was a few days into this question-from-readers thing, all giddy about tackling everything with complete honesty or, at least, smug sarcasm, when my friend Julie -- my best friend, really -- sent the following:

"One thing is I'm kind of curious what you think about your sobriety being over. And I don't know what my question is exactly but here is sort of my stream of questions and maybe one will stick and give you something to write about: Is it over? Are you still sober? Have you changed your thoughts on what it is or was to be an alcoholic? Are you fixed? Were you broken? Do you think you still have a problem? Do you think AA is a cult? Is a cult necessarily a bad thing if it helps you? Did AA help you? Do you think you could have given up drinking without it? Do you regret the drinking that took you to AA, or do you regret ever having to get to a point that you had to give it up? Do you regret?

Maybe that's my question. Do you regret? Not about alcohol necessarily, but anything. As you know, I've long had this philosophy that you shouldn't regret anything. But as a practical matter, how this plays out is that instead of trying not to do anything that I would later regret, I do stupid things and then just try really really hard not to regret them.

So here is what i want to know:
sarahhepola.com, do you regret?"

(I love this question.)

So let me back up. In this whole website-about-my-life thing, as it turns out, I've skipped a few parts here and there. One of those things, this drinking thing, keeps coming up. Time to come clean with all that. Okay. Where to begin? All right, I'll begin here.

In May of 2000, I quit drinking. I was 25 years old, and I was fucking tired. There's nothing scandalous in my story -- I never wake up in a jail cell or with someone else's blood on the grill of my car, although I do quite dramatically fall down a flight of stairs in Manhattan, taking a poor unsuspecting sucker with me, and end up lying on a slab of cold metal at a SoHo emergency room where a junkie named Brownie tries all night to romance the officious overnight nurse for a cigarette, saying, "Now why ain't you goin' give Brownie no love? Brownie love you." And there's nothing really new in my story either -- I drink too much, forget shit, spill stuff, brag and fall and don't give a shit, mister, and wake up and care way too much, blahblahblah and yeah-yeah-yeah. So I quit.

I promised myself I would stay sober for a year. I joined AA and got a sponsor. At first I tried hard to make the program work, and then at some point, I turned that mental energy into trying to dismantle the program in my head, trying to discredit the whole thing, but I don't want to get into that now. I quit my job and left for South America, not entirely sure what the plan was except that it seemed like a pretty good idea to stay sober until I figured out said plan. So I did that too. Once I was settled in Ecuador though, living in this small village for a month, it became harder and harder to rationalize the sobriety, because I was happy and far-away and curious again and living in a culture that seemed genuinely perplexed by a young, vaguely healthy woman who abstains from alcohol. "Beer isn't alcohol," men kept telling me. (Really. I had that conversation at least three times.) Eventually, on the night Ecuador qualified for the World Cup, I got drunk. And when I came back to the States a few weeks later, I kept drinking.

The thing is, I liked being sober. I liked waking up sober, everything remembered, nothing to apologize for. By the end of my run, I'd become this sour and self-devouring person -- all holed up with my beer and my Tex-Mex, watching Real World marathons and, like, spitting on happy couples. At least, that's the way I remember myself. But so anyway, suddenly, I liked the sunlight. I liked people. I could get this crazymad adrenaline rush from a field of flowers or a bunch of bubbles blown into the air. And sobriety wasn't just this up-on-life stuff either. It just felt very cool and very adult and very necessary to feel pain. Just to sit there and take it.

So why go back? Why return to drinking after this extended period of what I could have sworn at the time was full-throttle enlightenment? Hmm. I guess it's the way my girlfriends return to their boyfriend after they spend hours boasting about the beautiful struggle of living single. And I think my girlfriends, the ones who slink back after a few weeks of too much room in the bed, I think they probably liked things about the single life too. It's just that...well, you see...the thing is this: I wasn't convinced. I wasn't convinced that I wanted a sober life or that I necessarily needed it. I wanted to sniff out the middle ground, to give the sucker another go. I wanted the perfect days and the outrageous nights. In AA they would say something like "Every alcoholic's great obsession is that he can drink normally." But why take their word for it? I wanted to experiment. I wanted to prove or disprove the thing. So I continue to observe my drinking patterns in a detached manner, as if I am part of a scientific study. When do I crave more drinks? When do the cravings grow stronger? How many drinks would be enough? How do I feel before and during, or the day after? And you know what I found? I fucking drink too much. Big surprise. But the thing is that all of us need to be reminded of things. And like some of my friends, they keep going back to the guy over and over again. It always ends the same lousy way. But then sometimes, my friends seem to make it work with the guy, somehow turn a corner. And how do you know which one you are? I figure if I keep getting beaned in the head, eventually, I'll learn to duck.

Okay, kids, it's late. Let's pick this thing up tomorrow, shall we? See you then.