On It (Part 2)
The Tuesday before she rammed her mini cooper into a house in Mar Vista, California, the actor Anne Heche was co-hosting her podcast Better Together, and in the available (albeit probably bootlegged) recordings of the podcast, you can clearly hear that she is intoxicated and slurring her speech. Usually, I just move on to getting my dopamine hits in other bad news, but this one piqued my interest because she was my age.
I know all too well how days like this go: if you’ve been addicted for a long time, and if you start day-drinking on an empty stomach, you don’t stop at the end of the day. I, too, sans the vodka (my devils were beer and wine), would get started early and it would morph late into the evening, and then to maintain body and mind homeostasis the next day, I would drink to feel normal, and then ethanol’s addictiveness would cause me to drink more. Anne was probably in menopause at the time of her death, and that coupled with the PTSD she suffered from childhood trauma was a poorly mixed cocktail. The night sweats from hormonal changes, drinking, and her more than likely trying to stay relevant in an unforgiving occupation for the aging, would cause anyone to want to heavily dissociate. Ms. Heche more than likely didn’t learn how to self-regulate, and, as Holly Whitaker wrote in Quit Like a Woman, she had to “manage it with a jackhammer at the end of the day.” When she tore down that street, it was a race to get away from herself, knowing full-well she could no longer manage the endless work of being a woman.
The same year we scraped Craig off the tracks, I graduated university and went to Greece with my friend, Loreen. My relentless gym regiment had begun to wane, and I had dabbled a little in cocaine before the trip, but nothing full-blown yet. We had a stopover in England, then we traveled to Athens, ferried to San Torini, to Paros, then Mykonos. As we made our way up the Aegean, the riskier my behavior got. On Paros, I slept with an uncircumcised waiter. Drinking games after hours. Big, big moons. One night, Loreen got frustrated with me and walked back to our hotel in an island blackout. Selfish, I stayed behind and picked up a Greek man.
We walked out on a rocky pier…he tried to seduce me…it gets fuzzy from there. But I’ll never forget a base fear, like if I give in, I’ll be dead. He continued to plead. I stayed and listened. I knew I wouldn’t go with him, but it was at this point I was firmly entrenched in a kind of learned helplessness. I left him at the pier.
Why do we put ourselves in harm’s way?
In Alain de Botton’s May 2016 New York Times article “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” he writes:
“What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign.”
Happily, buzzed, I walked toward that man because I wanted to connect. What started to build was a need to attach, an attachment to men who had…I mean…I wanted inside them. I wanted to be them. Women, too. I didn’t want to be like them, or take on their clothes or affects, it was more physically haunting, like when a bird sticks its beak in your ear and doesn’t bite, but trills. I settled on those who wanted me for use. Me as them, I think, is worth digging into, as I saw something in them that was me, that I wanted back. I lived alongside them, stared at them through mirrors or windows or all the untoward ways we intrude on others. But mostly I sat outside them, crazy to find my way back to anything that looked like me, something I had lost.
Read Part 3.
© 2026–present C. Nightjar. All rights reserved.