On self-betrayal, and moving beyond it

In Salon, Sarah Hepola doesn't stop drinking, until she does.  But her many failures along the way feel like this:

Anyway, I had spent about three months locked in this formal effort to stop drinking, but my success was middling at best. I would last two weeks, and slip. I’d scrawl an oath in blood, last another two weeks and then think, you know, it wouldn’t be that hard to get two weeks again. Why not drink? It got to where I was pretty much drinking every two weeks, which was its own management plan. Twice a month: That ain’t so bad.

Except it was, because the shame of saying one thing and doing another is a dark and bitter brew. I had lost faith in myself and any promises I made whatsoever. I would lay down rules at 7:30 a.m. and dismantle them by lunch. It was meaningless, play-pretend, like depositing an envelope of very generous checks into my account, each of them written on cocktail napkins.

And I liked this, also (and this is in Salon - where Anne Lamott [whom I like!] had just too many epiphanies over the years):

If there is a choice between changing and not changing, I can assure you the latter is the much easier road. How splendid it feels to revert to form. How cool and lovely and sweet. I believe that most of us, in our gut, know what we need to do in this life: We need to leave that job. We need to leave that relationship. We need to stop smoking, stop stuffing our face with peanut butter and fudge, stop hiding in that closet, whatever that closet happens to be for you. But change is hard, man. Ask Obama. Ask anyone who’s ever tried to change.

You know what’s easy? Epiphanies. I love epiphanies, and I have them as often as I can. I will be walking down the street and BANG – I totally get it now. I will be driving in the car and BOOM – I see it clearly for the first time. I have always been like this, determined to solve the world’s ills with my stubborn little mind. I was especially prolific when I was drinking, because the optimism of booze combined with the erosion of my own good judgment made everything – but especially me – seem totally and completely brilliant: You know what we need? Rocket ships. You know what we should do? Get naked. You know where we should go? Mexico. I was an Epiphany Factory. It was light bulb followed by endless light bulb. I convulsed with genius ideas. I lit up like Times Square.

But epiphanies are cheap. They mean nothing, not if you don’t do anything about them. On mornings when I was hung over, I had a lot of epiphanies, too: I can never drink bourbon. I can only drink after 5 p.m. I just need to do more yoga. And then, finally: Screw this, I’m a drunk. This is what I do.

I drank for another year after that. It was great, until it was not. One June morning, exactly two years ago, I woke up near dawn and understood that if I kept drinking, I would not get the things I wanted most. I knew that I could keep drinking for the rest of my life. And it’s not that I would die, exactly; it’s that I would die inside. This was also an epiphany. But it was an epiphany with legs.

That night, I talked to my mother about my drinking. Once you go public with your mom, there’s no walking it back, which is probably why I did it. I wanted to firebomb my escape routes and secret hideaways. I wanted to narrow my options down to one path — the path I knew in my gut was right — so that I could stop spinning off epiphanies and simply trudge that path each day, until days turned to months, and months turned to years and I could look behind me and see that, you know, I covered some good ground there. I don’t know why that time stuck, while all my other efforts didn’t. Sometimes you just have to fail 99 times to succeed once. You have to experience 99 false epiphanies to find the epiphany with legs.

I have been thinking about that closet recently. Friends talk to me about changes they are trying to make, and how they are slipping, and I watch them lash themselves for it. They say things like: I’m never going to change.

What I wish I had known when I was drinking in that ridiculous closet is that change requires failure. It requires screw-ups and a mouthful of grass and shins covered in bruises and I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way around that. It also requires time and patience, two things I don’t particularly like, because I was raised in the school of  epiphany and instant gratification, which is why I loved alcohol, because it was fast, immediate, pummeling.

But change is not a bolt of lightning that arrives with a zap. It is a bridge built brick by brick, every day, with sweat and humility and slips. It is hard work, and slow work, but it can be thrilling to watch it take shape. I believed I could not quit drinking, that people would not like me sober, that life would be drained of its color — but every ounce of that was untrue.