Blackout Quotes

“Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“We all live in the long shadow of the person we could have been.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Sobriety has a way of sorting out your friendships. They begin to fall into two categories: people you feel comfortable being yourself with—and everyone else.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Some people are so brimful with misery they can’t help splashing everyone else.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“I began crying harder than she'd ever seen me cry. I became unreachable. A void in me had opened, and she had no idea how to fix me. I kept saying the same thing, over and over. No one will ever love me. No one will ever love me.
When Anna told me what happened, I was shaken. And I wasn't sure which worried me more: that I had blacked out again, or that when the deepest and truest part of me was cracked open, the only thing that poured out was need.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“We all want to believe that our pain is singular - that no on else has felt this way - but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we're not unique. But it also means we're not alone.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Own your own feelings, skepticism, irrational rage. Stop pretending to be someone you aren’t, because otherwise you have to go into hiding whenever you can’t keep up the act.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“I'm not sad or embarrassed to be an alcoholic anymore. I get irritated when I hear parents use that jokey shorthand: God, I hope my kid doesn't end up in rehab. Or: God, I hope my kid doesn't end up in therapy. I understand the underlying wish -- I hope my kid grows up happy and safe. When we say things like that, though, we underscore the false belief that people who seek help are failures and people who don't seek help are a success. It's not true. Some of the healthiest, most accomplished people I know went to both rehab and therapy, and I've known some sick motherfuckers who managed to avoid both.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“I read an interview with Toni Morrison once. She came into the literary world during the drug-addled New Journalism era, but she never bought the hype. “I want to feel what I feel,” she said. “Even if it’s not happiness.” That is true strength. To want what you have, and not what someone else is holding.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Women are so careful with each other’s feelings. We know the world shoots poison daggers into our egos—and we shoot them into ourselves—and so we rush to each other’s sides for triage: Yes, you were fine last night; yes, you are perfect exactly as you are. (Classic Onion headline: Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating the Living Shit Out of Each Other.) We become such reliable yes-women that any negative feedback is viewed as a betrayal, and the only place we feel comfortable being honest is behind each other’s back. Did you hear what she said last night? Did you see what she wore? These are the paths of least resistance—the unswerving praise, the gossip dressed up as maternal concern—and it can be very tricky to break rank and say, out loud, to each other: No, you weren’t fine at all.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Be kind to drunk people, for every one of them is fighting an enormous battle.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Addiction was the inverse of honest work. It was everything, right now. I drank away nervousness, and I drank away boredom, and I needed to build a new tolerance. Yes to discomfort, yes to frustration, yes to failure, because it meant I was getting stronger. I refused to be the person who only played games she could win.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“My shelves were filled with books I could not finish and textbooks I never cracked. But I was always cramming for the test about Anna's past. I paid lavish attention to every word she spoke. Until then, it had not occurred to me what an act of love this was: to remember another person's life.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“But fearing another person's opinion never stops them from having one.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Self-destruction is a taste I’ve savored much of my life.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Sometimes I felt like I was living on an island, where all I did was hope a friend would float by, and when they finally arrived, I began to wonder when they'd go away.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Alcoholism is a self-diagnosis. Science offers no biopsy, no home kit to purchase at CVS. Doctors and friends can offer opinions, and you can take a hundred online quizzes. But alcoholism is something you must know in your gut.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“So I sauntered up to those amber bottles, and I learned to swallow their violence. Do that enough, and you will reorient your whole pleasure system. Butterfly kisses became boring. You crave blood. Hit me, motherfucker. Hit me harder this time.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“But the one that stands out to me is how I quashed my feelings for the sake of someone else’s. His pleasure was important, not mine. His regret was important, not mine. It was a pattern I repeated for years.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“I had two speeds, which often varied with my blood alcohol level: fine with whatever, and never, ever satisfied. Where was the balance between these two?”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“I wanted to be like her: tough and foxy. I wanted to borrow her brassiness: What are you looking at? Who gave you permission to look at me? How exciting to barge through the world, never apologizing for your place in it but demanding everyone else's license and registration.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“That’s what I wanted. An honest conversation. Not one where my mouth turned into a geyser of random confessions—my bra fits funny, and I once boned that bartender—but a conversation in which those superficial details faded away and we dared to tell the truth about our own suffering. This was the closeness I had always been drinking toward. I drank for other reasons, so many other reasons, but closeness was the richest reward. The part where we locked in on each other, and one person sifted out the contradictions of who they were and how they got there, and the other person just… listened. I’m not sure when I stopped listening. Somehow it became my duty to entertain the masses. To be always on. I stopped being someone who talked with their friends and I started talking at them. Amusing anecdotes, rants deployed on cue. I wasn’t the only one. We were all out there on our social media stages with clever quips and jazz hands. This was not a cultural moment that rewarded quiet contemplation.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Overthinkers are the most exhausting alcoholics.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“An evolved life requires balance. Sometimes you have to cut out one thing to find balance everywhere else.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“When I sit in rooms with people once considered washed up, I feel at home. I’ve come to think of being an alcoholic as one of the best things that ever happened to me. Those low years startled me awake. I stopped despairing for what I didn’t get and I began cherishing what I did.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“One of my favorite ways to have sex was right before a blackout, when I was still there but I'd gone feral, and I could let all those low and dirty words spill out of my mouth. Do this. Do that. But now I wasn't sure if I liked sex that way because it felt good or because guys dug it when I got wild. That's what I wanted more than my own pleasure. To make myself irresistible. To blow his freaking mind.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“My self loathing was like a bone I couldn't stop gnawing.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“God was for weak people who couldn't handle their own lives, and it took me a long time to understand that, actually, I was a weak person who couldn't handle my own life, and I could probably use all the help I could get.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget