This is an account of drinking beyond what I can comprehend, and I myself am a drinker. I like alcohol, I like to get drunk, but I know my limits and I abide by them to a decree. If I don't follow that, I know the consequences.

For me, that is in part why I have a limited empathy for types like this author who specifically blame alcohol for larger problems. Her account of blackout drunkenness and the weight it carries is completely accurate. Many of my worst nights, in college at least, were from being blackout drunk and learning what happened in the aftermath. Even if nothing of note happened for me, I carried this uncomfortable weight within me that I really had no control over my faculties.

My empathy extends from what can happen while drunk to what actually happened under the influence and blaming it other forces. My blame is my own, not some drug that compels me. In the beginning, yes alcohol has some strange properties that change the way you act, the way you perceive situations, the way you navigate yourself. There comes a point in 95% of people's lives where they have to learn to operate themselves under the influence. Drinking and experiencing a drunken state is a process of learning and letting go. Being Grander than you are, daring to try and say things you wouldn't normally say. That's part of the fun. Even just feeling the waves of the world and of social dynamics beyond your normal understanding is grand, for the more introvert minded.

These feelings and experiences can quickly twist on themselves, because all of these come with a clouded lack of control. That 'zen' can spiral into so many directions, none in the direction that your aspirational past could ever put together. Or even understand. But as a failure, what could my idyllic past self even possibly understand about me now? The vision is vague and happy.

A void I cannot reach across is that I am a man and the author is a woman, and the experiential differences stand as they do. But as a guy, I have no idea how someone gets themselves into the situations the author describes, and that goes beyond sex. How does someone let themselves into a situation like any that the author describes. How as a guy, do I comprehend the difference that women face in these kind of circumstances, from men who suffer from this desire to put women in these type of circumstances. And all the black-out drunk men who usurp a woman and think that everything that they are doing is perfectly OK.