. I’ve had a little blowback from readers. An online reviewer said it would have been “cuter” if I’d addressed it just once or twice. Well, maybe. But I’m not trying to be cute, you guys. I’m trying to explain my thorny, lucky, deeply compromised life to you and I don’t know how to do that outside the frames of work and gender and class. At various stages of editing I could hear the voices of future readers in my head, just like I heard those women last week:

“She spent what on that bag?”

“Is it absolutely necessary for her to talk about sex?”

“How hard could her job have really been? It’s not coal mining, for fuck’s sake.”

When I listened carefully, some of the voices were giving me useful notes: telling me I needed to add a line, give readers a little more to go on. But the rest were just telling me to be milder and nicer and smaller…more likable. I can’t live or write by what those voices say anymore, not as a sober person, and if it means I sometimes err on the side of having too much edge, I’m okay with that. I’ll find my balance over time. In the interim, as Johnson says in her essay, “the truth is not a request, is not a question, requires neither permission nor forgiveness.” In my case, it means you are absolved from having to find me cute, or reasonable, or (god this is hard to even type!) wholly likable. I just want you to know I’m truthful.

*****

BathGate made me even surer that the path of risking universal acceptance is the only path forward. Because that craving to be liked, and the deeper fear of being disliked, came back fast. My cells have not forgotten what it was like to be twelve and the subject of a whisper campaign because something about me that was fine yesterday became wrong, wrong, wrong overnight. So it’s good for me to practice being okay with not being everyone’s particular cup of tea, and to remember that when I do fuck up, I can own up to it without putting my own head on a pike, or otherwise doing the work of bullies for them. To bring it back to Lacy Johnson’s words:

We can be wrong sometimes. We can make mistakes. Sometimes really big ones. We can be crude and vulgar. We can change our minds. We can say something wrong — or better yet we can say something that is unpopular but right. We can admit that we have sometimes loved the wrong person or gave away too much of ourselves in exchange for fame, or favor, or fortune. We can tell the stories of our addictions, our falls from glory, our kink, our abuse. We can tell the hard truth we learned at rock bottom, and we can admit that it is precisely by climbing back from that lowest place that we have drawn power and strength. We can let ourselves be vulnerable enough to admit our most unforgivable errors, to find our way back from the brink of oblivion, and even if no one likes the story we have to tell, there is no story — none at all — that makes any of us unworthy of love.

I actually need to hop in the shower now, so I’ll leave you with that quote. But read the whole essay! THERE WILL BE A QUIZ. Like it or not.

Day 1,944 (more or less).

Day 1,917: Not All Rowboats & Accordians

October 4, 2018October 4, 2018alcoholism, feminism, recovery, writing22 Comments

Last week I was seated at a dinner next to a woman who’s writing a recovery memoir. When she found out I’m a published memoirist, she had questions about how I’d structured my book to make publishers like it. “Did you put the message of yours up front?” she asked. “Or tell the story first and deliver the message at the end?” I explained that my book is pure memoir, vs self-help or memoir with an advocacy point of view–that it doesn’t really have a message per se.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “So what was your purpose for writing it?”

“Well, I just find sobriety really interesting,” I said. “And I wanted to see if I could sort of crystallize little bits and pieces of what it’s like.”

“Okay, but where did you put your summary? How did you outline your main points?”

I felt like an art-school dickhead, but I also felt like she was acting sort of mad at me for no reason, so I told her the truth: “I wrote it like I was holding a prism that I just kept tilting this way and that.” She all but scowled at that, so I gave it one last shot: “I think you should just write your story and let the structure emerge from what you actually have to say. Just get it all out in a big pile, and then see where the patterns are, and you’ll start to find some kind of shape. It sucks, but it’s really the only way I know how to write. I make a huge mess and I despair over it and then I fix it.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Okay,” she said, and turned to the woman on her left.

***

Yesterday I was sitting in the sun at Fuel, talking to a woman who is writing a profile of me. Toward the end of our conversation, she asked if I consider Nothing Good Can Come from This a feminist book. Yes, I told her, absolutely. But not just because of its explicitly feminist content. “It’s feminist because it’s my story,” I said. I told her I’d just come back from a sober women’s conference where words like phoenix and goddess and warrior were in the atmosphere. Which is fine, I guess. Conventional recovery wisdom, written by and for men, suggests that the newly sober need to be humbled, but from what I’ve observed, what newly sober women (and surely not only women!) often need is to be built up, not broken down. You could do a whole lot worse than to go from hating yourself to feeling like a phoenix.

That said, triumphant archetypes leave me cold; they feel dehumanizing in the most complimentary way. When I think of a phoenix warrior goddess I picture Robin Wright in Wonder Woman, and it’s a gorgeous image. But even Robin Wright isn’t Robin Wright in Wonder Woman. She probably spent months in a gym, in lycra or sweats, mock-swordfighting with a hired coach. Getting comfortable on horseback somewhere in Los Angeles. And that’s actually the more interesting story to me.

So I told the woman who was interviewing me that I’d written the ordinariness and the small details of my story as a feminist act. My flaws, too, and my considerable privilege. I wanted to get myself down on the page as a human, because I don’t think the world wants me, or any woman, to be just a human being. I have trouble allowing myself to be just a human being.

So in writing the 220 pages of NGCCFT, I made myself practice just being human. I could feel when I was begging to be loved, or trying to reassure the reader of my harmlessness, and when I felt myself writing that way I tried to stop. Mostly because writing meant to ingratiate tends to be bad, dishonest writing, but also because the biggest fuck-you to the patriarchy I can think of is to refuse to make myself easy for it to digest.

I also did it because the recovery community needs new stories. In literature and pop culture, there are a few master addiction narratives: the near-death experience, the jailhouse conversion, the sudden spiritual awakening, etc. But we’re missing the smaller, more ordinary stories. Here’s a question for readers in recovery: how often in your drinking days did you think “Oh, I must not have a real problem, because I’ve never a) lost a job, b) been arrested, c) woken up in a mysterious rowboat in the port of Marseilles with an accordion I did not remember purchasing.” What if you’d understood sooner that the word “problem” was for you to define, and that it could be as non-dramatic as a sense that your life was contracting instead of expanding?

: Photo by Anthony on Pexels.com

***

So you know what I think you should do? Write your story. YOUR story. Not your story grafted onto a master narrative. Just write exactly what happened, and what you said, and how you felt. Get yourself a copy of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and do what it says. Keep your hand moving. Keep it raw and close to the five senses. I don’t care where you put the message, because I don’t know that you even need to have one, unless it arises naturally for you. Try to forget all the recovery stories you’ve heard or read, including mine, and just get your ordinary, detailed truth down on paper. Let yourself be surprised by what comes up. Don’t package yourself.

And then–if you can–find a way to share what you wrote with someone else. When I was eighteen, I used summer-job money to fly to a Zen monastery in Asheville, North Carolina and take a weekend workshop with Natalie Goldberg. (I wish to god the whole thing had been filmed, because I thought of myself as a pretty sophisticated teenager, but the whole hippie-monastery-with-crew-cut-lesbians-and-yoga scene had my eyes popping and I suspect it was pretty funny to everyone around me.) We’d sit in a circle and write for ten minutes, and then people could volunteer to read aloud whatever raw, messy stuff they’d produced. There was no critique, and very little reaction from others at all–I think the rule was that if you found a line or image really striking, you could say so. Otherwise we moved on to the next volunteer.

There were professional writers in the group who probably used some of what they produced that weekend as the start of more formal work, and others who were just there to free-write. But in the circle, it didn’t matter. We were all just people sharing our raw, unpackaged words. You could start a group like that for recovering people in your town. Or you could decide to be a little more polished and blog your experience (anonymously, if you want–this blog was anonymous for the first six months). You could take a writing class and mine your recovery as a topic. Or yeah, you could jump right in and write a book. The format doesn’t really matter. Just find a way to tell your story, yours, and let it be as weird or messy as your addiction was. And as your recovery is, or will be.

Day 1,917.

Day 1,731: Longcuts

March 22, 2018recovery, writing12 Comments

“Why does this never get any easier?” I groaned to my trainer last week in the middle of deadlifting.

He looked confused. “Well, because we keep adding weight to the bar. You could only lift half this much a year ago.”

I had to concede his logic, even if it didn’t really answer my question.

*****

The main thing about me is I never think I’m making any progress. Yesterday, for example, I happened to read about the six 2018 books chosen for a special “Buzz Book” panel at a major book industry conference. That’s six books total, across all genres, out of thousands published in a given year. It had never once occurred to me that mine could be one of the six… until I saw that it wasn’t. And then I sort of deflated. Your book is just not the kind of book that creates buzz, I told myself. It’s a weird book, by a weird person. Just get used to that.

I moped around for a while and then I saw the online table of contents for the spring issue of a literary magazine that recently accepted one of my essays. In fact, I thought they’d accepted it for the spring issue, except uh oh, why wasn’t it listed? Maybe they changed their minds after accepting it and just forgot to tell me, I thought. Because the essay is actually so forgettable that they didn’t even remember someone wrote it.

“Hey babe,” said my unsuspecting husband, coming in from a run in the park. “Oh hey,” I said, then explained the ways in which my career had fallen apart in the past hour. “It seems very likely that I will dwell in mediocrity,” I said gravely. “I have walked away from a successful career with money to an unsuccessful one with no money.” (Did I mention that I left my day job a few weeks ago?)

“Or maybe you’re putting a ton of weight on two very small data points,” he said. “One of which would have been like being struck by lightning, and the other of which may very well be an error.”

“Oh please,” I said. “I have had years of cognitive behavioral therapy. I know all about binary thinking and catastrophizing and projecting and the rest of it. That doesn’t mean my career can’t still be falling apart. Hypochondriacs do get cancer, you know.”

Seeking someone who would understand just how bad things had gotten, I texted a writer friend about being dropped by the literary quarterly. “Why don’t you drop a friendly email asking what’s up?” she said. I had to admit it sounded reasonable. So I did, taking pains to sound breezy and oh-hey-just-curious. I got a response less than an hour later, saying my piece is scheduled for the summer issue. Because hypochondriacs do get cancer, but they also flail around in a panic a lot over nothing.

*****

Panic, self-doubt, fear: all just standard stuff in a writer’s life, right? Except consider these facts:

In the late 90s, the last time I was trying to place work in literary journals, the one that’s publishing me this summer rejected me nine or ten times. This time around, they asked me to write something for them.
The only reason I could freak out over not being one of six Buzz Books is because I have a book coming out this summer, from one of the finest literary publishers in America, the publisher of my dreams, who have made my manuscript into a gorgeous book that has been circulating and getting industry blurbs and other enthusiastic comments that make me dizzy.
And the only reason said manuscript exists is that I wrote it. For eighteen months I spent every weekend and most nights writing, and the book was on my mind in some way 24-7, like an earworm or a tinnitus buzz. My brain became a two-story house and I learned to live on both floors at once.
And the only reason I could write a book is that six months into sobriety, I sat down on impulse one day and wrote a page of a short story, just to see if I had any muscle memory left after a decade away from writing. And then I did it again, and again. I kept sitting down to write because it felt good. I told my husband I didn’t care if I ever got published, or if anyone ever even saw what I wrote; I just wanted to be doing it. And I meant it.
And if you’d told me on that day that I’d ever leave my day job, I wouldn’t have believed it. And not just because I couldn’t have foreseen a writing career for myself. Because I thought someone as mediocre as me was lucky to have a job at all, that I’d somehow been tricking my employer into keeping me around. I was two years sober before I started to clearly see how good I was at my job, and over three when it dawned on me that my employer was probably never going to value me the way I needed to feel valued, and over four by the time it hit me that instead of just resigning myself to feeling overlooked, I could leave, make a new life for myself where I could shine and be seen.

That was four years ago. Four years from “Do I still know how to write a good sentence?” to “Why was my book not one of six chosen from thousands to showcase at BookExpo?” Four years from “Who else would ever hire me?” to “Who wouldn’t want to hire me?” The person I was four years ago would say “My God, 2018 Kristi sounds like an ego monster.” But 2018 Kristi (which should totally be the title of a Prince song) isn’t an ego monster. She just knows what she’s worth, and she knows it because she did every fucking bit of the work to get here. There were no shortcuts; if anything, there were longcuts, because the hard way is the way I always go.

I guess I must like the hard way.

*****

But the hard way is slow and progress only piles up in retrospect. Years ago, ending an obsessive long-distance love affair, I couldn’t see that two days without talking or writing was twice as long as we’d ever made it before. I could only white-knuckle each hour and dwell on how that would never change. Finishing a difficult essay last month, I complained to anyone who would listen about the agony of only knowing what I think through the act of writing it, so that what I know and my ability to express it are never quite in balance; it’s a race with a photo finish.

Not to mention, I raise the stakes all the time. In yoga, I was first taught to do a headstand with my feet on the wall for balance. Over time, I moved a few inches away. Then I started kicking up in the middle of the room. Then I could kick up in the middle of the room and add on variations: leg splits, a twist from the torso, a half-lotus.

“Why does this never get any easier?” I said one day to my teacher, who laughed.

“Why would it?” she said. “You keep moving forward.”

I’ve started writing what I hope will be my next book and the mess of it is making me crazy. I don’t want to have to flounder around in the dark, searching for the voice and the structure. I want to have it all figured out right now and just, you know, type it up. Maybe I don’t actually know how to write a book, I thought the other day. Then I remembered something my friend Claire said, because she’s been where I am now:

“The second book is much harder,” she said. “Because you proved the first time around that you can write a book, and now you want to write a great one. It’s a quantum leap in ambition, and therefore in difficulty. Be prepared.”

I listened when she said this and I nodded gravely and I thought I was prepared. But of course I’m not prepared, because I’ve never been prepared. To quit drinking, to write a game-changing book, to leave a job, to leave a lover, to serpent-twist my legs in midair. I trust that I’ll catch up with myself, somehow, in the ways that matter most. And I keep moving forward.

Day 1,165: Now, where were we?

August 29, 2016August 29, 2016drinking culture, feminism, writing56 Comments

Well, hi there! It’s been a month since I published this essay, which was also the subject of my last post here. In case you haven’t been following along–because why would you?–it went viral. Really really viral. A blow-by-blow would be both dull and likely inaccurate, but suffice to say that after literally thousands of emails from readers, writers, agents, editors, men who live in basements, and people I knew in kindergarten, when Neko Case tweeted praise I thought ‘okay, this has reached maximum awesomeness and maximum weirdness in one tweet.’

Famous last words. The next day brought a takedown from Slate, which I learned about when a friend texted me saying “When Slate hates you, you know you’re doing something right.” (For the record, not the greatest way to let someone totally new to celebrity know that a major media outlet is complaining about her. You’ve gotta ease into it, people!) Time and the New York Post took vaguely off-topic swipes too, and I’m currently showing up in people’s Google news feeds right on top of Donald Trump’s head, which frankly is closer than I really ever wanted to get.

So it’s been a wild ride, and maybe someday I’ll have more to say about the totality of it. But since this is a blog about being sober, what I want to share today are some ways the experience impacted me as a sober person. Because I’ve been paying attention and there are parallels all over the place, and maybe some of them will be useful to you in your own wacky life:

Doing the next right thing works. When I got a Facebook message saying “Have you seen Time magazine?” I was already overwhelmed and in the middle of a stressful workday. Sure, there’s no such thing as bad press, but there are bad moments for hearing about your bad press, particularly when you have been a public figure for all of five seconds. I scanned the Time article (not really all that bad, more clueless than anything else), then sat at my desk frozen, wondering how I was supposed to function in a meeting in 12 minutes with my entire world continuing to turn itself inside-out.
Then, thank God, a voice inside said you have 12 minutes. Use them. And I lammed it out of my office building and spent those 12 minutes walking around the block. Not thinking, not trying to be any certain way, just walking alone in the sun. And just that simple act of moving my body calmed me down enough that I made it to my 2:30 meeting merely wildly distracted, not wildly distracted, panicked, and goggle-eyed. (Baby steps, okay?) That’s just one instance of how zeroing in on just one small, immediate action has helped to keep me as grounded as I can reasonably expect to be while things swirl around me.
What other people think of me is none of my business. Here’s a partial catalog of words I’ve been called since “Enjoli” published: hero, genius, star, dry drunk, liar, bitter, truth-teller, bitch, rich bitch, whiner, sage, smug, stunning, slut, judgmental, blind, man-hater, woman-hater, jealous, friendless, wonderful, astonishing, mean, brilliant, brave, goddess, victim, warrior, cunt.
Yep. At every turn, someone is describing me–not just the 10-page artifact I published, but ME–and it’s rarely in middle-of-the-road terms like competent writer or thoughtful person or a little bit bitchy. It’s all drama and superlatives, because my essay inspired strong feelings, and those strong feelings want a person to attach themselves to. But it’s hard to be the host for all those qualities, especially the ones that confirm things I secretly already fear about myself. So you know which ones I’m accepting as truth?

None of them. I’m rejecting all of them as applied to me, the person. If they apply to anyone, it’s to the consciously wrought version of me who narrates my equally consciously wrought essay (just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s a diary). And people can call that chick whatever they want, because the writer doesn’t control what happens between reader and text. (Much as she might like to.) Just like when I quit drinking, I have to define myself for myself, or the center’s not going to hold. (Not to mention that for a writer, praise can be as deadly as criticism.) So much as I would love to walk around thinking what a brave, talented, truth-telling goddess I must be…gonna let all those kind words drift gently back to my work where they belong.
People are (mostly) wonderful, and stories save lives. I’ve received thousands of emails and other messages this month. I’ve now mostly weaned myself from reading them, because it’s just too much for an empath like me to carry around. But I’m walking away with more faith in human beings than I’ve had in decades. Because I’ve heard from men and women; the 30-years sober, the 2-days sober, normal drinkers, alcoholic drinkers, non-alcoholics who just don’t drink anymore; Mormons and Muslims and the alcohol-allergic and other lifetime teetotalers; male and female tech workers; women who fled tech in horror; Indians and Scots and Aussies (lots of Aussies) and Italians; fathers of daughters; drunk-driving widows; bartenders, and on and on. (And yes, including a handful of truly loathsome, abusive human beings.) And their stories, in aggregate and alone, are amazing–as is their generosity in sharing them with a total stranger. I feel more a part of the human community having read these stories.
And it’s cemented my belief that if you can, you should consider recovering out loud. Emphasis on consider. I don’t know your life circumstances, or what you’re up for emotionally, or how people around you will react. What I do know is that there are TONS of us out there, but a lot of us feel alone and/or ashamed. And odds are good that whatever part of your own story you can tell–anonymously, even–will be heard by someone who needed it. Just something to think about.
Slow things down. I learned pretty early in sobriety that frantic activity and FOMO are routes to misery. Uh, and then apparently at some point I forgot, because I’ve been panicked at times this month with the quantity and quality of professional opportunities that have landed in my lap. I have more interesting, fun options than anyone (certainly anyone with a day job) can take advantage of and stay sane–and that scares me to death, because deep down I’m also convinced that the friendly person behind each of those opportunities is one “no” or “yes, but later” from saying “well, fuck her” and writing me off for life. It took a close friend saying “Look, these aren’t aunts and uncles you have to write your thank-you notes to–they’ll be around when you’re ready” to make me remember it’s okay to think strategically, and choose carefully, and all that other stuff people do when they believe in their own worth and aren’t just, you know, saying yes to the first boy who asked them to prom.
Binary thinking kills. When I was drinking, everything was black/white. Either I had a catastrophic alcohol issue, or no problem at all. Either I could drink to relax, or I’d be tense forever. Either I was the niftiest person alive, or the worst. Sound familiar? I still struggle with binary thought patterns, but at least I often recognize them now. And here’s some stuff I’ve read or heard in response to my essay:

She thinks sobriety is the only way to live an authentic life.
Anyone who has an issue with this essay is probably an alcoholic in denial.
She’s blaming men for all her own problems.
She raises some good issues, but fails to provide the solution, so fuck it.
She acts like women are the only ones who have a tough time at work.
She acts like women are the only ones who struggle with alcohol.
She acts like women are the only ones who feel stress.
Any man who doesn’t like this essay is probably a misogynist.
If she was a real feminist she wouldn’t judge women who drink. Feminists support other women no matter what.
Women who say they only drink socially are lying to themselves.
She must really hate fun.
People! All of us! We must stop. Life is in the gray areas. I know this. You know this. Let’s live like we know this. We will all be saner and kinder and happier. Even the assholes.

To be continued. (Maybe. 😉 )