Blackout Drinker
It comes and goes
“I don’t remember” is a mantra that glides through my mind with ease, even over a decade of sobriety and recovery later. What did I do, why did I do it, how did that happen- all questions my blackout drinking ways make it impossible to know. I don’t remember.
How can I understand or heal from things I don’t remember?
But, is it the details themselves that I need to know, or is it the fact that I knew what I was doing and continued to drink like that anyway for twenty seven years? For the eleven years of my sobriety there has been a persistent place in me that has thought: if I knew what I did and said then I would know what I need to do now. Somehow, the hundreds of piles of nights I can’t recall hand me need to know as the way to soothe the self doubt in all that purposefully lost time.
The shame of it. The resignation of it. The repetition of it.
Blackout drinking is when you drink so much alcohol your memory making shuts down- usually because you drank too much too quickly. There are two types: a brownout, where you have gaps in your memory, and en bloc, where you lose hours of time because memories never form. Blacking out is not the same as passing out. It is active, not passive.
There is a huge difference between blacking out and passing out. When a person passes out, they lose consciousness and are in a state similar to being asleep, although they are not likely to respond to stimuli like being spoken to or touched. When a person blacks out, they make decisions, hold conversations, and even continue to drink. They appear to be conscious, but they will not remember what happened. This is extremely risky, as the person may attempt to drive, have sex, or perform other risky behaviors that can lead to permanent harm and even death. (Psychology Today What Happens to my Brain During a Blackout)
The amnesia I created by drinking too much alcohol meant I spent hours at a time as if I was conscious, upright and acting like I knew exactly what I was doing- but I had no idea. I drank, I drove, I talked, I laughed, I cried, I argued, I made decisions, I told secrets, I went to the bathroom, I stood up, I sat down, I had sex- all awake yet unaware. I collected stacks of morning after regrets made up of uneducated guesses rather than solid recollections. I latched on to not remembering what happened, enabling myself to willingly repeat the pattern, a forgetful narrator addicted to the hope that something I couldn’t remember happening would never happen again.
I wasn’t willing or able to spotlight the actual issue: repeatedly drinking so much that I couldn’t remember what I did was a real, serious, and dangerous problem.
I still have a picture someone took of me, I’m probably nineteen and in my second year of college. I do remember the house where the picture was taken- it was a cabin in the woods rented by my best friend’s boyfriend and his friend next to a pretty creek. We spent a lot of time there, but I don’t remember the photo itself being taken or who took it.
In the photo I’m still tan and freckle faced from spending the long summer days between freshman and sophomore year working outside at a plant nursery, my shoulder length brown hair streaked blond by the sun. I’m standing in front of a double cassette stereo, an open tape case and a lit Camel Light in one hand, the tape itself in the other. Smoke swirls around my face. There’s a Grateful Dead poster on the wall. You can tell immediately by looking at my eyes that I’m gone, wasted. My blue eyes are wide with confusion and annoyance. You can see my clenched teeth and set jaw, the tension in my whole body.
I know this is a snapshot of what me in a blackout looks like. I’m wearing a blue plaid flannel shirt I don’t recognize over the Masters golf tournament T-shirt I took from my high school ex-boyfriend during a different blackout incident over the recent fall break when I left my parents’ house after midnight without leaving a note and drunkenly drove three hours south to go visit him at his college- showing up at his apartment door at an ungodly hour. I must have called him to get directions? This was 1990 so how else would I have known how to get there? I have no clue. I casually called my parents later that day to tell them where I was and the first thing I heard my mom say after I said hello was “WAIT! Tell the police it’s her!”
The police were in the living room with my dad taking a missing persons report.
I rarely took those things seriously. I thought my parents were over-reacting, treating me like a child. I acted like it was totally acceptable for me to drunkenly disappear in the middle of the night without telling anyone. As if it was no big deal to randomly show up at my ex’s apartment at four o’clock in the morning. (who, by the way, wasn’t even part of my life, other than me occasionally drunk dialing him late at night) I took his Masters T-shirt as a souvenir, pretending it was a reminder of a good time we’d had. I twisted the blanks in the story so I could stomach it, outrunning shame, responsibility, and reality with the fleet feet of an Olympic athlete. I normalized my behavior, convincing myself that I didn’t need to remember, and if I didn’t remember that erased my culpability.
For me, being classified as a blackout drinker has been a way to communicate to myself and others the seriousness of how far I needed to go to stop my pain. It has been a label I have worn almost with pride: see how bad it was? That has kept me stuck for an embarrassingly long time. It has been something that helped me shirk my own responsibilities and ignore the opportunities for help, shrugging off my behavior with a lack appreciation for the damage done all around. Not just my hurt, all the hurt.
The way I have been thinking about me and my blackout drinking has been nearsighted. It seems like a way to stay entrenched in my own bullshit. There are plenty of layers to peel off in recovery, and at this moment peeling away another my own bullshit layer is giving off a stench- and it’s the kind of stench like when you fart, and it smells so outrageous that you immediately have to smell it again to believe it.
I am continually amazed by: The ways I can live a perception of something, clinging to it like a life raft of truth even when it reeks of self deception. The mental maneuvers I make to continue my own status quo. The things I tell myself to avoid uncomfortable truths. How much practice it takes to change my point of view.
It’s interesting to me that since I got sober I have been trying to be as conscious as possible- the polar opposite of blackout drunk. Is that just another form of unconsciousness? Another hyper-focus that creates another narrow view, missing the wide angle vulnerability of simply not knowing, not needing to know? Could trying to know myself so well actually be another coping mechanism? I don’t know yet, but just because I’m thinking about it my guess is probably so. It feels like there is the past, and there is running as fast as I can away from that past, separating myself completely enough that the past can’t catch or recognize me.
Lately I want more options than that. More than just me and the past. So much of my energy still goes to tidying the reality of what has been to make it palatable enough for me to feel comfortable in my current inner world. It’s like I just need to walk around my inner town naked until I get over the idea that there’s something to hide.
I guess that’s it, really- that feeling that there’s something to hide. When I drank there was always something to hide. What does a long time blackout drinker do with these behaviors when the blackouts stop and they keep going?
Blackout drinking made me adept at pretending. Pretending it wasn’t me, it was me. Pretending I remembered, and meant to do what I did, or it didn’t happen like that and you were wrong- maybe you were the one who was too drunk? I was a good liar, acting like the random and dangerous things I did were on purpose, so good at covering up that I could sometimes even convince myself it was true. I would take all the blame in situations just so I could control the narrative. Then, after I got sober, I used these ways to excuse, absolve, or forgive myself because I didn’t know anything about what happened or how it happened during my long history of blackouts…well. There’s an arc to my life story that tells me otherwise.
In the case of my blackouts, I might not know the details, but I did know the results. And I did know the cause. Which leads me to a truth- a truth I lost by focusing on the missing pieces of my life rather than the whole picture. I looked closely only to those missing details to give me answers, when I had these other pieces- cause and result- to help the puzzle along.
Very powerful post!