by Marian Keyes
That first drink was vodka and one of the other girls refused to drink it because it tasted disgusting. Never mind the taste, I thought, baffled. Feel the effect.
Even though I didn’t drink very often in my teens, once I started drinking, I could never get enough. Right from the very beginning I drank more and faster than everyone else. And right from the very beginning I woke up with killer shame and dread. Guilt at what I’d done the night before. It was never anything too risqué – usually something to do with snogging boys that I shouldn’t have – but it was sufficiently out of character for me to be mortified.
When I was eighteen I went to college to study law – I’d always been academically bright and hopes were high (although not mine). I got a fairly decent degree and it was expected that I’d become a solicitor. But I couldn’t do it. I was paralysed by something, which I couldn’t articulate. So I left Dublin and went to London and got a job as a waitress. It was a glaring example of self-sabotage. Only now can I see that it was my old trouble, acute self-hatred, that wouldn’t let me have a decent job. I simply felt that I didn’t deserve it.
Eventually, I got a job in an accounts office. Once I had more money, my drinking moved up several notches. Albeit excessive, it remained social for a long time. I didn’t yet drink on my own – that was all still ahead of me in my empty future. And everyone else seemed to drink as much as I did – it hadn’t occurred to me that I tried hard to surround myself with other heavy drinkers so that my drinking didn’t stand out.
Fun became my yardstick. It was important to have ‘fun’ while drunk and more ‘fun’ when doing morning-after postmortems. (‘It must have been a brilliant night. I don’t remember a thing.’) I distanced myself from my drunken behaviour by turning it into entertaining anecdotes. One morning I woke up to find a carton of french fries scattered under my pillow with no idea of how they’d got there. But I sidestepped my shock by working it up into a funny story. My drinking wasn’t a problem, I told myself, it was fun.
I was big on bravado. I could drink neat whiskey without a shudder. I could down an entire pint in one go. I could and did drink anything and I rarely threw up. I could outdrink men twice my size and I thought this was sexy.
I was a woman in her twenties, living in London. Wasn’t it about wild times, raucous high spirits, ending up at strange parties, about embracing spontaneity? And if I sometimes woke up in an unfamiliar flat with people I didn’t know, surely it was better than being boring?
OK, so I was perpetually in debt, I woke up covered in bruises with no memory of how I’d got them, I often missed work because I was hungover, the depressions following a good night out were getting worse, I seemed to do nothing but drink, I never saw the second half of a play, I got off with men who turned my stomach when I sobered up and relationships with men I liked never worked out. At least I was living. It was a constant search for drama, any kind of activity, so that I – had I but known it – didn’t have to be alone with myself. And if some things had to be jettisoned along the way, like self-respect, then so what?
But alcoholism is a subtle, insidious and progressive disease. Which meant, quite simply, that I got worse.
I can’t say exactly at what point I became physiologically as well as psychologically addicted. But definitely by my late twenties, through overexposure, my body was sensitized to alcohol. So that when I drank anything – no matter how small – it triggered a fierce craving for more and more. Once I started I literally could not stop. And once I stopped I couldn’t stay stopped. I had become – though I wouldn’t have known the term – a binge drinker.
But there were enough pockets of normality to paper over the problem – I went shopping, bought shoes I didn’t need and couldn’t afford, went to the gym, met friends for dinner, had nights in with my flatmates watching soaps, and apart from being increasingly unreliable, I was actually good at my job.
And yet…
I kind of strayed into drinking in the mornings. It started at weekends, where a combination of the terrible depression of a hangover and the unbearability of having a lonely, empty day stretching ahead of me meant I couldn’t stop myself from picking up the bottle. But over the months, the weekend drinking spilled over into Monday and Tuesday. Or began on Thursday. Or Wednesday.
Even as I write this, my head tightens with disbelief. But at the time my denial blocked out all light. I didn’t know that denial is as big a part of alcoholism as the drinking, that it grows in direct proportion to it, so that I was constantly normalizing the abnormal. Bizarre as it sounds, I didn’t think I was an alcoholic. I knew something was very wrong, but I didn’t – couldn’t – make the connection between my acute misery and my drinking. Because then I might have had to do something about it – like give up. And that was out of the question.
Around me my friends, my peers, had begun to do peculiar things – like get married, buy flats, have children, get promoted. As my drinking buddies fell by the wayside, I was frightened. Their achievements highlighted the emptiness, the lack of forward propulsion in my own life. So I chose to mock them. ‘So and so has become the most boring person alive,’ I regularly scorned. ‘All he wants to talk about is his new couch and his career path.’
I didn’t have a career. As it was, it was only because I had a concerned and sympathetic boss that I held on to my job. And I most certainly didn’t have a healthy relationship with a man. By my late twenties, I had developed an uncanny ability to find men who could endorse my self-loathing.
But when things that happen to alcoholics began happening to me, I was appalled. One night, after I’d been on a solitary three-day binge, I went for a drink with my – for want of a better word – boyfriend. To my horror, I found that my hands had such tremors I literally couldn’t pick up my glass. Although it was obvious to everyone who knew me that this was likely to happen, I was still devastated and disbelieving. Even now I can see the expression on his face – realization and contempt.
The night I first made the decision to stay in and get drunk on my own, that I’d rather have alcohol than people, was when I began the descent into the final phase of my alcoholism. It was St Patrick’s night 1993, and just before I left to join my friends in the revelling, it struck me how much more convenient it would be to stay home. I could drink as much as I liked without anyone looking askance at me. What could be simpler?
It was around then that I stopped eating. I’d always been fond of food, overeating as a form of comfort and then overexercising as a form of penance. But as though a switch had flipped, I just stopped. Lots of the time I was too sick to eat, but mostly I’d just lost interest in food. My love for alcohol was so passionate there was no room for anything else.
By then it was glaringly obvious to everyone around me that I had a serious problem. Concerned friends and colleagues began to bandy the word ‘alcoholic’ about. To get them off my back, I pretended I agreed with them. I promised I’d stop drinking. But I was looking from the inside out, where the view was very different – a life without alcohol was unliveable. Anyway, alcoholism only happened to other people. But even though I couldn’t possibly be an alcoholic, I was unable to stop drinking. Sometimes I managed a few days, but sooner or later I always cracked.
My life dwindled away to almost nothing, until all I was left with was a defensive position. I spent bright sunny days hiding in darkened rooms. I missed more and more work, got further and further into debt, lost friend after friend. And I didn’t care. So long as I had my best friend, my lover, alcohol, I didn’t need anyone or anything else.
From September 1993 to January 1994 was the most bereft time I have ever lived through. I had a bare bed, in a bare room, with a bare window, in a bare, bare life. The cold seeped through the naked glass and I isolated myself as completely as I could, not seeing anyone, not answering the phone. I was paranoid and fearful and only went out to buy more alcohol.
I read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver around then, taking comfort es
pecially from Bukowski’s stoic acceptance that while alcohol made him sick and crazy, it was possible, indeed necessary, to co-exist with it. And three lines from a Raymond Carver poem jumped out at me, when he’s describing perfect happiness – ‘No one home, no one coming home, and all I can drink.’ That’s me, I thought. I felt understood by a kindred spirit and I read those three lines over and over, like a mantra. I’d always been prone to depression and melancholy, but it got worse. I began to have suicidal fantasies. When I closed my eyes, I was overwhelmed by a picture of me blowing my head off with a gun. At times in a busy street it was almost more than I could bear not to sink to my knees and howl with the agony of being alive. Before I went to sleep at night I used to pray not to wake up. For every moment that I wasn’t unconscious I felt as though my head was a war zone.
Things accelerated until, in hellish misery, one Monday morning I jerked into consciousness. I’d had my, by now, usual weekend, alone and drunk. I was in the horrors, savagely depressed, and something ripped inside me. Suddenly I couldn’t live my unbearable life any longer and for the first time I made the connection that alcohol was responsible for my wretched state. But I’d tried so many times to stop drinking and I hadn’t been able to. I was trapped in a pit, and suicide seemed my only option. Hardly believing what I was doing, I swallowed every pill I could find and waited to die. But as I drifted into unconsciousness, I had a moment of clarity. Maybe I had another option, maybe I could live without alcohol.
I rang a friend, who rang an ambulance. I spent six weeks in rehab before re-emerging into the world.
It was like the end of a love affair, the most passionate of my life. The gig was up, I knew I couldn’t handle alcohol but I raged against the loss. I was thirty. I felt like my life was over and I braced myself to endure the next forty or so years. Without drink, I felt I’d never be happy again – which is funny because I hadn’t been happy with it.
They’d told me in rehab to stick close to other recovering alcoholics, which I did, but reluctantly. By now I was half-prepared to admit that I was an alcoholic, but I still felt special and different – not realizing that, amongst other things, alcoholism is a disease of terminal uniqueness.
I had my last drink in January, but suddenly it was August, something good blossomed within me and I remember miracles.
I remember it was summer, that it stayed summer for a very long time.
I remember the absence of fear.
I remember the conviction that nothing bad could happen to me.
I remember feeling young and ripe with hope.
I remember being as excited as if I’d just moved to London, though I’d lived there for eight years.
I remember how sharp and new life was, how the old one seemed shrouded in grey mist.
I remember buying curtains for my bedroom window – glorious blues and greens, instead of the colour of air, the no-colour of my old life.
I remember walking through the crowds of Portobello Road one Saturday afternoon and the feeling of invisibility that true belonging brings.
I remember the thrill of rediscovery.
I remember feeling in love with everyone.
I remember the pit-of-my-stomach happiness at being me, at being clean and sober and honest.
I remember lying on sundrenched grass in Soho Square, laughing at something someone had said, and being struck by the understanding that even though I’d been so very careless of myself and my safety through the drinking years, nothing terrible had ever befallen me – and I remember the strangest thing of all. For someone who’d always felt so inconsequential I remember realizing that I’d been rescued. That I’d been worth rescuing.
Previously unpublished.
TWELVE MONTHS
Sackcloth, Ashes… and the Gym
January. The sackcloth and ashes month. The hairshirt and self-flagellation month. The month when I repent for my sins, when I do penance for the hedonistic free-for-all that was Christmas.
January, the month when bitter, bleak winds sweep across the empty plains of my bank account.
January, the month when I open my credit-card statement and my mouth drops open in outrage. Someone must have stolen my card and gone berserk buying gift packs in the Body Shop, I conclude. Just as I pick up the phone to call the police, I realize the person was me.
For me, January is always a month of sensory deprivation – no going out, no buying anything – as a direct result of the crazed orgy of spending on so many useless things during the frantic countdown to the big day. Never in the field of human consumption was so much spent by so many on such a multitude of little raffia baskets filled with bathsalts, facecloths and white musk body-lotion. While the credit cards are having a rest I have to make my own entertainment, so I while away the first thirty-one days of the year on my knees, picking pine needles out of the carpet. I have wheedly conversations with myself where I try to summon the energy to put the Christmas tree out with the rubbish. On the rare years that I achieve this, I’m a nervous wreck, tensed against being woken early on bin day by the binmen roaring insults up at my bedroom window when they discover the seven-foot tree nestling un-inconspicuously amongst the black bags.
Luckily, though, the tree usually ends up staying until June. Then when someone volunteers to carry it outside, I say, ‘Ah no. It’s nearly Christmas again. It might as well stay. It’ll save us buying a new one.’
But most of all, January is the month of regrets, and now it’s pay-back time. Time to undo the damage during the January purge, with self-denial and fresh starts. Except I’m not going to. This year the only thing I’m giving up is giving up. I couldn’t be bothered anymore. I’ve been on a diet for most of my adult life and I’m fatter now than I’ve ever been.
I am living proof that dieting makes you fat. But don’t for a minute think that I’m going to come back to you in a couple of months’ time and say that since I gave up dieting I’ve lost weight. Because I was conned by that particular trick a couple of years back. ‘Take the mystique out of food,’ they said. ‘Eat what you like,’ they urged. ‘Reclaim your right to eat and you’ll break the starve-and-binge cycle.’ ‘Right, thanks very much, I will,’ I said, suspicious, yet delighted. Well, it didn’t work. I put on more weight and the one person who wasn’t surprised was me.
The only times in my life that I’ve ever been skinny were when I was having a couple of what amounted to near nervous breakdowns. And even when I was at my thinnest, there was always a fat woman inside me waiting to get out. So now, if I was offered the choice between being plump and happy or skinny and miserable, I’m nearly certain I’d choose the plump and happy option. Truly, I have achieved wisdom! (All the same, I wouldn’t object if I was offered the chance to do a bit of barter – a 10 per cent reduction in my peace of mind in exchange for a corresponding reduction in the size of my thighs, for example.)
To banish the superfluous lard acquired over the festive season, January is the month when gyms around the world see a surge in membership. When poor awkward people emerge from changing rooms, resplendent in their pristine new leotards and snow-white runners that you could sail to France on, hugging the wall, convinced that everyone is looking at them and laughing. Which indeed they are. My experience is that most people feel so anxious in gyms that if someone else is at even more of a disadvantage than they are, they will cruelly capitalize on it. All the better to convince themselves that they’re OK.
This January I won’t be joining a gym. But only because I’m already a member. In the same way that I’ve been on a diet almost since the day my mother put me on to solids, I’ve belonged to a gym since nearly the first day I began walking. It’s not my fault. I lived in London during the soulless greedy eighties when you were no one if you didn’t own an Azzedine Alaia dress, have a cappuccino machine and belong to a gym. And it wasn’t enough just to belong to a gym – you had to go at bizarre times. Either you got up at four-thirty and did two hours’ circuit training before going to your fl
ash job in media or the City, or else you went after you finished work at midnight. No other times would do. (Which was hard for me because I worked the shamefully slothful hours of ten to six.)
The worst thing about joining a gym – no matter what month of the year – is The Fitness Assessment, where they tell you how fat and unfit you are before they let you loose on the machines. I had a very humiliating one about three years back, after I’d taken a six-month sabbatical from step classes. First they weighed me (I always close my eyes, because it’s invariably worse than I expect it to be). Then they measured my percentage body fat with a kind of pliers’ yoke (again, I requested to be spared the details). Next I had to lep up on a bike and cycle for five minutes at top speed to assess my aerobic fitness. Then I had to pull and lift things so that they could find out how strong I was. Then all the information was fed into a computer and within seconds a print-out appeared which gave a picture of my overall fitness.
The assessor’s face went very still. ‘One moment,’ she said through white lips. ‘I just want to get my superior.’
The superior arrived and they both studied the print-out. Low muttered conversation ensued. ‘That can’t be right…’ drifted over to me, as I sat with a fixed, anxious smile on my face. It seemed they thought the computer was broken. So they did the whole thing again, and it turned out that the computer wasn’t broken. Although I could have told them that.
The superior went to get his superior. In fact they almost rang staff on their day off to come in and have a gawk at me.
Judging by the things they were saying – ‘An unexpectedly high percentage of fat… In all my years… Very poor muscle tone…’ – they’d never seen the like.
‘You don’t look that bad,’ the assessor said, by way of comfort.
My humiliation was utter. Nowadays, I ask to be excused from The Fitness Assessment. I say, ‘Lookit, I’ll pay the twenty quid anyway. But you know and I know that I’m unfit and overweight. Can’t we just leave it at that?’
