Dear Reader ,

There are things I have not told you.

It was the middle of 2019 and all of Cleveland was celebrating the rebirth of the Cuyahoga River on the 50^th anniversary of its infamous burning. I'd been walking and walking all day from this event to that, my daughter and husband in tow. The pandemic and George Floyd and the insurrection and the war in Ukraine and the fall of Roe v Wade were somewhere on the road ahead of me, soon to weave into my life along with everyone else's.

A friend spied me and my crew from afar as we traipsed along West 25^th Street that June day and snapped a photo, which he sent later in a jocular, guess-who-I-saw-today way.

The image (I cannot bring myself to attach it herein) was awful. The 10 pounds I'd put on over the previous couple of years hung around the center of my five-foot frame like a bag of ugly. Some bad photos sail over your head, others don't. This one did not. There was Erin Unplugged and she made me roil in self-disgust. I looked at it and said to myself what I'd said so many times before: If you just quit the booze, you'd look and feel better. The admonishment that day, however, went further and burrowed deeper into dark familiar places.

So I stopped drinking, at least for a while. Things improved, but I slowly fell back into nightly vodka. Then I landed the job of my dreams in fall of 2019 as a writer for the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland and I put the booze down again. Then came the pandemic, and as it was claiming the lives of more than one million Americans it also killed off my position with the museum in September 2020.

Things got bad. I fell in and out of drinking, which was a closeted nightly thing. In February 2022, I had a routine physical. My cholesterol clocked in at 260 despite the daily pills. My triglycerides were so high that the Cleveland Clinic lab was unable to calculate my LDL or anything associated with it.

The doc indicated to me that these numbers were, well, problematic.

Indeed they were, but I didn't need any doctor or test results to tell me I felt terrible. So I dried out again and did pretty well. At least until the holidays rolled around and I rolled right along with them—downhill. Since the first of the year, however, I've managed to keep the booze at bay in a way that feels … different.

So here I am, reeling amid a new reality and negotiating it like a silver ball zooming around a pinball machine. Every day, a flipper sends me hurtling into an unknown universe. Lights blink and bells clang all around me. I hit a bumper, and another and another. I score one thousand points. I land in a ball popper and wait to be ejected. I slide across the playfield. I go spinning down the return chute. I get perilously close to tilt.

But so far, dear reader, I am still in play.

It's been hard, but so what? A lot of things are tough, I tell myself. Quit bellyaching.

Despite what you might believe about me, I am intensely private when it comes to personal things and this is as personal as it gets. I am loathe to write about something like this, but you've been with me a long time. One might say you've been with me from the beginning, and I feel I owe you this uncomfortable admission. Also, I knew that as soon as I could tell you, it would mean I've cleared a significant albeit painful bar.

At some point during the festivities, I picked up a volume of what I have playfully dubbed Drunk Lit—that category of books written by people who have Struggled With Addiction and now Have Good Advice because they have Gotten Better and are In Recovery.

Drunk Lit sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, but this endeavor wasn't about my chosen craft or evaluating another writer’s work. So I removed my writer/editor hat, slid it onto the shelf, and continued with a pretty forgiving eye.

Until I came upon this:

"… it's best understood that alcoholism is what happens when your lives become intolerable, or resemble Nick Cage's in Leaving Las Vegas. We know what happens to people who can't control their drinking, and we know it will happen to only a small percentage of us."

-- Holly Whitaker, from Quit Like a Woman, Dial Press, January 2021

That "small percentage" includes my brother John O'Brien, who authored the tragically autobiographical 1990 novel Leaving Las Vegas, which made its way to the silver screen in 1995. Nicolas Cage won an Oscar for his depiction of Ben, the story's main character. Ben is a profound alcoholic on a short and self-destructive path that does not end well (more backstory on John's writing here). John took his own life in April 1994, just days after signing over the film rights for Leaving Las Vegas.

Me and Johnny, circa 1969. The camera knew the story then: She lives, he dies.

Hence, when I saw this reference in my wobbly sober state, I most certainly took it personally. It is supposed to make the reader (me) feel better, as if to say: You might be a drunk, but hey—at least you're not that pathetic guy from the Las Vegas movie who drinks himself to death! I mean, COME ON … It could be so much worse!

The worst part of that italicized speculation is how it evokes the sort of self-deprecating back-and-forth banter Johnny and I were so good at. We’d laugh and laugh and laugh. And then one day we didn’t.

I don't blame Holly Whitaker for selecting John's character Ben as the poster boy for hopeless alcoholics. She is certainly not alone. Ben is the reference drunk for my generation and possibly others. His singular and poetic depiction will likely hold the title for a long time to come as a testimony to my brother’s brilliance as well as his doom.

Holly, incidentally, is not the only one to make this tidy little reference. A similar line bubbled up in This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. It may be in other writings as well (I've put my Drunk Lit consumption on hold for now). Ben and John and Leaving Las Vegas have stumbled through crossword puzzles, films, pop music, and even a Jeopardy clue or two. I am as accustomed to these things as a person can be, but seeing this amid pages I'd turned to in a time of naked vulnerability was something else. It took a minute, but I swallowed it neat and moved on.

The words are still on the page. I am still not drinking.

Perhaps because the Royal Navy issued daily Rum Rations to British sailors for more than a century, a shot of booze somehow became equated with courage. Believe what you will, but a whole distillery full of hooch couldn't match the courage required to write this letter.

I needed to write this. I need you too.

Without you none of this is real. Until I push the “publish” button, it’s just black marks on a white page. You bring it all into focus.

I hope you'll come along with me as I author these pages. I do not intend to turn this into an insufferable recovery diary. Content will be funny and sad and weird, sometimes angry or absurd. It will almost always be what you don’t expect.

This is normally where I'd insert a satisfying line, one that gives you a bit of comfort, but today I just don't have it. I'm tip-toeing along the edge of a precipice. I can't look down right now. I need to just keep going.

I need to hold your hand.

Love, Erin

ps: Don’t worry, my last blood work results were fine.