I know: I LOVE NURSES. My sister is a nurse and she is fucking awesome.

Clearly you haven’t read the comments to see how strongly these posts resonate with people. Who cares if it IS a promotion - this is obviously a topic people need and want to talk about.

Sarah and Jezebel, this is such a tremendous series. Please consider extending it.

You should check out a wonderful book called Drinking: A Love Story, by the late and great Caroline Knapp. She fits many of your descriptive aspects to a T, and makes a big point of how well alcohol worked for her for so long, until it didn’t, and how “hitting bottom” is usually a series of bounces against the floor…

I’ll just say this, I know people who are functional alcoholics and I know people who WERE functional alcoholics and often you can’t tell the difference. My friend swore up and down that she knew she might have a problem but it didn’t really effect her job or her relationships so there was no need to address it. Until…

This is beautifully written, and so honest it hurts. I have never been an alcoholic- I was a smoker. When I stopped smoking it was because I knew it was better for me to not smoke. And when I stopped, it was as though I was naked, or had no skin. I felt intensely vulnerable, my coping mechanism was gone. So I can…

I hear ya. I think I used to drink more than what you described, though. When I drank, I would pat myself on the back when I “took a night off”. If I went 3-4 nights, I had a “low-key” week of adulting. I rose in my professional career, started a family, the whole nine yards, and was purely a “social” drinker. All…

Well christ on a cracker, isn’t this fortuitous?! I’m about to go off to my first AA meeting in over 25 years. It was NA for me back then, because I didn’t “like”alcohol until my 30s! Now I’m all grown up, having shed the really fucked up drugs, and taken on the glory of booze. I’ve been unemployed for a long time,…