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My high school Latin teacher was a tiny, intimidating Argentinian woman. In her elaborate shawls, she meandered about the school at a pace of .5 miles/hour, sipping her tea and scolding us for furrowing our brows. If you told me she grew up speaking Latin at home, I’d have no doubts. She was of another time.
Latin was the school’s only entirely elective academic class. We studied it on top of our additional schoolwork - it replaced nothing. It was intense, as was I.
Latin is a puzzle. The words don’t go in order, there’s no clarifying punctuation. How many times my Latin teacher reprimanded me for translating something literally. “Amore et melle et felle es fedundissmus,” I translated as “love and honey and venom are rich,” when it’s actually “love is rich with honey and venom.” But what did I know about love? I was 16. Or venom - I lived in a city woefully devoid of snakes. Or honey - it was a time before alt sweeteners.
I loved Latin because it was hard. I derived self-importance from studying until the wee hours. Our Latin teacher told us there were priests at the Vatican who still spoke Latin, but her accent was strong, and I heard, “freaks.” Latin Freaks. I did not think she was disparaging them. I wanted to be a Latin Freak.
Latin felt mature, even naughty. My favorite Latin poet was Catullus. It’s little wonder, now, why I liked him. He mostly wrote about the same lover over and over again. Relatable, much? He was filthy, and that delighted my teenage brain. He once tells a woman her ass is purer than a salt cellar. To this day, I’d sleep with any man who opened a Tinder conversation with a line like that.
I took so many Latin proverbs to heart, believing if I lived by them, then I, like the language itself, would never die. My reasoning was flawed, as Latin is a famously dead language. I believed everything I read in Latin; if it were wrong, why would it have survived thousands of years? And why would the class be so hard? Quidquid latine dictum, altum videtur. Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.
With this attitude, I took one particular proverb to heart. One that I came upon at least a full year before first getting drunk, one that thrilled me for what it promised of adulthood. In vino veritas - in wine, truth. I would drink wine, and I would speak the truth.
I was 15 when I got my first flip phone. The kind on which you may have to press a number up to four times to get the desired letter. The kind whose battery lasted 17 years. The kind that could withstand a nuclear attack.
Texting on those phones was another puzzle. I delighted in taking a string of numbers and determining different possible transitions. I raced myself to text faster. I developed touch-typing capabilities. In a time before smartphones, I was one of the few who could text fast. And I loved to text.
In high school, I shared firsts with my two best friends, Danielle and Jessica. We all got our inaugural phones within a few weeks of each other. Once the technology was available, it became conventional wisdom that a cellphone was a safety necessity for a teenage girl in Manhattan.
We were well-behaved, as 16-year-old girls go, but like all teenagers who spend their evenings unwinding Catullus, we had some inkling of an urge to rebel. And it came to us. Danielle’s parents were out of town, and we were blessed with a large enough liquor cabinet that they wouldn’t notice any aberration. And we didn’t arouse suspicion.
That night, the very first time I got drunk, I sent drunk-texts. I knew I would. I’d been mulling over in vino veritas for a year, and I had a whole lot of truths built up. My friends weren’t paying attention to what I was doing on my phone – they were, unsurprisingly – piss-drunk off their first two sips of vodka. So, I let the texts fly. Most notably, I told my friend Mark about a crush I’d developed on one of his friends, and followed it the next morning with “haha...in vino veritas.” I thought I was so smart. So sophisticated. So intense. Like the Latin Freaks.
When I was 24, I went on two very good dates with a relatively nice guy. Two dates isn’t a lot, but it’s far more than one date, which was my median and mode number of dates per suitor (if we’re excluding zero). I began mentally planning our life together on my subway ride home from #2. We would have at least one child and a pet of his choosing. In the age of fast, online connections, if the first date is good and the second date is good - that’s 95th percentile, baby.
He was a Jewish software engineer from New Jersey, not to be confused with all the other Jewish software engineers from New Jersey I’ve dated. If you meet a Jewish software engineer from anywhere in the Tri-state area, ask them if they know me. Actually, please don’t. There’s a reason we don’t have a Yelp for dates.
After our second date, I texted Jeremy and asked if he wanted to go out again. I used to think I was confident and assertive with men. I later learned I was just drunk. Jeremy said he did, but that he was going to Canada for the weekend, and would text me when he got back. I never heard from him. I wonder if he’s still enjoying Canada. Good healthcare, I hear.
I can remember when we all sent drunk-texts. When we all got drunk and let our feelings rip. When I woke up to a bevy of them, or when I’d hear from a long-lost Tinder match at 3 am (UPDATE: I’ve been informed this is a booty-call, not a drunk-text). Danielle went to college on the East Coast, three hours ahead of me, and I’d often get her drunk-musings as I was still finishing dinner on a Saturday night. I received drunken rambles from most of my friends at one point or another in my early 20s. It was small potatoes.
But by my mid-20s, it was just me. Sometimes, my texts were silly; a long string of hot takes on a celebrity romance. Sometimes, they were funny, akin to the type of content I would later tweet (I have never in my life tweeted anything unfunny). Sometimes, they were nonsensical. A problem set partner sent me a screenshot of my half-baked efforts to write a mathematical proof in a black-out. Sometimes, they were confessional; I’d reveal a secret from my past, as though the secret itself were social currency. Sometimes, they were annoying; I woke up to so many texts that said, “thanks for the novel,” that I thought perhaps I should become a writer. Sometimes, they were drivel; the Latin language has little in the way of punctuation; nor did my drunk-texts.
Initially, I sent them only to friends, but soon, I sent them to new lovers. Long, soapy messages about hopes for our inchoate relationship, or my own insecurities. I once very sincerely – over eight texts - told a man that there was a line from Mindy Kaling’s book I thought about all the time, one that had given my life direction. When he asked what line, I had to admit it was Why Not Me? This is also the title of the book. I didn’t read any other part of it.
If a partner expressed concern about the texts, I would write them off as a way of hastening an inevitable demise. He was never going to be into me anyway, so it’s good I made him say it. When I had a new lover, I knew I would drunk-text him. I’d try to get it out of the way early, fly my freak flag, so to speak. I thought that it was an immutable part of who I was. I thought potential lovers needed to know, and that someday, someone would accept me – drunk-texts and all.
Two weeks after Jeremy became a Canadian citizen, I went to Jessica’s birthday party in LA, where she worked as an assistant to a fashion designer. I was visiting from the weekend from San Francisco and was woefully underdressed for every event. I blacked out. I have no recollection of texting Jeremy. But I suspected I had - he was the man I was currently hung up on, and that’s what I did. I was beyond the point of trusting myself. Ne puero gladium - don’t give a child a sword. Don’t give a lonely drunk-texter a phone. She won’t remember if she used it.
Blacking out is its own kind of puzzle. An unusual type, because the mystery lies within your own mind - the events can come back to you, if you trigger them correctly. I often found myself rinsing off in the shower only to be seized by the memory of something I said in a black-out. If I listened, I could find a whole hour of the evening I didn’t realize my brain had retained. Events would unfold once I situated myself in the black-out moment and began looking around, as though in a VR headset. Once I started remembering things, I would halt whatever I was doing to search the blacked-out memory - there was surely more there.
I was a sleuth when it came to trying to piece together drunk-texts. I would apply my talents to Jeremy, I decided. Finding answers was the only way to calm myself down.
To start, there was the question of whether I’d texted him at all. The answer is obvious, you’re surely thinking. Why don’t you look at your text messages?
No, silly. I didn’t start drunk-texting yesterday! I had already developed a ritual around it, helpful habits to sustain the practice. I deleted all texts immediately after sending or receiving them. In fact, I would log onto my computer in a black-out and delete SMSs saved there, too. And while I was there, I would probably send some emails.
While I never got fired because of a drunk-message, I easily could have. I used to pick drunk-Slack fights with a boss, once prompting him to say, “I just don’t understand how I’m failing so hard at this relationship” (when you work with all men, it’s sort of like being on The Bachelorette, if none of the bachelors wanted to sleep with you). I’ve written overly-emotional pitch emails while drunk. In one of my closest calls, I drunk-emailed a reporter who was looking for a scoop the condiments company. Many of our human instincts were designed to keep us alive in a different world - one in which a mountain lion may snack on us at any moment. I never developed the instinct to turn off my phone in a blackout, but the risks are no less real. I could have ruined my life with a text and a bottle of wine. (Okay, being eaten by a mountain is different from having to switch careers. In only one case are you cruelly forced to update your LinkedIn).
I would never know just how close I got to professional annihilation, because I deleted all those emails too. Absens haeres non erit - out of sight, out of mind. The effects of the drunk-texts were only painfully obvious in my dating life.
So, no, my text logs provided no hints about whether or not I’d texted Jeremy - Step 0 of the investigation was complete. But wouldn’t he have responded to me, you ask? Possibly not, or possibly I’d already deleted the responses. To add to the mess, I regularly blocked the numbers of people I drunk-texted. Often, I knew on a subliminal, black-out-drunk level that I didn’t want their response - that I was trying to make myself known to someone who didn’t care to know me. So, a non-response from Jeremy told me nothing.
The next step was to search the rest of my phone for clues. I had one saving grace, one hint that perhaps I’d spared myself. It was something I’d done a week earlier.
Because I knew I was a drunk-texter, I would go to great lengths to remove phone numbers. Back in the olden days, if you saved someone’s number on your iPhone and then deleted it, their number would still appear when you searched their name. You could not permanently delete someone’s number. The world’s iPhone users are divided into those who know this fact and those who don’t. People for whom this Apple limitation has proven relevant time and time again, and people whom I will never, ever, ever understand.
I deleted Jeremy’s number after his first week in Canada, but I could still find it in my phone when I searched his name. To get rid of the shadow number, I had to reset my phone from factory settings. I destroyed all my data, just to ensure that in a black-out, I wouldn’t text him.
This should have been enough to calm me down. Unfortunately, my phone provided an unsavory hint pointing towards something more sinister. I deleted numbers from the contacts on my phone. But there were always loopholes. Sometimes, I knew I’d sent a screenshot of a text, before I’d saved his number, to a friend. Sometimes, I knew I could find their number in the original dating app conversation.
But then, the puzzle complicated itself once more. I tried to return to the app in search of a clue. But I couldn’t, because – lo and behold - my Coffee Meets Bagel profile was gone. Which meant, in my black-out, I deleted it.
This seems bad, right? As though I’d been on the app and done something nefarious enough to warrant its deletion. Or maybe I merely preemptively deleted my profile so I wouldn’t go back in and find his number. That would be good, right? I’d done things like that in black-outs before. Systems upon systems upon systems. Either way, I still had no idea if I’d texted him.
There’s a line in the HBO show Chernobyl where the scientist explains that nuclear power is a matter of probabilities; there’s no saying if a devastating explosion may occur. The same was true of my drunk-texts. Sometimes, I didn’t text at all. Sometimes, I exploded my life. Is that the most ridiculous metaphor I’ve used thus far? Tough to say, but I do think it makes the mountain lion one sound more reasonable.
The post-drunken anxiety became constant. I’m an early riser, and I often found myself biting my nails in bed on a Saturday morning, waiting for a friend to wake up and respond to me. Waiting for her to tell me I hadn’t done anything too awful; hadn’t texted anything so very bad. Hadn’t trashed our friendship.
I had a visible drunk-texting problem far before I had a visible drinking problem. The texting felt more important to me. Sometimes, I’d get drunk because I wanted to text freely. Vino for Veritas. Sometimes, I’d have a vague notion of what type of texts I would send, and then I’d start drinking and watch them fly. Sometimes, I’d even draft texts while sober and not get the courage to send them until four drinks in. Sometimes, I wanted to have a serious conversation with someone, but I didn’t want to remember it, and I didn’t want them to respond. Drunk-texting was the only way. Some of my relationships were so sad that I wanted them to end in black-out, so I wouldn’t remember. Sometimes, I preferred a mystery to a memory.
And even while I still had the ability to stop, I chose not to. I considered my drunk-texts healing. A cleanse, even. Shitting out emotions that no longer served me. When a drunk-text chain ruined something for me, I took it as insight. As with my late nights of studying Latin, I thought there was inherent goodness in the struggle. That had always been my perspective – the hard thing is the best. Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim - Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.
Even worse, my daytime fear of the drunk-texts only reinforced the belief that they were in some way important. I was saying something that needed to be said, and that alone was terrifying. I fancied myself digging into my rich subconscious, using alcohol to find profound ideas. I didn’t see the drunk-texting as a problem, nor the drinking. All my favorite poets did it, after all. For all I know, Virgil sent prolific drunk scrolls.
I still didn’t have answers in my Jeremy investigation. The next step involved finding witnesses - other party attendees. Did they see me on my phone? Did the phone time last over an hour? Did I mention who I was texting? I would have been ashamed to ask these questions of friends, except I’d done it many times before. We all pretended it was funny. Maybe it was.
My close friends knew of my drunk-texting issue. On nights when I could muster the courage, I would ask friends to take my phone away. Praestat cautela quam medela - prevention is better than cure. Natasha once refused to hold my phone because I was a known drunk-wanderer, and she didn’t think it was safe for me to not have it on me. I was angry, as though she was wrong for prioritizing my physical safety. I asked her if she couldn’t ameliorate the issue by keeping an eye on me. To spend her night baby-sitting, if you will.
When the interviews yielded no answers to my Jeremy-quandry, it was time to invest money. I paid $160 for a service that promised it would get the texts back from Apple. It failed, so I paid $30 for another service that also failed. This was a time before iCloud, I think, or maybe just a time before I used it. I logged into my mom’s iPad, just in case our networks were somehow connected and my texts would be loaded there. I restarted my phone several hundred times. I tried it on multiple different WiFi networks. I looked through deleted screenshots. I went to the Apple store to see if they were still on my account somewhere. I asked God for a favor or two, and still, I turned up empty-handed.
I stayed up at night imagining what I may have written him. Best-case scenario, I’d sent him nothing, or perhaps something so inane he wouldn’t be able to translate it. Not everyone is as adept a puzzle-solver as I. Worst-case scenario, I’d told him I loved him or been horribly cruel. Or perhaps I’d made up a fictitious story to make him feel bad for ghosting me. Amans iratus multa mentitur – an angry lover tells many lies.
How could they just disappear like that? Are texts allowed to die? I thought tech companies retained our information forever and ever and ever and ever. What about Cambridge Analytica, I ask? Verba volant, scripta manent - spoken words fly away, written words remain. Except these particular texts, whose existence was still unclear.
Even though I didn’t have a record of my drunk mutterings, the person receiving them always did. I picked a dangerous outlet. I could have chosen to speak aloud, and then, at least, I couldn’t be screenshotted. But for all the drunk-texts I sent, I never made drunk phone calls. I wasn’t trying to connect or listen – just rant. I didn’t want to be accountable to the person on the other end. Any time someone wanted to discuss my texts the next morning, I would shut down the conversation. “Oh, I was being dramatic, I’m PMS-ing,” I’d say. “Have you considered changing your birth control?” A close friend once asked. “You seem to PMS all the time.”
In Latin, nouns are spelled differently depending on their position in a sentence. These are called declensions. We have them too, but only for pronouns - “I” vs “me,” for example. In Latin, if I wanted to say, “The boy receives my drunk-text” vs “I send a drunk-text to the boy” vs “I drunk-text at the boy,” I would use a different word for each “boy.”
I should have taken that to heart. I treat someone differently when they are the person to whom I’m directing a drunk-text. We are not in conversation, as two speaking subjects; they are the objects. It was not a fair way for me to interact with others.
I’m quite introverted, as I’ve been told by dozens of men I was not interested in talking to. I can give people the impression that I don’t like them. And sometimes, I don’t - I’m not going to pretend I like everyone. But more often, I fear people won’t like me. I’d rather hide in my phone than engage with that possibility. IRL-conversations were not of interest. For years, I would duck out of social engagements under the guise of going to bed early and then walk around drinking bodega wine until 1 am. I’ve left my own parties to drunk-walk. When I’m drunk, I want to be alone. In part, drunkenness felt precious. I didn’t want it spoiled by self-consciousness. I can only enjoy myself when I’m free from fear of others not enjoying me.
About a week after the party, I gave up my Jeremy investigation. What was the harm, anyway? Even if I’d sent him something nasty, he was mean to lie about Canada, wasn’t he? Besides, if he wasn’t lying - if he’d died or permanently lost his phone - he wouldn’t have seen those texts.
It didn’t matter if I’d drunk-texted him. I simply wanted it to matter. Men who ghost you don’t really care what you say to them after. We all know the feeling of rejecting someone and having them bite back with a rude text - we’re not angered, we’re vindicated. We made the right call.
After that experience, I acknowledged the drunk-texting was an issue. But I still hadn’t come around on booze as the deeper problem. I thought I could stop drunk-texting while still drinking, if I put enough controls in place. I was wrong, because the desire to drink and the desire to text came from the same source. The same contradiction - the desires to be seen and to hide. I thought there was something more to me, something hidden inside that would come forth if I shaved off enough of my social anxiety with my booze-razor. I needed the alcohol to find myself; I needed the texts to tell someone else who she was.
But in those thousands of texts, we never found her. Maybe she wasn’t there. Vasa inania multum strepunt - empty vessels make the loudest sound.
A year later, I ran into Jeremy. We were both Facebook employees at that time, and he was visiting my campus in Menlo Park. He said we should catch up. I took it as proof that the drunk-texts had done no damage.
A week later, I drunk-Facebook-messaged him (I didn’t have his number, of course). I wanted him to know I was pissed he’d ghosted, pissed he thought he could slide back into my life, just like that, as though him saying, “we should catch up” was proof that he thought he could just get away with everything.
Alcohol is a filter, but an unpredictable one. The booze transformed any negative feeling into anger. Ghosting is pathetic, and I’m not ashamed to have called Jeremy out, although I give him a slight pass for being 24.
But that’s not what I was mad about. I was mad for the same reason I was always mad at men - that he didn’t love me, and I didn’t know why. But, given a moment of thought, I would have realized my anger would never get me what I wanted. But I didn’t give it a moment of thought. Ira furor brevis est. Anger is brief insanity.
After those messages, I blocked him on Facebook. Almost as though I couldn’t handle the uncertainty, so I instead moved to ensure our relationship ended on a bad note. This time, there was no puzzle to solve. I was puzzled-out.
Jeremy was not my last mystery. After him, they got bigger and more obvious. Why was I so sad? Why did I feel like I didn’t have a genuine connection with anyone? Why was I so lonely? Did I deserve love? Why did I hate the hours of the day when I wasn’t drunk? Why was I a professional writer if I needed booze to express myself?
In high school, my Latin teacher once scolded me for sitting in a way she deemed “unladylike” (I had my legs splayed open while wearing a knit shirt and no boxers. It happens). I immediately crossed my legs - she scared me - but whined about it after. “What is this, 1951? What kind of outdated line of thinking is that? Did the Feminine Mystique just come out?” (The book came out in 1963, and doesn’t address the knit-skirt-phenomenon).
I thought I was making a proud, defiant feminist statement by sitting exactly as I wanted. I was obsessed with arbitrary means of “speaking my truth,” be it my leg positions or my drunk-texts. I thought saying whatever I wanted was a show of strength in a world attempting to silence me. As with my visible Hanes, so with my drunk-texts. The more I was told not to, the more determined was I to keep going. In the face of push-back, I doubled down.
No one was trying to silence me. People were asking me to stay, to talk to them at the party, to focus on what was happening around me. I was choosing to leave, because I thought what happened on my phone was truer than what happened in real life. The men who asked me to stop drunk-texting weren’t taking away my agency, they were asking for an honest conversation, not a string of nonsensical riffs on Mark Ruffalo’s hairline.
I was obsessed with finding that Veritas in wine, but I deleted everything I ever drunk-wrote. I never let the truth of those texts stand, if there even was truth within them. But here are some things that were actually true: I had no confidence without booze. Even with booze, I had to hide behind my phone. I didn’t need to express these truths in drunk-texts. I needed to tell them to myself. And I needed to hear them. Vero nihil verius - nothing is truer than truth.
I don’t send drunk-texts anymore, for obvious reasons, though I can’t pretend the way I text is “normal.” One of the beautiful things I’ve learned in sobriety is that I don’t need alcohol to send texts I regret. I recently joked to a new romantic interest that he probably can’t imagine how wild my texting was when I was drinking, to which he responded, “yes, I definitely can. The way you text is insane. Most people collect their thoughts and send one comprehensive text, you send 14 half-baked ideas in a row.” Um, it’s called stream of consciousness? Read Faulkner, you Philistine.
I still can’t trust myself when it comes to my phone. The stakes have grown higher. It would be scary if I were drunk-tweeting, for instance, though still not as bad as a mountain lion. I haven’t stopped accumulating secrets since I stopped drinking. Without releasing them into the world, I worry they’ve had time to grow stronger. I worry about being on my phone in any state of disorientation, including the simple things like hunger, dehydration, and waking up in the middle of the night. I turn my phone off for days in a row while adjusting to new antidepressants. I have a hard time trusting my emotions, and an even harder time trusting that I won’t let them flow through me towards some unsuspecting target. My only option is to hold tightly to every scrap of sobriety I have.
Latin is a dead language. There will be no more of it, but there’s much to be learned from what we still have. And my drunk-texts are dead, too - purged from my phone in moments of black-out, the source now dry with sobriety. Joan Didion once wrote that we’re well-advised to keep on “nodding terms with the people we used to be.” The risk, she tells us, is that if we forget who we were, that person can come back at an unsavory moment.
I want to know who I used to be. And still, I wouldn’t read through my drunk-texts, even if I could. I know enough. I know I was a person who once got in fights she didn’t remember, and I know that I’m not her any longer. I know drunk-texts sabotaged my love life. I know that’s not a fair thing to say - I sabotaged my love life with drunk-texts. Joan Didion said “nodding terms.” Drunk Ginny and I don’t need to be best friends. I’ll follow her on Twitter for quick takes, but I’m not going to subscribe to her newsletter.
I’m grateful drunk-texting wreaked havoc on my romantic relationships. I’m not sure I would have stopped drinking without it. There was never a devastating rock bottom; I just pushed person after person away with strings of dozens of texts all night long. I needed to see the damage drinking caused, and my drunk-texts were the only ones kind enough to show me. How badly I needed them. Quod nocet, saepe docet - what harms, often teaches. As it turns out, there was quite a bit of truth in that wine.
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