Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 224

You guys,

I was never invited to a dry wedding but the thought of one sounded dreadful. Even a cash bar offended me. Drinking was what made special occasions fun. Drinking was what made life brighter and better. Drinking was what I looked forward to at the end of every day.

Sam and I were in a long-distance relationship then—me in Long Beach, him in Charlotte—and on one of his visits we floated together in a hotel pool while drinking beer—one of our favorite things to do together—when he confessed he thought he might be an alcoholic. “You?!” I laughed. “There’s no way you’re an alcoholic. If anything, I am.”

I was starting to wonder, perhaps, if my drinking was a problem. Not because of the bottle of wine each night but because of the drunk eating.

Right before I met Sam I had a moment that felt like the ground beneath me tilted at a harsh angle and everything looked different. I’d been reading The Untethered Soul when I realized that the first thing I thought about when I woke up each morning was my weight, and the last thing I thought as my head hit the pillow each night was my weight, and then this next thought: “I cannot live like this anymore.” It was one of those cliched moments where I knew my life had changed, where I knew I could not go on living the way I’d been living. 

Weeks later I found another book, Intuitive Eating, and had been listening to it during long walks on the boardwalk. The narrator (who’s voice annoyed me so much I had to increase the speed to 1.5)  told me this wasn’t a dieting book. Rather, that most food issues were actually caused by dieting, and that dieting was a form of short-term starvation. For fifteen years I thought I had no willpower but when underfed, the narrator assured me, I had no choice but to obsess about food. 

One afternoon I was working my first day at my new job in Long Beach. It was a Wednesday lunch shift and the person I shadowed had three tables in four hours. I was bored and famished by the end of it. I ordered a burger and fries and sat in an empty booth at the back of the restaurant, unable to think of anything else except how hungry I was. The burger was messy and greasy. I ate more than half of it and scarfed down most of the fries. 

Something I used to say when I was too full of food and shame was that I hated myself. I wanted to go back in time, to fix it, to eat healthier, eat less, eat slower. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make what I’d done go away. So all I could do was punish myself.

When I got home to my apartment I sat on my bed and stared out the window at a gray sky. I was sinking into a place where I didn’t want to talk to anyone and didn’t want to be in my body and wondered how many miles I’d have to run to make up for what I had just done but also knew that no matter how long I ran I’d still hate myself at the end of it, so that I’d finally open a bottle of wine to ease the self-loathing.

I thought back to the burger and fries. I ate too much and I ate too fast. This was nothing new. I’d been bingeing for years. But for the first time I connected what I put into my body with how I felt thirty minutes later. I realized I never felt good after I ate a lot of fries, and the way they tasted in the moment wasn’t worth the feeling after I ate them. I told myself, right there on my bed, that from then on I could eat fries but never that many. It was a tiny thought that didn’t change the darkness I still felt but it was a change that would stick. There would be binges of other foods in my future but I would never overeat french fries again. 

Intuitive Eating was changing me, though at first it was mostly in my head. I believed the message to be true—that I had to reject the diet mentality and honor my hunger—but to follow its plan meant to relinquish control and trust my body to know when it was hungry and when it was full. Could I do that? Could I really trust my body all the time? 

Something that was gnawing at me, that I refused to fully acknowledge, was that my drinking was interfering with my food journey. If I honored my hunger during the day and then drank a bottle of wine I would inevitably eat one too many Cheez-its before bed. But drinking was not the problem, I reminded myself. The problem was my relationship with food. So while I gave up control of my calorie intake I enlisted the help of Sam to control my alcohol intake. 

I drew up a weekly drinking schedule. It started with only one night a week without alcohol, two nights of two glasses of wine, one night of three glasses, and three nights Unrestricted, which meant we could get blasted, which typically meant a bottle or more. 

The one night a week without alcohol was my saddest day. I had nothing to look forward to. My Cheez-It snack didn’t taste nearly as good without intermittent sips of red wine. Rather than binge eat I binged Stranger Things on my laptop then stared at the ceiling until I finally fell asleep. The next morning, though, I woke up easy and full of an optimism that I could take on the day. AND there was the added thrill that I could drink that night. I had certainly earned it. 

The nights with two glasses were the most difficult. I had less willpower after the second glass, even though I gave myself two generous pours which, let’s be real, put me closer to three glasses. On one such night I went ahead and had a third “Charlie pour” of wine. When I woke the next morning I looked at the bottle and there was about an inch of liquid left. 

The familiar inner voice was loud. You are such a piece of shit. You already get three Unrestricted nights a week. Is it really that hard to limit yourself to two glasses of wine? Was it worth it?? God, you suck. 

Then I thought of Sam. We were in this together. I didn’t want to tell him and in the next second had to. I called and confessed. I expected to be met with disappointment but Sam said, “Babe, it’s okay. Some nights you’ll be able to do it and some nights you won’t. This isn’t going to be a straight line. Don’t beat yourself up.”

Don’t beat yourself up. I never knew any other way. But when Sam told me it was okay I felt like it was really okay. After that, when I caught the voice berating me I heard another voice intervene. You’re doing great. This is not a straight line. Don’t beat yourself up. Keep going.

The weekly drinking schedule evolved over time to two nights a week without alcohol and two Unrestricted nights. These were slow changes with some weeks better than others, but I was drinking less. 

It wouldn’t be until eight years later (the power of compounding according to Sam) that I would attend a wedding and choose to drink water. I would stand on a deck with Sam and stare out at the Intracoastal Waterway and see a tiny boat go by with six young people on it, drinking dancing juice out of solo cups and blasting 2000s hip-hop, and I would sip my water and smile at the partiers on the boat, then we would get home by 9:00pm, be in bed by 10:00pm, and get a good night’s sleep.

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Until next week,

Charlie