Wine and More Wine

I never once saw my mother or father drink alcohol when I was growing up. It wasn’t in the house. They didn’t order it in restaurants. Nothing. And then I went to college and the floodgates opened. They began drinking wine! White AND red. And, it wasn’t just my parents that started having the occasional glass of wine. It was basically all evangelical Christian parents. It was one day just okay to drink. I’m not sure why — children out of the house, a general loosening of legalistic rules (no dancing, no swearing, no drinking), a growing cultural popularity with wine — I don’t know, but evangelical Christian baby boomers around the US started drinking. It was a phenomenon. Okay… maybe not, but in my world, yes. Yes, it was. 

I was not a drinker. I drank maybe twice in high school. At Wheaton, I had signed The Pledge, wherein I agreed not to drink alcohol, one of many rules I vowed to follow. Like a good Christian, I honored it. I had a few drinks during the summers. We were not beholden to The Pledge in the summertime, at least that’s what I told myself. But I just wasn’t that interested in it. However, after Matt and I broke up, I started drinking some. I was probably 25ish. Yes, mid-twenties. Late bloomer in all ways. First it was wine coolers (do these exist anymore?), White Zinfandel and then White Russians.

Why, you may be asking yourself, did you drink White Russians?

Because they were sweet and delicious and my depressed roommate (she and her boyfriend had just broken up too) was drinking them. We would go to the Indian restaurant next door and order them at the bar. I’m sure we felt very grown up. I moved on to white wine and eventually joined all my peers, with the much-beloved, socially-acceptable and sophisticated red wine. 

I didn’t drink excessively. The party binge drinking that a lot of people experience in their twenties made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t about partying or self-soothing for me, at least not yet. I just enjoyed having a White Russian every now and then with my roommates. That changed with law school. Drinking was a stress release where I could forget the pressures of studies and papers and performance for a while. It became a way to blow off steam when I went out with friends.

My consumption really began in earnest in NYC as my loneliness intensified and my attractions toward women, and particularly Kelly, became harder to ignore. 

As I’ve mentioned, I found myself pretty much friendless when my three friends moved away. The lonelier I felt, the more isolated I felt and the more isolated I felt, the less I left my apartment. My world encompassed about a five-block radius with the occasional trip into Manhattan for my internship. I walked to school, the grocery store, bagel shop, video store (yep, back in the days when we still rented DVDs and even videotapes) and liquor store. That’s it.  

The liquor store was located steps outside my apartment. It became all too easy to dash in on my way back home from school and buy a bottle of wine. I would rent a couple movies or my mailbox would gloriously gift me with three red-sleeved Netflix DVDs. Armed with wine and movies, I would barricade myself in my studio apartment. I’d pop open the cork, pour myself a big fat glass of red and queue up a movie. I was set.  

The effects of the wine were almost immediate: the welcome giddiness, the pleasant fogginess, the slight elation. This was it, the highlight of my day (except the days I received one of Kelly’s letters), my happy place.

Wine relaxed me, rounded out the sharp edges of my loneliness and my ever-increasing shame.

It made me feel light and airy and sometimes even ornery, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My liquid courage. It made the past and the future dissipate and quieted the mounting volume of my worries. I often ended up drinking a bottle a night, which was enough to get me sufficiently drunk but not so much that I couldn’t function in the mornings. 

And the movies I watched, well, they tended towards stories about illicit or unconventional romantic relationships. I was enamored with Tadpole, about a high school boy who falls for his step-mom (sounds icky but I loved it), and Imagine Me and You, about a woman married to a man who falls in love with a woman.

Ugh, I know. Was I blind?

My attractions to women were real and true, but I stuffed them down deep, so deep I couldn’t or wouldn’t see them for what they were.   

Then I discovered The L Word, Showtime’s ground-breaking show about lesbian lives and relationships. I was immediately obsessed, hooked, and addicted. I binged, watching episode after episode, and re-watching particularly moving scenes. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Women openly dating women and living together and getting married…like it was normal. They were beautiful and successful and unabashedly themselves. No hiding. No cowering. No side-stepping. I wanted a love like Bette and Tina, I marveled at Shane’s confidence and freedom in her sexuality, and I rolled my eyes in annoyance at Jenny (why couldn’t they have killed her off instead of Dana?!). I didn’t see the irony then but I so identified with Dana and her fear of coming out.

These characters became my friends.  

When the wine’s fun effects wore off and the shows and movies ended, I was left feeling empty and yucky and ashamed. Wasn’t I indulging my sinful desires? Feeding them? Exacerbating them by watching these kinds of shows and movies? It didn’t matter to me that they were one of the very few outlets I had to deal with my same-sex attractions. I was supposed to stuff these feelings down, ignore them, forge ahead and carry on and just deal with it. And sober, I did just that. But drunk…well, I continued drinking, not only because I was finding it more and more difficult to cope with my secret and shame, but because it gave me license to indulge my desires. 

Another thing. Alcohol loosened me up, lowered my inhibitions and, wonder of wonders, made me attracted to men. Or rather, it made me think that what I was feeling was attraction toward men. I was finding it harder and harder to orient myself towards men, to want to date them, to want to engage with them or flirt with them. Drinking came in handy at a time when I really, really wanted to be straight. Those times during the NYC years when I found myself in a social setting, alcohol was ever present. I usually drank too much but was able to flirt and act like a normal heterosexual woman.  

Drinking became my crutch, my coping mechanism. It was also a huge time suck. I most often drank alone, and wasted countless hours, dawdling the day and/or night away, binging on Netflix and I don’t know what else. Somehow the hours just slipped away. I used alcohol to numb my emotional pain and shame. I used it to disengage instead of confront and deal with my sexuality. And truth be told, even though I get none of the buzz now that I used to feel, it is still my first impulse to pour a glass of wine when I’m feeling sad or lonely.  

I once heard someone say we soothe ourselves from our shame with the very thing that shames us. And it becomes a cycle that is hard to break. I was ashamed of what was happening with Kelly. And I was ashamed of how much I was drinking. Both soothed me and I wanted more of both. I told no one about either.