The Night I Lost Time

On blackouts, blurry lines, and the grey space between choices and consequences

This is the most vulnerable essay I’ve written. It’s lived quietly inside my journals for nearly twenty years. Shame kept me from sharing it, but I finally feel ready to bring it into the light—here, with care. If I’d read a story like this when I was younger, I think I would have been a little less hard on myself in the aftermath. That’s why I’m sharing it now. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience, or love someone who has. I hope this piece finds its way to whoever might need it.

I’ve made this post comment-only for paid subscribers—not to gatekeep, but to protect. I’m unwilling to risk trolling on a piece like this—not only for my own mental health, but for anyone reading who’s wrestled with the uncertainty of what happened, what they chose, and what they couldn’t consent to when the night blurred around them.

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me in college

I am not blameless.

I was twenty-one, depressed, anxious, and directionless. My father was drinking himself to death an ocean away. My boyfriend was applying to medical schools. I was about to triple major with three liberal arts degrees and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

I was working part-time at a local steakhouse, and after one of my shifts, I joined a friend and her bartender boyfriend at the bar. We took shots. I don’t remember how many. I remember the lightness, the spinning, the way my brain loosened just enough to feel detached.

We started talking about the idea of a foursome. It began as flirtation—playful, slightly reckless. The sweet burn of each drink corroded my inhibition as we talked more seriously about hooking up, and I called my boyfriend. He said it sounded fun.

Until that night, it wasn’t something I’d ever really considered. But something about the drinking and disassociation made it feel possible—daring in a way that was still safe. At some point, though, my boyfriend changed his mind. I don’t remember when. I only know it was before I arrived at the bartender’s apartment.

I was on medication—an antidepressant and another prescription to help with night terrors. I wasn’t supposed to drink, but I was young and sensitive and liked the way alcohol quieted my mind. I don’t remember driving there. Just arriving. Being in a room.

And then: the blur.

Bits and pieces surface. A bitten lip. The three of us in a room. Then just him and me. A friend pounding on the door, yelling for me to come out. Not finding all my clothes. His girlfriend crying. My boyfriend outside. Running. Being held down by my boyfriend. The police arriving. Being driven to the hospital. Put on suicide watch.

My boyfriend and his friend drove me home. My roommate hid the knives.

I couldn’t remember most of what had happened. The next morning, a friend drove me around so we could look for my car. I had no idea where I’d left it. When she told the bartender I didn’t remember anything, he called me. He told me I’d said yes. I told him again: I just didn’t remember. He sounded scared, so I comforted him.

His girlfriend—my friend since high school—never spoke to me again.

Over the next few months, I became a ghost. My relationship fell apart. I quit my job because I couldn’t bear to work with him—or with her. My psychiatrist told me I may have been given something because my prescribed meds shouldn’t have made me black out. But I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure.

I lost most of my friends that year. I didn’t fight for them. I didn’t believe I deserved to.

When my boyfriend and I finally broke up, I winced when he said he’d slept with his ex to get back at me. I didn’t blame him.

Years later, I told a former partner what had happened. His response—the bartender probably didn’t know I couldn’t give consent.

I’ve replayed that night in my head more times than I can count, as if memory might eventually fill in the gaps. As if clarity might finally arrive and settle the unease. But it never has. What I’m left with isn’t a neat conclusion or a clean story—it’s the ache of uncertainty, the shame that attached itself to me afterward, the way I learned to distrust both my instincts and my right to feel hurt.

And still, I’ve carried it. Silently, for years. Not because I wanted to hide it, but because I didn’t know how to hold its complexity out in the open.

It took me years to even begin naming what happened. And even now, I hesitate—not because I don’t believe myself, but because the language still feels too small for the truth, or too sharp for something I’ve only ever held gently, like a permanent bruise.

There are pieces I will never recover. I’ve had to learn how to live with the blank spaces. To stop asking myself what I could have done differently. To stop twisting myself into knots trying to answer questions that memory refuses to give me.

Some things happened. Some I agreed to. Some I couldn’t have. Some I’ll never fully know.

But just because I can’t name every part of it doesn’t mean it didn’t leave a mark.

Recently, my partner and I spent the weekend with his parents. We were all laughing about the obnoxious things we did in college—the shenanigans of drunk boys on the cross-country team. His dad shared stories from his own wild years, and then I noticed his mom had gone quiet. I asked if she ever partied in college. She said, evenly, Girls drinking in college don’t have the same stories as boys.

I nodded. Then whispered, I have a story like that.

I think about this often now, as a mother. I worry for my own son. For my friends’ children. There’s so much freedom—and so much fear—that comes with living on your own for the first time. Alcohol can feel like a shortcut to confidence. To connection. But how do we teach them about the gray? About the blur? About the harm that doesn’t come with clear villains or clean names?

How do we help them understand that not all damage is visible, that some tolls take years to name?

I’m still deciding if this is a story I’ll one day share with my son. Not because I want to hide it from him—but because I want to tell it carefully. In a way that honors the complexity. In a way that teaches him how to listen. How to be gentle. How to pause long enough to ask if someone is still fully present, still fully able to say yes.

Even now, I still get flashbacks—tiny shards of glass embedded in my psyche. I’ve come to understand that some things can’t be fully excavated.

But in writing about it, in unburying the shame I carried alone and holding it to the light—after years of hearing these stories whispered between friends, this happened to me too—I know this much: as raw and fragile as it feels, healing begins when we stop hiding.

It begins in the telling. In the light.

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When I first started writing this essay, I planned to keep it behind a paywall. It felt more vulnerable than anything I’ve ever shared publicly. But once I finished, I knew I wanted it to be read. We don’t talk about experiences like this enough. And if my story helps someone feel less alone—or helps someone just stepping into adulthood better understand the complexity of alcohol, consent, and the blur between—then it’s worth sharing.