As I started to take my addiction seriously, I joined multiple online support groups, attended a few in person, read the proverbial “quit lit.” Another brother, Brian, died when he was hit by a car, in 2002.

The sufferers, I concluded, didn’t want support, we wanted one of three things: someone to see us, a platform for our solipsism, and someone to fix us. Behind every heavy sigh in whatever flavor of group I signed up for there was an addiction to not doing the work, staying stuck. This took the form of either the male comedian, or the man who likes to tell stories about the worst thing they did while drunk, dominating the meeting with their war stories as other men puffed up their chests in solidarity.

Or, the women sat idly by and watched the show, unless they could find a women-only group. “Self-care” is the thru line there, and for those who can afford the higher end of these groups still get the same messaging, just packaged differently. Take care of yourself, set boundaries, keep coming back to this site, buy this book and if you need more support that will be extra. As of late, many doctors have got on board and partnered with these pop-up sites to prescribe Antabuse, Naltrexone, and the other opioid antagonists with little oversight. But if you don’t have access to what you really need, to be seen, understood, you’ll just stop taking the antagonists and keep drinking. Dennis Lehane writes in Shutter Island “…someday, we’ll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.”

The most helpful thing I ever learned would come years later when someone just simply said to me “you are the master of your own ship.” It flipped a switch for me.

But I drank for decades more. My last brother, David, died by hanging in 2019.

I always thought it would be my breasts that would defect first, but it was my heart. After days of abuse, my mouth would open as a hollow, and my heart, fierce but helpless, pumped like a fist against a locked door.

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

…

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

Louise Glück, from the poem “The Wild Iris”

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© 2026–present C. Nightjar. All rights reserved.

I know all too well how days like this go: if you’ve been addicted for a long time, and if you start day-drinking on an empty stomach, you don’t stop at the end of the day. I, too, sans the vodka (my devils were beer and wine), would get started early and it would morph late into the evening, and then to maintain body and mind homeostasis the next day, I would drink to feel normal, and then ethanol’s addictiveness would cause me to drink more. Anne was probably in menopause at the time of her death, and that coupled with the PTSD she suffered from childhood trauma was a poorly mixed cocktail. The night sweats from hormonal changes, drinking, and her more than likely trying to stay relevant in an unforgiving occupation for the aging, would cause anyone to want to heavily dissociate. Ms. Heche more than likely didn’t learn how to self-regulate, and, as Holly Whitaker wrote in Quit Like a Woman, she had to “manage it with a jackhammer at the end of the day.” When she tore down that street, it was a race to get away from herself, knowing full-well she could no longer manage the endless work of being a woman.

The same year we scraped Craig off the tracks, I graduated university and went to Greece with my friend, Loreen. My relentless gym regiment had begun to wane, and I had dabbled a little in cocaine before the trip, but nothing full-blown yet. We had a stopover in England, then we traveled to Athens, ferried to San Torini, to Paros, then Mykonos. As we made our way up the Aegean, the riskier my behavior got. On Paros, I slept with an uncircumcised waiter. Drinking games after hours. Big, big moons. One night, Loreen got frustrated with me and walked back to our hotel in an island blackout. Selfish, I stayed behind and picked up a Greek man.

We walked out on a rocky pier…he tried to seduce me…it gets fuzzy from there. But I’ll never forget a base fear, like if I give in, I’ll be dead. He continued to plead. I stayed and listened. I knew I wouldn’t go with him, but it was at this point I was firmly entrenched in a kind of learned helplessness. I left him at the pier.

Why do we put ourselves in harm’s way?

In Alain de Botton’s May 2016 New York Times article “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” he writes:

“What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign.”

Happily, buzzed, I walked toward that man because I wanted to connect. What started to build was a need to attach, an attachment to men who had…I mean…I wanted inside them. I wanted to be them. Women, too. I didn’t want to be like them, or take on their clothes or affects, it was more physically haunting, like when a bird sticks its beak in your ear and doesn’t bite, but trills. I settled on those who wanted me for use. Me as them, I think, is worth digging into, as I saw something in them that was me, that I wanted back. I lived alongside them, stared at them through mirrors or windows or all the untoward ways we intrude on others. But mostly I sat outside them, crazy to find my way back to anything that looked like me, something I had lost.

Read Part 3.

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© 2026–present C. Nightjar. All rights reserved.

That bottle of white wasn’t my first vacation, and my amygdala wanted out before I did, tired of its job. Yet I had submerged a helpful part of me in quicksand and poured rocket fuel down the hole. If you do find yourself in quicksand, lean back, getting out takes a long time. It’s a lot of spiraling, one way or the other, until you loosen quicksand’s hold. The only danger is the incoming tide that never relents, and at its center is overwhelm.

House cleaning got more urgent the worse my habituation. After a multi-day binge, I would get out of bed like I was shot out of a cannon. I moved around the house like I was dodging bullets, running from one end of the house to the other like I was trying to hide. Every lick of clothing was washed and put away. Gone, temporarily, were the shame and night sweats from the sheets. Still legless, I walked the dog, holiday heart pounding and inflammation so extreme it crept into my lower back and strained my lungs. Then I would bathe, wax my upper lip, tear that dead toenail off. If I can just put my house in order, I’ll be in order, too. Exhausted, breathless, and bereft of meaning, I had to sit with myself.

Thomas Roethke writes in his poem “Prognosis,”

The scheme without purpose; pride in a furnished room; The mediocre busy at betraying Themselves, their parlors musty as a funeral home.

Charles B. Towns, who conducted experimentation with cures for alcoholism and drug addiction and drafted drug control legislation in the early 20th century, writes in his 1915 book Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy, “A far greater number of its victims than the offhand moralist is included to concede have admiral sturdiness of will and dogged persistence.” He continues: “They are alcoholics because with the help of stimulants they have habitually forced themselves to overwork, to bear burdens of responsibility beyond their normal strength, or to overcome physical obstacles, like poor health, eyestrain, and insufficient nourishment. The man who drinks is not necessarily depraved; but under the influence of [a] stimulant he is very likely to drift into associations and environments which will lower his standards until he becomes irresponsible, unadmirable, or even criminal.”

When my late mother was overwhelmed, she would go to a bar. Sometimes, she would abandon dogs we had adopted on the side of a road. Wanting responsibility to be no longer there, abandoning situations where you were always the responsible one, is tricky. You start out in loving service, then it defines you, and then it leads to a loss of self.

I’ve left my family out of this; they are all dead. Sure, there are a few stragglers: a leftover sister, a widowed sister-in-law and her spawn, a Mormon cousin – a love child of my uncle’s. Working through your past is not an archeological dig, nor is it linear, the chaos already in full swing before I got here. One fun tale involved my mother, at the time living in Alaska with five kids on a school bus, punching a middle school kid who was bullying my brother. My father spent his time shooting horse and playing cards with Jimmie Angel. Everyone drank, smoked pot, smoked. Died. I was born when everything had lost its color. I arrived at the wedding only to find out it was one long, drawn out wake.

In early 1994, my brother Craig stepped in front of a train. They say he was already on those tracks, walking his 10-speed, ZZ Top on 11. His pants, I’m sure, were far down below his waistline. As I write this, I see him walking away from me, gait like a quick upright duck. And I still imagine his mangled corpse, bike wrapped around his body in a metal hug, sweat and blood and dirt caking his full Irish beard. Around the train, the dirt is an oxidized orange, the manzanita is sparse. I only imagine this.

There was relief, as I had taught myself to stop loving long before. In 1990, my sister had been found down a mountain in Washington state, holes in her back, stuffed in a sleeping bag that by chance had held out its soft nylon to a tree branch so she could be found. I became addicted to exercise, sometimes spending an hour or more every day at the gym or on epic hikes in sweltering heat, my groin complaining with the arrival of the blue devil (depression).

How did I not see the hole? How long before I stopped seeing the horizon, any horizon? The exercise addiction was the first attempt to escape. My monkey then morphed into a brief love affair with cocaine. Combing for rocks in the shag and playing all-night Tetris in a basement at twenty-eight, I found out quite by accident that I could drink to get to sleep.

Read Part 2.

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© 2026–present C. Nightjar. All rights reserved.