Koren Zailckas's 'Smashed: Story Of A Drunken Girlhood'

859 Words2 Pages

The Confidence Alcohol Gave Me “ I believed the people who romanticized those years, the ones who told me to embrace irresponsibility before I was slapped with the burdens of corporate adulthood” (23). Zailckas’ alcohol binging started at a very young age and followed her for nearly a decade. She turned to alcohol because of her peers who told her to live it up while she was still young and before she had to take on all these adult responsibilities. In the novel, “Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood,” Koren Zailckas opens up about what caused her alcohol addiction and how it left her with lifelong physical and emotional effects. Alcohol is very commonly turned to because it distracts the mind from the problems we face in life. Zailckas states: This pleasure feeling was given do to unhappiness from the small, Zailckas who was not able to control herself and turned to her addiction. The self conscious Zailckas who did not allow herself to recognize happiness. Zailckas has a very low self esteem and confidence. Two of the most important things a woman struggles with while growing up and here we find the author still struggling with these problems in her adult life. Zailckas experiences a regression that keeps taking her back to her teenage years before the drinking, which demonstrates she was never able to mature. She keeps going back to that regression because it was the time in her life before the alcohol, that allowed her to believe in her own confidence. Alcohol was her self medication, she believed it helped her become herself. It gave her the confidence she did not have while being sober. Zailckas’ alcohol abuse affected her physically, as peers often mistaken her age. She states: “Too many days, people make me aware of my own childishness” (23). Zailckas faces the problems a child would have like, for example, keeping eye contact and having her gaze look off to the floor. She struggles speaking up in public and expressing herself. Physical damage is something that once done it can not be undone. It is something that is going to follow her for the rest of her life, that will not allow her to grow as a person

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