Yoga Girl

At sixteen, I got pulled over for drunk driving and had to spend the
night in jail. I got out, picked up some beer, and went right back to the
party. is is also how old I was when my boyfriend hit me for the first
time. I started spending a lot of time at a bar in downtown Stockholm, and
after we got to know the staff, they stopped asking us for IDs, assuming
we were eighteen (the legal drinking age in Sweden). One evening my
oldest friend in the world was walking home from a party and found me
passed out in the snow next to the road. He brought me home, cooked me
food, drew me a bath, and made me promise to stop drinking, or we
couldn’t stay friends anymore. We had a fight and didn’t speak to each
other for a year. I didn’t stop drinking. By this point I had already been
drinking and going to clubs for years and was known as the go-to girl at
school if you wanted to party. I was angry and insecure, doing all I could to
draw attention to myself.
At seventeen, I was out partying and got in a car with a drunk driver.
Driving ninety miles per hour he rammed into another car and we skidded
off the highway, flipped over several times, and finally smashed into a tree,
landing upside down. I got away with a few broken ribs and internal
bleeding. I drank every single day. Every day. I finally stopped lying to my
mom, but only because I think we both stopped caring. At eighteen I gave
up. At high school graduation in Sweden, it’s traditional to dress up in
white and celebrate in the park outside the school together with friends
and teachers. Everybody was there in the grass, signing one another’s
graduation hats, hugging and singing. I sat in my friend Jack’s old Volvo
parked in the back of the parking lot, drinking vodka straight from the
bottle and wishing for it all to be over.
At one point in the middle of all this, my grandmother died. My
grandmother had been the only constant in my life, the sensible, calm,
caring person who always knew the right thing to say. When she passed
away I hit a new low and my family finally had had enough. I’d spent
years lying, fighting, stealing money, and creating more chaos than they
had ever seen before. Even I started to get the uneasy feeling that maybe