As I get older, I realize more and more that many things aren’t necessary for a good life. I don’t mean possessions, though those too are often superfluous. I mean activities. Things like going to parties and restaurants. Vacations to exotic places. Second homes. Getting interesting degrees. Romance, or even committed companionship. Drinking.

See, I’ve done all those things, and I can live without all of them just fine.

That might sound awfully dreary to 12-year-old me.

I say 12 because that’s when I first remember being a whole separate person, and by 12 I was reading all the time. I read an immense amount of fiction, including classics, SF, mystery, and utter trash. It was a marvelous education in literature. I lived in those books, and when I wasn’t reading, I was making up stories.

I got a lot of my life advice from books, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because fiction, by definition, just ain’t so.

I won’t say I thought romance was a blinding passion that overwhelmed people and resulted in miraculous and instantaneous transports of joy, for instance, but okay, yeah, that would partly explain why I was so frantic to bond physically with a number of bewildered young men starting from when I was 15 and allowed to stay out late. Part of it was definitely hormones, but a lot of it was just a persistent delusion that I could make the earth move. The god damn earth didn’t move. Annoying, but I kept trying. I have a lot of willpower.

I also believed, because I grew up reading all sorts of novels written in the early twentieth century by self-absorbed and privileged young men, that women were not only inferior, but actively evil. They also wore makeup, had fingernails like talons, wore girdles, and lived only to seduce and betray. (I tried a girdle once. It made me sick to my stomach.) So I would have to be a sort of a non-woman, I thought. I invented a gender for myself in which I could be the protagonist but still think men were hot.

The fictional activity I pursued most doggedly was drinking. I read a piece recently about writers and drinking, which assumed that the enjoyment of alcohol is essential to a vivid life. Boy, how I yearned for a vivid life when I was 12. There was a lot of vivid drinking in the fiction I read.

Friendship, for instance, was something you found in bars. Romance happened more easily when both partners were a little tiddly. The hero was a two-fisted drinker; when he got a little dismayed, he downed shots, and he felt it burn going down. Cocktails had names, and signified sophistication. Women didn’t drink as much, but then, I wasn’t a woman, not exactly. So of course, by the age of 12, I was already downing various forms of liquor whenever I could.

I didn’t get the idea solely from books, mind you. But books certainly did romanticize things.

Thus I believed firmly that drinking was an answer, and also possibly the only answer, to everything.

I worked hard at it.

And over the years from 12 to 22, I steadily discarded all my other aspirations, all my other dreams of achievement, and dedicated myself to being a serious alcoholic.

In that, I succeeded. But it turns out that drinking doesn’t work after a certain point, and without going into the sordid details, I stopped when I was 22.

I’m 74 now, and haven’t had a drink since.

And it turned out all those writers had been lying to me all along. I could live a perfectly rich life without having to imbibe. I could travel, study, build a career, write, make art, fall in love, get married, and have a kid, all without the lubrication of ethyl alcohol. I also could experience tragedy, be trapped in situations of my own making, and do terrible, hard things without having to go to a bar, down a shot, and feel it burn.

It even turned I could even be the protagonist of my story, even though I was a woman. And I could do it without pretending to be someone else.

I woke up thinking about all this because I had a dream last night, and in it, my husband was still alive. It was nice to have him there, but after I woke up, had my cup of coffee, and fed the cat, I looked around. I thought to myself, I don’t go to parties or bars, I’m widowed, I don’t travel, I don’t have a vacation home, and I’m retired. Also, I don’t drink. Yet I think I have an excellent life. How odd.

Perhaps I was wrong about a few things when I was twelve.