“Blackout”— an excerpt from In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns

I don’t hide the fact I am an addict. An addict who is eight years sober but an addict nevertheless. Not only will I talk about my addiction openly to people I meet, but, from time to time, I post about it on social media and I wrote about it extensively in my memoir of mixed-race mental illness, Fuse (Guernica Editions, 2021).

I am comfortable talking about most parts of my life as an active alcoholic but thinking about the blackouts I experienced can still make me feel like someone has injected liquid nitrogen into my gut. There is much lost to those memory voids—much lost besides time. This may sound surprising coming from me—someone who shares many intimate details of her life (seemingly) with no inhibition—but I don’t know if I’ll ever write about my experience with blackouts: what I learned happened from the accounts of others. What I learned happened from silences and lowered eyes when I asked questions. From the pain and shame I’ve come out of the blackouts holding in my body.

Reading James Cairns’s essay “Blackout” from his new essay collection, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (Wolsak & Wynn, June 2025) didn’t dull the ice flow to my stomach, but it did provide perspective and solidarity.

James and Wolsak & Wynn were good enough to give me permission to publish an excerpt from “Blackout” here. I hope it helps others the way it helped me. I can’t think of a single addict I’ve met who would choose the obsidian puddle jump of our memories, but if we have to have them, it helps to have a space to look into them together.

(Please be aware the following passage includes a detailed recounting of addiction.)

Excerpt from “Blackout”

[…]

In Sarah Hepola’s Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, she writes that even a sober person can’t always tell when their drunk friend has blacked out. Watch me, Hepola says, in the middle of a blackout. You’ll see “a woman on her way to somewhere else, with no idea her memory just snapped in half.”

The imagery resonates with me because it evokes a before and after, a decisive break in being. After blacking out once at the Imperial Pub in Toronto, I returned to consciousness a few blocks away, lying on damp pavement in an alley. My shoes and eyeglasses were missing. I don’t know where I’d been. (I never found the stuff I’d lost.) When I fell into the blackout, I went elsewhere. I’d return changed. 

Hepola describes coming out of a blackout while on a magazine assignment in France. The last thing she recalls is exiting a cab after a night of heavy drinking with a friend. She walks with purpose from the taxi to the stairs in her hotel lobby, then the curtain falls: blackness. “When the curtain lifts again, this is what I see. There is a bed, and I’m on it. The lights are low. Sheets are wrapped around my ankles, soft and cool against my skin. I’m on top of a guy I’ve never seen before, and we’re having sex.” She seems to be enjoying it. The man seems to know who she is. She’s not scared, just clueless. They finish and she lies in the crook of his arm thinking, “How did I get here?”

How does anyone get here? Why drink to the point of blackout? Hepola says she drank to ease social inhibitions, obliterate her body, and forget the harm her drinking caused. I, too, drank to manage sexual anxieties. I also relished dancing on a chair at the party’s centre, and I knew drinking would get me there. Yet my reasons for drinking to oblivion never seemed rational to me. I don’t know how to describe them without sounding comically abstract, arrogant, absurd. I drank to… what?... I don’t know… to blackout in order to feel nothing. Or to feel everything without distinction. I wanted to experience total control over all of God’s green Earth. To sense meaningful changes of space, time, and self. To approach the thrill of catastrophe, death. In Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he explains that capitalism alienates people from our capacity to labour – the core of what Marx calls our “species-being” – as well as from one another. Capitalist wage-labour “estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.” Amid the life-destroying demands and violence of capitalism, who doesn’t ache to feel whole, alive, free, of significance, of value? Who isn’t, at some level, trying to escape?

Why did I drink that way is a good question; one I’ve spent many hours in therapy trying to answer. But six years into my latest stretch of sobriety, it’s not the question that troubles me most. When I lie awake at 3:00 am, I’m thinking: What do I do with all those blackouts? How do I relate to so much lost time? Time lost both in the sense that the blackouts are in the past and therefore, unchangeable, and the sense that when I lived them, they were, in that moment, already gone. How do I live with that night with Caroline (not with Caroline?), and so many others like it? 

I’ve tried striking these dark episodes from the autobiography in my head on the grounds that I can’t claim something I never knew. (Brain doctors are split on whether blackouts are legitimate legal defences.) But when I ignore the blackouts of my past, I’m unable to conceive of myself as someone whose views and actions matter today. The philosopher Martin Hågglund might say that my blackouts have broken “the fragile coherence of who I am trying to be,” as a teacher of social justice, a socialist whose comrades can trust him, a parent whose guidance is more than hypocrisy. It’s necessary to face up to my history of blackout drinking if I am to find what Hågglund, in This Life, calls “spiritual freedom.” Achieving biographical coherence (or at least, comprehensibility), which is an aspect of spiritual freedom, “requires that the agent in question can ask herself how she should spend her time and be responsive to the risk that she is wasting her life.” What of the wastelands, black holes, in my past?     

What about whole periods of drinking? Not blackouts technically speaking, but years, decades dominated by addiction, which I’ve also come to think of as blackouts of a kind. Huge swaths of time lost to my obsession with, consumption of, and sickness from alcohol. When the poet Patrick Lane first returned from rehab, he said he “stepped back into the world after an absence of forty-five years of addiction.” The blackout is the condensed form of my twenty-five-year crisis of alcoholism; but what I’ve lost to drinking far exceeds all those memories never made. Staying sober, living well, avoiding the worst of this familiar crisis, requires a more considered approach to the darkness in my past. What might that involve?

Steps eight and nine of Alcoholics Anonymous involve listing “all the persons we had harmed” while drinking and making “direct amends to such people wherever possible.” But the blackout, by virtue of being the blackout, means that its harms are often untraceable. I once came out of a blackout early in the morning while entering a house that wasn’t mine. I remember a woman with white hair saying, “No, no, you can’t come in!” I’d somehow made it through her front door. She had an accent. Portuguese? While she waved a rolled-up magazine at me, I turned and walked back outside. Next thing I remember, the sun was up, and I was walking past a school near my house. How do I make amends to that white-haired woman when I don’t even know what street she lives on? Encountering the “blank spaces of the historical archive” leads Saidiya Hartman to ask: “How does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?” My ethical-methodological dilemma: Is it possible to rescue anything from the dead zone of blackout?    

Until recently, I would’ve said no.

“Blackout” is excerpted from In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns copyright © 2025 by James Cairns. Reprinted by permission of Wolsak & Wynn.

More about In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns:

In 2022, the Collins Dictionary announced that its word of the year was “permacrisis,” which it defined as “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.” Have we reached a breaking point, arrived at the moment of truth? If so, what now? If not, why do so many people say we’re living through a period of unprecedented crises? Drawing on social research, pop culture and literature, as well as on his experience as an activist, father and teacher, James Cairns explores the ecological crisis, Trump's return to power amid the so-called crisis of democracy, his own struggle with addiction and other moments of truth facing us today. In a series of insightful essays that move deftly between personal, theoretical and historical approaches he considers not only what makes something a crisis, but also how to navigate the effect of these destabilizing times on ourselves, on our families and on the world. 

James Cairns
Photo credit: Layne Beckner Grime

About James Cairns:

James Cairns lives with his family in Paris, Ontario, on territory that the Haldimand Treaty of 1784 recognizes as belonging to the Six Nations of the Grand River in perpetuity. He is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, where his courses and research focus on political theory and social movements. James is a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books, and the community relations director for the Paris-based Riverside Reading Series. James has published three books with the University of Toronto Press, most recently, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (2017), as well as numerous essays in periodicals such as Canadian Notes & Queries, the Montreal Review of Books, Briarpatch, TOPIA, Rethinking Marxism and the Journal of Canadian Studies. James’ essay “My Struggle and My Struggle,” originally published in CNQ, appeared in Biblioasis’s Best Canadian Essays, 2025 anthology.