Kristin Hersh released Hips and Makers in 1994. Her band, Throwing Muses, was my favorite band, and I idolized her. I can still picture the record store chalkboard where her impending solo release was announced. In the days before Google, we got our news from chalkboards in record stores. I bought the CD the day it was released, and listened to it obsessively for the rest of the year. My roommates heard the album on repeat, and barely even rolled their eyes until months in. Acoustic songs, strings, tortured and oblique lyrics. I loved that album. 

I put it on today for the first time in at least 20 years. To my surprise, it didn’t transport me to my days as an 18-year-old in Chico, CA. It took me back to being a little kid. Maybe it’s loneliness that draws the through-line. I was deeply lonely as a child, and I was painfully lonely that year in Chico. Music has a way of gripping you by the guts and thrusting you wherever it wants. Today, I am back in the land around our property, playing solo make-believe. I’m alienated in the babysitter’s house with her unfriendly kids who insist on watching “Transformers” and “He-Man” while I want to watch just about anything else. I am climbing the tree a little way away from the house to read and write in the branches. 

Where I grew up, there weren’t other kids around. It was a very rural area, and maybe lots of kids would have liked it, picturing the idylls of exploring nature in the fields and making their own fun. I just missed my friends. Because there was no one to drive me around, there was no staying after school for clubs and sports. I saw other kids at lunch time, and sat in class with them, and went to day care with them. The rest of the time, I was alone.

I didn’t drink in high school. Drinking culture turned me off, and my peers who were rumored to have beer bashes were not my kind of people. I fell in with a group of really neat kids who were into indie rock and were straight edge, no drinking or drugs. As an obese teenager, I always felt somewhat on the edge of that group, never getting to participate in the endless forming and re-forming of romantic relationships between the participants. My friends were actually very kind, and embraced me completely, but I still never felt fully one of them. When they took me home, it was to a house 10 miles from the middle of nowhere. I was still lonely. 

When I went away to college, it was in a new city, and it was hard to make friends. I did finally make some friends, and not too long later, I had my first drunk. A friend of my roommate had a kegger, and there was half a keg of beer that “had” to be finished before the keg got returned to the liquor store. He and his 14-year-old brother brought it over to our apartment for us to finish. We stayed up into the wee hours. We did “clear the keg.” We walked to Denny’s at 6am. I was with the cool kids, and we were having the time of our lives.  I had never felt such a sense of belonging.

I don’t remember what role alcohol had for me for the next couple of years. I was definitely not a regular drinker during that time.  We were underage. I remember my roommate getting her hands on an occasional 4-pack of Zima, which we drank enthusiastically. Zima! For those too young to know this one, it was the predecessor of modern spiked seltzers like White Claw. 

Then, in 1995, I moved in with some friends who were 21, and were happy binge drinkers. Drunks were frequent, not always limited to weekends, and involved taking down a handle of Jim Beam. It was unbelievably fun. We had raging parties where we cleared the keg every time, and only slightly damaged the rental house. We had beer around probably every day, at least every day we could afford it. Even though I still wasn’t part of the romances, my friends had deep respect for my ability to hold my liquor, and I felt accepted and part of the group in a way that had eluded me my whole life. It must have been the drink….right?

Inclusion and belonging drove my early drinking, and what I remember, I remember very fondly. The next 25 years involved a whole lot of drinking that turned into more of a way to avoid and bury problems than a way to have fun. There were occasional episodes in between that did remind me of the early college days when drinking was a doorway to being part of a group that loved me and wanted me there. That was all I wanted. 

And where it ended up in my 40s was drinking alone. No one drank like I drank. Instead of making social plans, I drank in my basement until I blacked out. Liquor stopped being a tool for acceptance and became an end in itself. I became more and more isolated. 

I know, this is supposed to be a story about how I found companionship and belonging in sobriety. Maybe on another day. I really have connected with people in astonishing ways as a sober person. But today I am transported back to feeling loneliness in my gut – a lifetime of solitude carving a wide canyon. Today I am grappling with the past, with reconciling who I am now with the memories that got me here. There are a lot of days over the past 45 years where I would drink to make this feeling go away, to stuff the memories down and let the drink fill up the chasm. I won’t do that today, but there is a lot to sit with. Beware the perils of putting on albums you were obsessed with at age 18. You never know what will come up.