I have a problem. The problem isn’t the one in which I did things years ago of which I am deeply ashamed. No, this problem is that I pretty those things up and shift reality.

Here are the facts. I ran off to California after graduation. How very seventies. California doesn’t have that cool hip vibe now, but along around 1978, it was the place to be. I wanted to re-invent myself. I’d been a nerdy, lonely, slightly chubby, and silently messed up teenager, and I wanted to be anything but that in the next chapter of my life. I devoted the next ten years to cultivating what in my eyes was an aura of cool. It wasn’t cool. It was pathetic. Sad, embarrassing, humiliating; there are a lot of adjectives I could use, but cool shouldn’t be one of them. I was a sloppy drunk; the girl pouring her drunken self over every guy in the room. I was hungry for attention. I had no boundaries. Most of all, I had no self-respect.

I stopped short of being an actual alcoholic; I can’t even claim a genetic predisposition for my overindulgence. I drank because the party life beckoned with the light of a thousand suns to my teenage self. I also drank because I was terrified in social settings. Drunk me transformed into a different person. One I’d fantasized about becoming for a very long time.