Answer Addiction

Tag: alcoholism and creativity

  • 3 Things My Father Taught Me About Addiction

    3 Things My Father Taught Me About Addiction

    Reframing the addiction as a disease helped me understand that my father didn’t want to hurt himself or my family.

    Every time I talk to my dad about his experience with addiction, I come away with beautiful—although sometimes painful—new insights. Listening to him talk about his longtime struggle with opioid addiction has taught me not only about the complex and labyrinthine nature of addiction itself, but also about love and forgiveness.

    The most important thing I’ve learned is that no matter the struggle, there is a person who deserves real compassion—before (or under) the addiction, before (or under) the trauma that may have caused them to use drugs, before (or under) the pain and suffering.

    I’ve seen prison time, loss of custody, and disease take hold as a result of addiction, and yet I can see the other side as well. While everyone’s experiences are different, here’s what I’ve learned from my father and his experience:

    1. People with addictions don’t want to be addicted

    Within the dark void of addiction—and its loneliness, shame, powerlessness, and disaster—it can be hard to really see the person who is suffering. This is true both from the outside and if it’s yourself you’re looking to find. It’s also hard to accept that someone isn’t making an active choice to suffer (and cause suffering around them). They may have made a choice to pick up a drug, but addiction is an actual disease, and its grip is real.

    According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Many people don’t understand why or how other people become addicted to drugs. They may mistakenly think that those who use drugs lack moral principles or willpower and that they could stop their drug use simply by choosing to. In reality, drug addiction is a complex disease, and quitting usually takes more than good intentions or a strong will. Drugs change the brain in ways that make quitting hard, even for those who want to.”

    Reframing the addiction as a disease helped me understand that my father didn’t want to hurt himself or my family. And in talking frankly with him today, it’s very clear that he knew he was suffering, but he simply couldn’t figure out the steps to get out of it. It took so much loss before he got himself into recovery, and that’s something I stay compassionate about. I think this empathy can go a long way in both understanding your family’s narrative and forging a path toward potential forgiveness (and maybe even advocacy for others).

    1. Addiction doesn’t magically disappear

    On a trip to see my dad recently, I was taken aback when he said, “I still get cravings.” Although I know—I mean, rationally—that just because someone is in recovery doesn’t mean they won’t feel temptation or relapse, it’s harder to hear it from your parents. It’s scary, yes, but it’s also just sad. On my end, I wanted to say, “But you’re okay, right?!”

    I held my tongue. Instead of seeking comfort from him in his truth and struggle, I decided to simply listen—as an adult, as a human. As a child of two people who have struggled with addiction, I have learned to see my parents as humans, and part of that is constantly reminding myself to actively choose to listen and find compassion in their story. It’s not always easy—and some will argue that this isn’t fair to the child—but it’s what has worked for me.

    I asked my dad, “So when do these cravings happen? Is it often?” And I simply listened to what he had to say. I learned about the mechanics of his addiction, how he manages it, and what he feels in those moments.

    That illumination has given me insight and compassion, and even though it’s hard, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s enabled me to treat others as human beings and advocate when and how I can. It also helps me to see my dad fairly.

    1. Hardship often creates beauty and wisdom

    Although there’s no way this can be true for everyone, and although it’s almost a cliché, sometimes our suffering can yield something beautiful—even when it’s not our intention.

    Sitting in my dad’s house, I watched him pull out notebook after notebook filled with song lyrics and poetry. Most of these poems were about his addiction, and the sadness, loneliness, pain, and self-questioning it caused. Some of the poems were about finding a divine source, or fighting past the pain. Some weren’t so positive. Reading his words surprised me. I’ve been an active poet for years, and yet I had no idea how prolific a writer my dad is, and how he uses writing to cope with trauma as well.

    Reading his words connected me to him, but it did more than that: It proved that even in our darkest moments, humanity has an uncanny ability to try to cipher that pain into something bigger than ourselves. This is not just a mythology we tell ourselves, though. It’s real: Just look at the many writers, for example, who lived with addiction throughout their lives.

    I am grateful to see the so-called silver lining in these insights, but it only underscores the real tragedy of addiction: that far more people with substance use disorders are misunderstood and underrepresented, and that their stories, when told, are told poorly and without nuance. There is grief and hope in addiction. There is recovery and there is relapse, and there is everything in between.

    There is access to care for some and a desperate lack of access to care for others. There are abstinence-touting programs and there are clean needle centers. Addiction is a huge issue, with no one story or approach or outcome that represents everyone’s perspective. But as someone watching from the outside, as a family member, it’s my goal to listen, be compassionate, and share what I’ve learned in a way that makes space for some good.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else.

    The following is an excerpt from Jolly Lad – The Expanded North American Edition, published this month by MIT Press and available here.

    After I stopped drinking in August 2008 I went to Alcoholics Anonymous a lot at first – most days in fact for about half a year. I don’t go that often anymore and I haven’t done any of the twelve steps but I’d still say the programme was a crucial aid to me quitting.

    I guess even before I joined the fellowship I already had an inkling of what AA would be like. I’d seen enough soap operas, so I was prepared. Generally speaking, it was as I’d imagined it – a neon strip-lit, magnolia painted room with trestle tables and stackable chairs – usually in churches, village halls or community centres. Careworn people in comfortable clothes, chatting, sipping tea, rolling cigarettes. The 12 commandments and the 12 traditions would be unrolled and hung on the back wall. The yellow card (“Who you see here / What you hear here / When you leave here / LET IT STAY HERE!”) would be placed prominently at the front, resting against a small tub for the collection of voluntary subs at the end of the meeting. There would be a literature table full of pamphlets, information sheets and books and a box containing chips, or commemorative engraved metal tokens, for those who had hit a notable anniversary in sobriety – including the most important one: 24 hours. There would always be one or more copies of The Big Book there – the text written in 1939 by Bill W, to help alcoholics.

    Chapter Three of The Big Book says: “Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is mentally different from his fellows. Therefore it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterised by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.”

    I had been prepared to pursue the chimera of controlled drinking right through the gates of death myself. When I gave up I was close to dying and had nearly checked out accidentally once earlier the same year. But I’d made my peace with death. I had come to believe that alcohol was the only thing that made life bearable. And in a lot of ways it was.

    Image via Krent Able

    There was dirt, horror and disfigurement everywhere I looked. But after one stiff drink I could leave the house; after two drinks the fear started lifting and after the third drink I’d feel like an artist. Or to be more precise, I would see the world through the eyes of an artist. And after five drinks, well, I could take my pick of them. On a good day I felt like Picasso. But there were all kinds of days. Imagine being Gustav Klimt in Hull, the golden light of the low winter sun at 3pm in the afternoon radiating along The Avenues. Imagine being Walter Sickert in Manchester, the violent brown and black smudges radiating from your feet and along canal towpaths. Imagine being Vincent van Gogh in St Helens, the sky ablaze with stars. That is something close to victory, something close to beating death.

    They laughed at me and called me a piss artist. And how right they were. I was an aesthete with a broken nose in a stained shirt and inside-out boxer shorts, drinking the world beautiful.

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else. You float through the film of your own life. You see the sublime in the augury of fried chicken bones and tomato sauce cast upon the upper deck floor of a bus. You can divine a narrative among the finger-drawn doodles on the misted windows. You can feel your destiny in hundreds of individual condensation droplets on the glass turning red, then amber, then green.

    Everything that you’d worried about a few hours previously… Where will I get the money from? What if he beats me up? Am I seriously ill? Am I dying? Have I got cancer? What will she say when I finally get home a week late? Will she cry when we eventually go to bed together? Will she pack her things and leave the next day? How near is death? What will it be like? Will I scream and cry? What is it like to die? And now, after some drinks, there is just the sweet sensation of your life passing you by with no struggle and no fuss. The rope slides through your fingers with no friction, just warmth as a balloon rises higher and higher out of sight. I have bottles and bottles and bottles and my phone is out of credit. A Mark Rothko night. A Jackson Pollock night…

    This is the eternal holiday of the alcoholic. Once you create as much distance from your everyday life as you naturally have from orange tinted Polaroids of childhood caravan trips or stays in seaside hotels and Super 8 film reels of school sports days, then you start to experience your quotidian life like it’s the sun-bleached memory of a happy event. You feel nostalgia and warmth for boring events that are unfolding right in front of you. You feel wistful about experiences that most people would find barbaric or gauche or unremarkable. You experience the epic, the heart- warming and the hilarious in post office and supermarket queues. You develop permanently rose-tinted glasses.

    But there’s no getting away from it, after a while the strategy starts failing. You start seeing everything through the eyes of Francis Bacon, through the eyes of Edvard Munch, through the eyes of HR Giger…Your vision becomes stained and cracked.

    It is pretty tough stopping drinking but it’s not like I want a pat on the back for it.

    Image via Krent Able

    I see alcoholism as a self-inflicted leisure injury to some extent, disease or not. But going on the wagon is nothing compared to coming to terms with what you are like sober. The trouble with stopping drinking is that the only thing it solves in your life is you being drunk or hungover and ill all the time. When you stop drinking, everything you drank to avoid dealing with is still there, as bad as ever. Mental illness, debt, depression, the impulse to self-harm, the impulse to commit suicide, anxiety, social dysfunction, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, stress, anger, violent rage… I started drinking when I was 13 and was drinking every day by the time I was 15. I stayed pretty much constantly drunk until I was 37. When I stopped I had no real idea what I would be like.

    Alcoholism is debt consolidation for your life. Submit to alcoholism and your life becomes incredibly simple. Drink becomes the only thing you care about – and you will end up just fine with letting all the other stuff slide to the extent that it doesn’t even matter if you die or not. The only real problem with this arrangement is what happens if you decide to stop.

    Picture a reservoir surrounded by mountains. You have been tasked with draining the massive body of water away to repopulate the area. But once the water has gone you are faced with the former town that was initially flooded and the now wrecked buildings which need to be pulled down. Call several construction firms. People have been fly tipping here for years. There is tons of rubbish here. You will need help to clean the area up. There are corpses wrapped in carpet and chains. It was the ideal place to dump bodies. You’ll need to call the police and the coroner’s office. The press are on their way. There are rotten and half eaten animal carcasses that need to be cleared up and disposed of. Environmental health need to be involved. You have never seen so many mangled shopping trollies, broken children’s bikes and unwanted cars. The clearance job will be massive. There are burst canisters of toxic waste that have long since leached into the ground. It will be years before you can do anything with this land. The water was merely the stuff that was making this area look picturesque. What you have left in its place is an area of outstanding natural horror. It probably feels like you should have left well enough alone.

    Before claiming a seat by putting my coat on the back of it, and even before queuing up for a coffee, I went into the gents to try and freshen up. I scrubbed my hands hard and splashed freezing cold water onto my face – prodding the dark purple streaks of flesh under each eye with a fingertip. I stood for some time looking into the mirror as the water dripped off my face.

    What did I look like? A middle-aged man with long hair in a heavy metal T-shirt. The beard of someone who slept behind a hedge on an A-road roundabout. Face permanently blotched red down one side with hundreds of burst capillaries after spending three days awake doing amphetamines in 1996. A Monday night which culminated in nurses shouting: “Shave his chest, shave his chest!” A nose broken 17 times and eventually surgically rebuilt. Forehead like the cover of Unknown Pleasures. Right eyelid drooping down over a partially sighted eye, scarred and damaged beyond repair.

    George Orwell said we all get the kind of face we deserve by the time we turn 40. I had mine hammered irreversibly into place by my 25th birthday. Ostensibly I looked like the same person, but somehow as if reflected in the back of a rusty soup spoon instead of a mirror.

    Image via Krent Able

    I was comfortable with going to AA now that I’d been going for nearly two years but still, the back of the room suited me just fine – it’s not a Kate Bush concert, you’re not missing anything if you don’t sit in the front row.

    Comfort was not on the agenda the first time I went to AA however. My first visit to the rooms might as well have been my first day at senior school, or my first day in prison, for all the stress it caused me. I went while visiting friends up north and it was terrifying. A bare concrete room with old school chairs, bare lightbulbs and spiders in the corners. A retirement age man with a nose like a red, purple and blue blood sac mumbled brutal things as other broken people looked at their feet. When I stepped outside into the freezing cold night after the 60 minutes were up I had to sit on a garden wall for ten minutes, staring at the ground under an orange sodium light. I was unable to stand properly because of anxiety and I was still dizzy with fear walking away afterwards. It struck me quite clearly that there might not even be any point to giving up drinking, that it could even make things worse in some ways.

    It’s bad form to talk about the meetings or AA at all. Tradition 11 says: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” I’d like to apologise for speaking about AA here, even if it is just in very general terms. I would never repeat what anyone else said there; I never talk there myself, I just sit and listen. I wait for the reassurance of identification and nothing else.

    “I was like that once. I was that bad. I never want to go back to that again.”

    Buy Jolly Lad here.

     

    This excerpt has been lightly edited for context. All identifying details of AA meetings have been changed.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in their alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    I’ve heard it repeated as a recovery truism that nobody is too dumb to stop drinking, but plenty of people are too smart. One supposes that’s the sort of thing intended to be helpful. I’ve no idea on the particular veracity of the claim, though I’ll say that people who are smarter (or think they’re smarter) can certainly generate some novel justifications for their alcoholism. 

    When I was deep in my cups, after stopping for one drink after class that turned into a blackout which had me checking the soles of my shoes for evidence of which way I stumbled home, I could structure an argument with recourse to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic about how “alcoholism” was a construction of the medical-industrial complex.

    After I woke up another countless time cringing as I recalled how I’d embarrassed myself yet again, it was only a short period until I was crafting a rationalization that drinking expressed an idyllic, pre-capitalist, medieval past that was based in revelry and joy.

    While noticing that my hangovers seemed to go on a bit too long, or that my hands were a little bit too unsteady, or that I seemed less and less able to stop that second drink from sliding into that twelfth, I could wax philosophical about how intoxication evoked the Dionysian rites, for after all it was Plato in The Symposium (a booze-soaked party) who claimed that “For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet,” and when I was getting my PhD in English what I loved was pints of lager, gin and tonic, and Jameson on the rocks, and sometimes if I was drunk enough and squinting with one eye, I could convince myself that I was a poet.

    If I was smart, it certainly manifested itself in the same tired old story as any other alcoholic, even if my justifications seemed clever to me. Because whether or not it’s true that some people are too smart to quit drinking, many academics might enthusiastically agree that’s the case, the better to avoid church basements. Psychologists call this “rationalization”…

    Lots of discussion is rightly had about the problems generated by substance abuse among undergraduates, but much less is had about alcoholism on the other side of the podium. Something is surprising about this – the cocktail hour is valorized in academe, especially in the humanities where with cracked pride there is a certain amount of cosplaying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, where the past tweedy imagined pleasures of sherry fueled conviviality run strong. Rebecca Schuman (who is not an alcoholic) writes in Slate about how this “campus alcohol epidemic, one largely ignored,” is often “heralded as an inextricable virtue of the Life of the Mind.”

    But for alcoholic academics there are also often darker particulars for returning time and time again to the bottle. The unnaturalness of living in one’s head all of the time, the stress and intermingling of life and work so that it almost always feels like you’re stuck in the latter (and people think we get summers off!), the often incapacitating imposter syndrome. Professors aren’t the only alcoholics of course; there are plenty of alcoholic plumbers, alcoholic nurses, alcoholic accountants, alcoholic cops, alcoholic lawyers, alcoholic janitors. Yet academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in that alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    University of Notre Dame history professor Jon T. Coleman writes movingly of his own struggles with alcoholism in academe, explaining in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education that one of the “most sinister aspects of alcoholism was the intramural loathing it encouraged,” describing how he drank to “mute the feelings of guilt, failure, and panic that came from not being able to control my drinking,” despite having “graduated from college, earned a Ph.D., secured a job, won book awards, and received tenure from a top-tier university while engaging in a habitual behavior that rendered me a dumbass.”

    In her remarkable new book The Recovering, Leslie Jamison similarly sees the appeal of annihilation and escape as central to the professorial preoccupation with self-destruction, explaining that drinking “plunged me into a darkness that seemed like honesty,” misinterpreting that “desperate drunk space underground” as “where the truth lived.” As a way of proffered hypothesis, that’s some of what fuels the alcohol problem among humanities scholars, a misapplied radical skepticism that’s suspicious of recovery-speak (which allows for convenient rationalizations). Combine this with the accumulated boozy romance of past generations, and one sees part of what motivates the problem.

    Even now I’m hesitant to use the word “alcoholic” in describing myself, chaffing at the “One Day at a Time” folk-wisdom of 12-step philosophy, historicizing and critiquing recovery in a manner that at its worst could easily justify relapse (though it hasn’t yet). But a certain saving grace also is gifted from my vocation, for as an English professor nothing is more paramount than the sanctity of words, and if I’m not an alcoholic, then the word itself has no meaning. One of the bits of hard-earned wisdom I’ve been gifted through the haze is the understanding that if my disease isn’t my fault, it’s surely my responsibility. I believe that had I not been an academic with a drinking problem, I’d have had some other job and identity – with a similar drinking problem.

    Even as a personal responsibility, the wider academy, because of its particular culture and history, must also do more to provide support for graduate students and faculty with substance abuse disorders. Graduate student Karen Kelsky in a guest blog for “The Professor is In” writes that the “stigma associated with addiction may be stronger than stigmas for mental illness,” in part because alcoholism is so often perceived as a “choice,” and not a complicated issue of heredity, acculturation, and brain chemistry. Even moderate drinkers face opprobrium in the wet groves of academe, with Shuman writing about how after she decided to quit excessive social drinking, she was “cut off socially” and that as she “drank less and less,” she was “accepted less and less by my peers.”

    There needs to be a shift in how academe grapples with alcoholism, and with alcoholics. In the short term, a small start would be to provide alternative possibilities at conferences and symposia that are so often permeated by alcohol. Jeffrey J. Cohen, a scholar of medieval literature at Arizona State University (who is not an alcoholic himself) argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education that those “who arrange conference social events were alcohol is served must ensure that they are not the sole access provided to conference conviviality.”

    In the long term, academics need to become more sensitive to and aware of the definitions of alcoholism and addiction. Kelsky writes of how a “common misconception… is that once someone has gone through treatment, they are ‘cured.’” Consequently, non-drinking graduate students and faculty are often shut out of professional opportunities, their self-care interpreted as being the behavior of a scold or a Puritan. With an important awareness of how difference is manifested for various marginalized groups in our culture, too often academics don’t extend the same consideration to those in recovery, or provide assistance for our colleagues in need.

    Of course even if mental health and substance abuse care are woefully lacking in professional contexts, most fellow individual academics can and do respond to those in recovery with care and empathy. I first read Coleman’s essay after it was sent to me by a concerned colleague and I was able to recognize the malady, so eloquently described, as my own. I drank for two more years.

    My thirst was unquenchable, simply confirming Coleman’s observation about being “Caught in a trap… [with] an inability to break loose.”

    The kindness in being sent that essay had an effect, though, part of that arsenal in my spirit that I was able to drudge up after numerous shaky mornings haunted by fear, a little indication in which I knew that the center could not hold, and in which I could sometimes glimpse the awful grace of that thing called hope, which we alcoholics know as a “moment of clarity.” Coleman did break loose, and so have I for the time being, while always remembering that “There but for the grace of God go I.”

    Three years after my bottom I still work on that first step sometimes, but I find that the organ which made those old rationalizations so evocative can be helpful in actual not drinking. I wake up sober in the morning, and I can reflect on the ways in which recovery bares the mark of the conversion narrative, I can trace the historical antecedents of 12-step groups, I can examine how important issues of race and gender affect how we discuss addiction and recovery. More than enough intellectualism in sobriety; actually, more than there ever was in the tantalizing hum of drunkenness. There can be, as it turns out, as much hope in the classrooms as there is in the rooms, occluded though it may seem, but for that I am grateful.

    Ed S. is a widely published writer and an academic.

    View the original article at thefix.com