Answer Addiction

Tag: Features

  • I’m Open and Willing, Dear Sponsor, but Wait a Minute!

    I’m Open and Willing, Dear Sponsor, but Wait a Minute!

    We know “our best thinking got us here,” but that doesn’t mean we need to be open and willing to take abuse or be manipulated.

    When you first came into the program, you might have heard your “best thinking got you here.”

    You’re told since your way hasn’t been working, maybe it’s time to try something else.

    You’re told you need to surrender.

    You’re told you need to start listening and follow directions.

    Well, if you were like me (gung ho!), and made the decision to be “open and willing,” I’ll bet you gave the program your best shot: you took the suggestions readily; you went to 90 meetings in 90 days; you read the Big Book daily; you got a sponsor; you did the steps. And hopefully, you started to see some progress. Your life began to improve. You cleaned up the wreckage of your past, mended relationships, got involved in service work, and really started to feel better about yourself.

    If the “your best thinking got you here” aphorism played like an endless loop in your brain, you might have felt that you’d lost the ability to think rationally for yourself and that you needed guidance. Should I break up with my addict boyfriend who just happens to be violent?  Well, um, yea . . . but you might have been so enmeshed in codependence while simultaneously combatting your addiction that you honestly didn’t know what to do.

    If you were like me—with some crazy, delusional thinking going on—and you were put on a six-month waiting list by your insurance to see a therapist, you’d need some help, and fast, and that help might have come by way of a sponsor. And if she was a good one, she’d listen, be empathetic, and gently suggest healthier ways of coping with your problems.

    Some people will say that a sponsor’s job is solely to lead a newcomer through the steps—not be a counselor, therapist or life coach. And while some sponsors may stick to this definition, most of the ones I’ve met take a much more involved role. My peers in recovery say they call their sponsors when they want to drink, when their ass is falling off, when they need help! The many times I discussed a problem with a fellow member after the meeting, I invariably heard, “Have you run this by your sponsor?” Or “Call your sponsor, that what she’s there for.”

    Sponsors can be unquestionable lifesavers. Through the years, I’ve had sponsors who have really saved my ass. One time, I was dealing with a relative who had a meth addiction and bipolar disorder. She was delusional but also cruel and selfish. But because she was “blood,” I enabled her. After one particularly trying event with her, I remember calling my sponsor and telling her I didn’t know what to do. She told me to do nothing—walk away. And not feel guilty. It ended up being the smartest thing: my relative got much better learning how to cope and take care of her problems herself instead of manipulating me into doing her bidding.

    But be careful. Not all sponsors should be sponsors. They may only recruit potential sponsees because their sponsor told them it was their turn to get one, not because they are qualified. And if you get with one who isn’t right for you, she could cause you some damage. As a newcomer, you’re incredibly, nakedly vulnerable—and impressionable. So can you see the conundrum here? You want to be open and willing, you want to start following suggestions and take direction—but you still have to listen to your gut and not confuse vulnerability with gullibility.

    When I first met this particular sponsor, I was blown away by her enthusiasm for the program. She was very bright, seemed very together, articulate, funny, educated, empathetic, kind, the whole enchilada. She told me she had tried myriad ways to recover because she’d always been searching for that thing that would fill her up that wasn’t drink drugs food men money or status, and after searching far and wide, she finally surrendered to AA. She claimed it was the best decision she’d ever made. Since she seemed to have what I wanted, I asked her to be my sponsor. I was sure she’d say she was way too busy, because at the time she had six sponsees and was working. But to my delighted surprise, she said “Oh, my of course I can.”

    I was wildly excited and hopeful. I was not working at the time and was willing to do just about anything asked of me. She could see I was clearly broken, my life practically in ruins, and assured me she would help me get through these very trying times of early sobriety.

    We dived right into the steps. She also instructed me to do 90 meetings in 90 days and get a coffee commitment. But gradually—almost imperceptibly—I discovered something else: She wanted to mold me. At first there were mild corrections of my speech or attitude, but it got to the point that I felt oppressively censored. If I ever said “should” or “have to” she’d immediately correct me and say, “not ‘should,’ not ‘have to’” it’s “I ‘get to’” do blah blah blah. In hindsight, I would have told her “Look, ‘should’ is an intrinsic word of the English language, it means something needs to be done. I think I know the difference of when I ‘get to’ do something and when I ‘should’ do something.”

    Another thing she’d do when I told her of a problem I was having with someone, was immediately cut me offbefore I could even finish. She’d interrupt and say, “I want you to think of three good things about this person. Remember, they are doing the best they know how. Find your compassion.” Which is good spiritual advice, but when the shoe was on the other foot and she was pissed at someone, she’d get downright eviscerating, nary mentioning three good qualities of the victim of her rant.

    But her all time fave platitude was: “If you spot it you got it!” said immediately to moi every time I complained to her about a person I felt was being unfair, selfish or mean. And she did have a point: sometimes, when we see something we don’t like in a person it’s because we recognize it in ourselves. But not always! For example, do we renounce the bully because we are bullies ourselves? Maybe, but usually not. Then she’d get into mystical stuff and go on about karma and say, “Everybody gets what they deserve because it’s all karma.” When I asked, “So the old lady that gets raped by a stranger, how did her karma cause that?” Her reply, “Well maybe she did something to deserve it. Now, personally, I’ve never been raped.” Whaaatt?

    But what put me over the edge was something she said that I knew, even with my broken brain, was incontestably wrong. I didn’t have to chide myself this time for thinking that I wasn’t being open and willing enough to learn, or was being controlled by my ego.

    While we were taking a walk, I confided in her about a doctor who had sexually assaulted me when I went in for a pelvic exam.

    She responded: “Well, you aren’t going to like this, but can I say something to you?”

    “Well, sure, I guess.”

    She took a dramatic big breath, squared her shoulders and said, “Okay here goes. I think, that maybe you asked for it.”

    I was dumbfounded. At the time, I explained to her, I was 19 and alone in New York City. I’d gotten my first bladder infection, couldn’t pee and could barely walk straight I was in so much pain. All I wanted was some antibiotics.

    “What do you mean I was asking for it?” I asked, frightfully confused.

    “Well, I didn’t want to bring this up, but now is as good of time as any. I see the way you talk to the men in the meetings. You’re very sexual, you know.”

    “What?” I boomed. “Are you fucking kidding me? I try to treat everyone, men and women alike, with respect, and hopefully, kindness.”

    “Well that is not how it is being perceived. People talk you know. I’m hearing all kinds of things, like ‘God, I can’t believe Margaret is married! The way she talks to the guys.’”

    Now I was pissed. I am an incredibly happily married woman. I adore my husband dearly. I would never, ever, go out on him. I am not even remotely attracted to other men.

    I realized then that her thinking was irrevocably off and I had to cut bait. I finally got the courage to fire her but it took time; she wielded a lot of power at the meetings and she intimidated me. It was an incredibly painful experience. I was already so vulnerable and sensitive, and totally confused. To have my sponsor, the one I’d done my steps with, the one who knew my deepest darkest secrets, become something slightly resembling, well, delusional, was demoralizing to say the least!

    It took me a while to get back to my homegroup. I was so shattered. I really thought of everyone as family there: they were so nice and kind, it was easy to be friendly back. But . . . but, what if my sponsor was right? Could I have been so wrong, so delusional? Was I flirting and were dudes coming on to me and I just didn’t see it? Eventually I went back and shared what she told me to a couple of trusted AA pals. They told me they’d never heard or seen any of the behavior she was reporting about me. 

    The reason I’m sharing this story is not to criticize AA, or gossip about members, or diss sponsors. I’m sharing my story because I don’t want the same thing to happen to another vulnerable newcomer, a newcomer who knows her thinking is off and is willing and open to change, but may be confused about the accuracy and validity of some of her sponsor’s suggestions, opinions, or directions.

    Listen to your intuitions, and your higher power. If you’re having problems with your sponsor, share your experiences—without using names—with other trusted members in order to get some perspective. Because we are scared and alone when we come into the rooms. We know “our best thinking got us here,” but that doesn’t mean we need to be open and willing to take abuse or be manipulated.

    Most of the time, sponsorship is a wonderful example of people helping other people. Sponsors can help talk you out of a drink, and because they’re drunks like you, they usually get where you’re coming from. But just because someone is a sponsor or old-timer doesn’t mean they are perfect.

    Face it, we are all deeply flawed in some way. But sponsors have a very serious job to do, and they should be doing it out of altruism, not as way to assuage their own ego by lording over vulnerable newcomers who they can control, manipulate or abuse. So be careful. Be open and willing but keep your boundaries firmly in place. And if things get creepy, don’t spend too much time being resentful (like I did!). Instead, break it off with him/her before you develop another codependent, dysfunctional relationship, and chalk it up as an invaluable learning experience.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • When My “Give a F**k” Broke

    When My “Give a F**k” Broke

    I stood on the edge of this abyss and began my free fall to find healthy. I had nothing left to lose.

    “I am fine,” was my go to response for years. When anyone would ask, I would answer with that canned response, and if the typical follow up question was “Really?”, I was prepared. I would look them square in the eye and state firmly, “There is no other option.”

    During my almost three-year sexual assault investigation and prosecution, this was my warrior’s response. If someone was brave enough to follow up with that second question and meet my eyes for the response, typically they took a step back or walked away. Even my therapists tried to break through that façade, but my walls were thick, my stilettos were high, and my eyes were piercing. I was not for the faint of heart and no one was getting in.

    I was a mom first, a single mom. A single mom operating as both Mom and Dad to two beautiful girls. That man was so disengaged, he moved to Dubai but continued to send—not child support—but rather criticizing emails on how I should raise our children. Thank God for email filters – his crap went straight to a file I almost never opened.

    I was a sexual assault survivor who learned a life lesson that I could rely on no one and safety did not exist. Life taught me how to use my presence and my voice to keep people at bay, and also how to motivate people to act. Safety was not real, so I had to make it so. But my triggers were substantial and regular, and the constant awareness that what happened to me could happen to my daughters often paralyzed me.

    Those two daughters were my everything. I became a warrior on their behalf. When the school administration failed to protect my daughter from bullies, I fought them, and then finally moved. When my daughter was struck in a hit and run that was so severe it totaled my new car, I allowed my mother bear instinct to come out but limited my rage so I would not be put in prison.

    I carried a mortgage, student loan debt, and at one time allowed a homeless family of four to live with us in our home until the pregnant mother could give birth and they could get on their feet. Meanwhile, professionally, I endured a passive-aggressive boss who enjoyed playing head games for sport. I supervised (and truly enjoyed) over 60 adjunct professors who taught amazing students at a graduate school. With what little personal time I had, any attempts at dating were laughable; the caliber of men available was lower than I could settle for and the unavailable men who attempted to gain my affection repulsed me. I was hard, I was strong, and I was lonely – but it worked. I didn’t have a choice. I did not have the luxury of time to handle hurt or to feel more than what was necessary to be functional. I was safe if I exposed myself to nothing and no one. I was this way unintentionally most of the time, but knew how to call upon it when necessary. Still, I was absolutely perplexed when I was given feedback that I was intimidating. I just wanted to survive and I was doing it the only way I knew how.

    When my daughter was committed to a mental health facility twice for attempting suicide and given the diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder with PTSD, I finally broke. The realization that I really could not protect my children from all the unknowns absolutely unraveled me. I sat in the emergency room, sobbing. All my deepest fears and suppressed anguish came to the surface. The reality that I could not keep my children from hurt translated into absolute failure as their mother. When the emergency room doctor came over for my statement, I was crying so hard that I could not talk. She asked me that dreaded question, “Are you okay?” I finally answered honestly, and it was the only word I could get out, “No.” That simple and honest answer broke through years of protective walls and it was devastating.

    During the months that followed, my newfound vulnerability did not settle well. I needed back in the driver’s seat; it was a non-stop internal battle. I hustled myself back into therapy, where, at one point, I told my amazing therapist that I could not talk to him unless I laid flat on the floor of his office. I was convinced I was losing my mind. He assured me I was not but I did not believe him.

    I was broken. My “Give A F**k” was now in a constant state of zero and my moral compass was constantly spinning. I felt exposed and vulnerable and very, very confused. The belief system I had created to make sense of the violence that had happened to me and to generate an environment of safety for my daughters was an illusion that had been destroyed. I had perfected this for years and it was gone in an instant. I was drowning. I could not breathe.

    What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was a gift. The dam wall had broken and all of the harbored pain was released and it forced me to process it. A healthy, accepting mindset was as foreign to me as Egyptian hieroglyphics and I had to change. My mental health and my ability to be a good mother and human depended on it. I stood on the edge of this abyss and began my free fall to find healthy. I had nothing left to lose.

    Fresh eyes saw the world for all its flaws and beauty. I learned to address flaws as a simple ingredient of life and not as a threat; I began to accept people and situations for who they were, and it was freeing. Another key step to my freedom was learning to listen to my gut and unapologetically responding as such. If I did not feel comfortable in the presence of someone, I simply removed myself gracefully and did not look back. My gut owed no one an explanation, and that was empowering. Kindness was no longer seen as weakness and connecting with people was no longer dangerous. The world was not a field of landmines but rather an adventure with twists and turns.

    I felt like I was breathing fresh air for the first time. I laughed freely without hesitation, I smiled boldly without fear, and I slept so well. I loved with all of me and I loved ME. Everything in me relaxed for the first time in over a dozen years and my mental health was good, for REAL. I was no longer simply “fine,” I was “good,” teetering on great.

    Unhealthy people in my life were not so supportive of my new healthy lifestyle, but healthy people supported me with fervor. My manipulative boss was the least supportive because she would no longer get the intended response. She was a daily practice for me though, providing regular situations that allowed me to implement healthy responses. She eventually began ignoring me. Unhealthy friendships fell to the wayside. My youngest daughter, who was working on her own demons, did not understand my choices and decided to go live with her father overseas. I mourned her decision, but the friends and loved ones who accepted me, even when I went into my Xena: Warrior Princess mode, kept me grounded.

    Shortly after reconnecting with my emotions and releasing my fear, I met a man who changed my life. He was so healthy and good, kind and unconditionally accepting. Jumping into the abyss landed me in the arms of someone who did not see me as broken and on the mend. I was also able to connect with my oldest daughter on a level that I cannot explain other than she is one of my best friends. She accepts my flaws as I accept hers, and we connect almost every day.

    I left my stressful position in that unhealthy working environment and began working as an independent contractor, providing trainings to first responders on how to communicate with victims of trauma. I began writing educational materials and speaking at conferences, utilizing my rape and prosecution experience as an educational opportunity for those who work within the criminal justice, mental health and medical professions. This work is sometimes emotional and tiring, but highly rewarding. It gives me purpose and satisfaction to know that I can make a difference.

    My “Give a F**k” may have broken, but I didn’t, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Joys of Being Wrong

    The Joys of Being Wrong

    I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency.

    I had initially thought to write this story – the story of a person once self-presumed irreparably broken who recently completed chemotherapy turned Ivy League law student in a sensible, stable long-distance relationship – once I had received official acceptance letters from myriad top-ranked schools and the boundless adoration of a future wife, an expression forged in platinum, maybe with a tasteful emerald or cushion cut. Submitting it now, though, amid this very particular brand of uncertainty so laden with the weight of proving my worth, after many rejections and healthily parting ways with my girlfriend, seems a far more fitting representation of the point of recovery.

    What is that point?

    The wording will vary for everyone, of course, but to me:

    The point is not what you get: the point is what you do with it.

    Were I to await the above, the increased likelihood of this lesson being misconstrued as “quit drugs, win big!” would overshadow the actual essence of sobriety. Sure, the cash and prizes sometimes include overwhelming esteem, material gain and skyrocketing popularity; more often than not, though, the promises of recovery entail something less expected – something that we wouldn’t at onset necessarily identify as exceeding our wildest dreams, but that somehow does. That’s one of the most amazing things about all of this, really – that what we think is humdrum is actually fulfilling, and that what we think will be fulfilling actually sells us short.

    There’s a reconciliation of paradoxes implicit to the recovery process. When I heard of the addict mentality described as “negative ego” I didn’t fully grasp its implications until I heard the same rephrased by a young woman who said that, in her active addiction, she felt like a “piece of shit in the center of [her] own universe.” Later I heard such peculiar self-evaluation termed as “arrogant doormat” and “I didn’t think much of myself, but I was all that I thought about.”

    When I first got clean, the catalyst beyond threat of discontinued financial support was certainty that I would finally be recognized for the meteoric talent that I was – that all of the reasons for which I thought I used substances would be reinterpreted and rightly understood as unappreciated genius and, once so affirmed, I would no longer indulge that self-destructive tendency born of being “misunderstood” – no wait sorry – not just misunderstood like you are – distinctively misunderstood. Quitting drugs for me, however, has actually shown its primary benefit to be that I now get to participate in life just as other people do – like a person looking to what actually is instead of constant consumption with what is not, with how they’ve been wronged, with how they are somehow simultaneously better and worse than ____, all at the same time.

    Even now, despite years of practiced right-sizing and spiritual dependence, there is a part of me that continues to sustain the myth that I am somehow so special as to be immune to the conditions that dog other people, despite a consistent undercurrent of fraudulence: that I can put in a little less effort, that I am somehow shrouded in a halo sufficient to enchant those so blessed to gaze upon my angel face.

    We do not look at the world as if it were a mirror, reflecting only ourselves and whatever lies behind us: we look at the world as through a window; we see what is ahead but can’t help also catching our own reflection. Who we are, and what we think, informs what we see. That myth I maintain is delusional, so a part of who I am is delusional, and that part collects evidence to support that delusion’s accompanying grandeur. For as much as I develop my faculties of reason and reality, I think I might always retain a degree of magical thinking where I believe that maybe more is possible than may actually be possible. Sometimes I think that gives me the courage to take actions in faith and belief that might otherwise be precluded by too much logic, or not enough magic; while I can’t parse the precise extent to which that contributes to faith-based actions, it does seem to keep my chin parallel to ground and sky.

    The other day someone asked me “How do you get from pain to faith?”

    When I am in pain I am drawn closer to God. I do not balk at those who feel that pain instead causes division, or interpret pain as an absence of God: it is an absence, if you choose it to be. God is not the cause of pain; God is the solace that might be sought within it. It is almost as easy to blame God as it is to seek God; it is almost as easy to see differently as it is to see the same. When I am disappointed, it is not because God did not respond to my commands – God is not obligated to obey me; to the contrary it is I who is afforded the choice to obey God. All people have that agency – the ability to decide whether or not to honor and uphold that which is divinely informed, however “divinely informed” may be interpreted.

    Whatever face you give to God, whatever name – that entity is with you. God is intended to comfort you in the impossible length of the dark night; God is intended to draw you closer.

    What is closer? What does it feel like? Closer is the humoring of my will, the acknowledgment of its concerns and demands without automating action upon them. Closer is the awareness that maybe someone or some thing, either vaguely understandable or wholly intangible, may know better than I know. Closer is the nearly imperceptible sense of warmth you feel when you’re in great pain but know that this will not break you, that what you feel is not fully representative of your capability, because you are not just you – you are you plus that something greater; you are you and not alone.

    ___________________________________________

    When I am charged with the full control and conduct of myself, as though my will and intention were affected within a vacuum, my ego enters stages left, right and center. When I surrender some bit of my will I am more closely actualized as who I am meant to be, rather than who I think I am meant to be, or who I project that I am. When I willingly enter into and actively sustain that relationship – severing ties to the notion that it has to be just me, that it means more if I do things on my own – then the way that I see the world, as it is and with my reflection, is limitless. I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency. When I am in my own power, my options consist solely of those that I am capable of conceiving; when I am in God’s power, my options are as limitless as that to which I am intentioned.

    I do not always agree with that to which I am intentioned. I recently received another “no” from an elite law school – another from one to which I was sure I’d be admitted – and have, in the past 10 minutes alone, assigned permanent and predictive weight to that decision. I have convinced myself that both my present and future fate are tethered to those rejections. I have projected that those rejections foreshadow a coordinated stonewalling effect that will prove ever prohibitive of every ambition that I have ever had, and as such I should just learn to teach spin, because that is probably how I will end up – alone, undereducated, and teaching spin – *not even at SoulCycle* (see what I did there?) – for the rest of my life.

    When I fully inhabit my individualized agency I am downright apocalyptic. I allow no slit through which a ray of truth might shine; I do not suffer fools as I misunderstand soothsayers to be. At those times, I am in the most limited space I can occupy. And then, the break; then, the unexpected; then, that which I’d so quickly discounted, manifests.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Language Sideways: The Poetry of Addiction

    Language Sideways: The Poetry of Addiction

    In what ways do current poems of addiction represent the minds of addicts in the throes of active disease as well as after the process of recovery’s begun?

    Something poet Sam Sax said in an interview for The Fix has me thinking about poetry and addiction. “Poetry for me,” he told writer Christian Arthur, “is the only medium I’ve found that can accurately mimic how the brain moves.”

    I’ve sensed this ever since I stumbled into poetry in my early 20s, and though I’ve written books of poems and have taught writing for years, Sax’s statement reminds me that poets use language in radically unexpected ways. Rather than communicating directly, poetry sidesteps logic in ways that may enervate or baffle. Because its language may seem sleight-of-hand (or even swindle), poetry is a medium well-suited to embody the multidimensional shifting and meandering that the mind enacts on a regular basis. But what may seem merely perplexing language that distorts reality may also be noted as presenting how the brain actually moves, with dizzying speed from present to past, reality to fantasy, hard fact to symbolic representation, all in a moment or, more likely, a split second.

    Got it, and now we’re good to go back to our double espresso lattes and the latest CNN infuriation, right? But not so fast, for my coffee-charged mind is cycling through thoughts faster than I can process them, and my news-cycle drenched brain—well, never mind the news. The brain on coffee gets us closer to poetry, at least in the sense that I wish to explore here in relation to Sax’s statement. How, I wonder, does poetry fare under the strain of the addictive mind? What are the ways that poems written by recovering addicts mimic the mental circuitry of addictive thinking, that snarled labyrinth of brain moves that torture every addict I’ve known, both before and after sobriety? In what ways do current poems of addiction represent the minds of addicts in the throes of active disease as well as after the process of recovery’s begun?

    * * *

    Since American poetry is presently enjoying what may well be its golden age, I push away a stack of books by familiar poets and take up three recent books by first-time authors. Though Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Charles Bukowski, Etheridge Knight, Jean Valentine, Gregory Pardlo, Cynthia Cruz, Nick Flynn, Maggie Anderson, and Joan Larkin—whose poems on alcoholism The Los Angeles Times described as “the finest ever written on the subject”—have much to tell us about how the addictive mind works, I wish to witness the mental machinations of those at the frontlines of sobriety.

    So I turn to the most recent debut poets issue of Poets & Writers magazine, where I find ten first books, at least three of which address the subject of addiction.

    To read Sam Sax’s Madness, William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (both chosen for the National Poetry Series) and Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf is to enter danger zones in which the only direction we have comes not from GPS, but from eyeballing how close we drive to the edge of a cliff. In these poems, the mind is vertiginous, and in many cases its language sidesteps reductive meaning in order to reproduce, in the reader’s mind, states of mentality pertaining to the addictive impulse. In each of these books, non-linear, sideways-moving language introduces us to harrowing inner worlds. Words swoop down without warning to initiate us in the experience of drug-induced psychosis or to the grief in watching a brother overdose. Lines come at us from around blind corners to ambush us with the minutiae of what detox feels like, from the inside out. Meaning strips us bare then retreats, and words act not as locatable comfort, but as ventriloquized ephemera, cast-off detritus of the unspeakable degradations and mysteries of the addicted mind.

    In its 79 pages, Madness (Penguin 2017) reveals a mind reeling from institutionalization, addiction to alcohol and painkillers, and the initial stages of recovery. Its concision may appear, at first, as imprisonment until you find that Sax’s language is liberating, untethered, and—dare I say it?—downright playful. You read these poems as interior landscapes. Though statements such as “i can only half-blame alcohol for my overdose / the other half is my own hand / that poured the codeine” (“On Alcohol”) occur, by virtue of Sax’s skill with wordplay and cadence, we’re invited to participate in a mind surveying its experience of an addictive trajectory that spans active withdrawal to whispered reprieve.

    The heft of his subject matter—inpatient mental illness, queer identification and sex as painkiller, an uncle’s cancer, and, of course, drug use—may seem weighty enough to crumple the reader into one of Sax’s finely-wrought pages. Yet the writing style renders Sax’s project one of resuscitation and, for this gay reader, affirmation.

    I have to work for it, though, and Sax gives nothing away cheap. Starting with a prefatory block of clinical language from the DSM-1 (1952), words, in and of themselves, cannot be trusted. “[T]his must be the way of things,” Sax writes in one of the four poems titled “Psychotherapy,” “—all signs pointing toward unknowable destinations.” In the mental states of addiction, nothing clear-cut will do. Sax’s speaker opts for a more chaotic approach. “i’ve begun to grow distrustful of sense,” he says in “On Syphilis,” “let there be madness in the text.” Linear meaning oppresses the mind the way disease oppresses the body, until there’s nothing for language to do but to burst out of its skin. That means, in the mind moving in these poems, out and up, into the freedom of wordplay.

    Linguistic play sets the reader on notice as to the liberties this book takes with documenting a mind that refuses to move in acceptably linear ways. Words rub against each other, a form of auditory intrigue. “[A]ll our white blood / cells an oven,” Sax writes in “Fever Therapy, “a coven of bees blushing,” the off-rhyme (eye rhyme) of “oven” and “coven” creating a kind of linguistic harmony. Elsewhere Sax puts into motion a series of two- and three-word morphing patterns—“comets” / “comma” and “boarding” / “boring” and “sickle,” “silk,” “sick” (“Diagnosis”); “ward,” “warden,” “wars” (“Willowbrook”); “city,” “family,” “ancestry” (“On Syphilis”)—chains of sound that please the ear and, in one possible interpretation, mirror the circularity of the speaker’s addictive mind. Rationality is turned on its side, and we are driven over it, roughshod.

    As I read, Sax’s cadence catches my attention as language becomes a percussive instrument drumming out the mind’s anguish. Punctuation, or its lack, emphasizes these poems’ rhythms, as well as their barrage of mental buzz. In Sax’s hands, driving cadences refuse logic while simultaneously giving rise to a clashing sonic beauty that articulates feeling (drowning? enclosure?) better than most narrative can. Take these lines, for instance, from “Transorbital Lobotomy”:

    in the fifties there were tens of thousands performed in the states

    sour mess. sour mash. mash-up. macerate.

    cut a rug. jitterbug. wonder drug. gutter. tug. suture. lacerate.

    erasure. erase. raced. deadened. dead end.

    How can writing about lobotomy sound so, um, appealing? So mentally alive? There’s more than meets the eye: an outpouring of mind that moves toward implying the panic and dis-ease of circular thinking, while simultaneously (and subliminally) encoding that which is sonically recuperative. In one of the main ways that Sax’s poems encode mental activity, sound, in and of itself, simultaneously embodies the horrors of addiction and enacts recovery.

    Recovery’s brain moves happen in William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed 2017), but differently. New York magazine calls Brewer “America’s poet laureate of the opioid crisis,” but even those like myself who have never taken recreational opioids might find familiar ground here. Addiction is addiction, and in “Oxyana,” the place Brewer defines as “[a] nickname given to the town of Oceana, West Virginia, after becoming a capital of OxyContin abuse,” the addictive mind proliferates. But it’s also where I experience a degree of skepticism with regard to Brewer’s poetics, for this statement seems more explicit than what I’ve come to hope for in poetry. My misgiving only increased as I read further: “Following a successful crackdown on prescription painkillers, heroin has now flooded the state. West Virginia has the highest fatal overdose rate in America, nearly three times the national average.” How, I wonder, can this factual language reach a state of epiphany that poetry is primed to offer? Explanation, my thinking goes, kills the spell that lyricism attempts to cast.

    Which is what I expect to happen in I Know Your Kind. Brewer’s emphasis on Oxyana feels narrow, literally confining. And I sense a further problem in Brewer’s first poem, “Oxyana, West Virginia,” which opens with a panoramic view that winds through the Alleghenies and arrives at the town where the action is. Does the addictive mind think this way—in aerial shots panning down from the ethers to land us in an Oxyana? This seems too staged to be a useful representation of the addictive mind in action.

    But in the book’s second poem, “Icarus in Oxyana,” a striking image leads me to the discovery of another way poetry renders how the brain moves: “Someone on the porch / who’d lost both his arms / chain smokes.” This single image–bold, bewildering, painfully true–clarifies the addictive mind at work. It allows me to settle into this book, an eye out for other potent images.

    And I find them: “waking up in an alley with a busted face, // teeth red and penny-sweet, the rain / coming down clear as gin” (“To the Addict Who Mugged Me”); “have held the still hive of his head, / have placed my lips against the shadow // of his mouth, screamed air into his chest” (“The Messenger of Oxyana”). And these, from “Detox Psalm”:

    With the waves’ jade

    coaxing, I heaved my every organ

    through my mouth, then cut a mouth,

    at last, in my abdomen and prayed

    for there to be something more divine

    than the body, and still something

    more divine than that, for a torrent

    of white flies to fly out of me,

    anything, make me in the image

    of the bullet, I begged, release me

    from myself and I will end a life.

    Language moves sideways here by creating literal impossibilities—heaving internal organs through the mouth—that are metaphorically accurate. Detoxing does feel like the body throwing itself out of itself, the skin all wrong. The detoxing body is its own enemy, and glad we would be, at the worst of it, to be our own bullet that ends the body’s dangers. Such is the power of Brewer’s imagery to carry the reader through the stages of addiction, partial recovery, relapse, and finally sustained recovery. Brewer’s images depict the emotional and mental rot at the foundation of addiction, the skewed thinking at the heart of the disease.

    In the work 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning poet Frank Bidart calls “an intensely inventive and original debut,” Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) is alive with images that render shifting mental states at dizzying speeds. Akbar’s poems shunt from one emotional state to another, giving a sense of mental motion more reminiscent of driving too fast on hairpin curves than of logical elucidation. We race to keep up with speakers who pay no heed to safety. In “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal,” Akbar offers a description that veers from one image to another: “I can hardly picture any of it now / save the fox I thought / was in the grass but wasn’t // I remember him quiet / as a telescope / tiny as a Plutonian moon.” Dimension derails, and disproportion prevails as the poem’s narrator lurches from fox to telescope to a moon so far in space that we’re granted a sense of how distorted the mind is that’s lining up these improbable—and emotionally accurate—images of DTs. “It’s amazing what you can find / if you just dissect everything,” Akbar writes in another poem, followed by a tumble of images: “Once / I pulled a glowing crystal from my beard / and buried it in the earth. The next day / I went to the spot and dug up a silver trumpet.” These images aren’t locatable in a linear context. They lurch and undulate beneath the skin of sense, advancing a project that, as with both previous poets, incites a sense of skepticism in relation to the body. As such, Akbar’s images wobble, as if they’re about to topple headlong onto bloody pavement. It’s no wonder, given the sidewinder moves the mind in these poems makes, that Akbar admits, “When I wake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do.”

    Because of Akbar’s linguistic bravura, it takes time for me to become aware of his use of topographical space representative of another way the mind moves. In the context of his poetry, empty space is not vacant; it connotes the unsaid, the impossible-to-say, the outer limits of implication. Every silence is an admission of not-knowing, a blow against hubris. Amid the linguistic swerves of Akbar’s poems, ample white space sometimes surrounds words, engulfs lines and whole stanzas in a silence that cordons off a kind of quiet amidst mental chaos. For showing brain moves in his poetry, silence is as meaningful as articulation.

    Akbar offers extra spaces between words (“my whole life I answered every cry for help with a pour   with a turning away” [“Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)”], and he occasionally jettisons left-margin conventions in favor of lineage that moves across the page (“Portrait of the Alcoholic with Moths and River,” “The New World,” “Against Hell”). Though the silences of the intake interview embodied in “Drinkaware Self-Report” indicate physical and emotional distance between interviewer and interviewee, the majority of Akbar’s silences are indicative of commonalities. The space between the three-line stanzas that filter across the page of “Learning to Pray,” for instance, are silences of communion, of reaching toward something greater than the addicted self. The white space between the unrhymed couplets found in “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy” is tentative with an uncertainty suggesting a fragile state of mind.

    In Akbar’s best work, silence girds understatement, and what remains unsaid gives a sense that within the frantic place of the addictive mind lies a locus of calm. There, the mind doesn’t explain. It doesn’t offer delusion or false comfort. Yet it comforts, perhaps because open space is public space that has the potential to welcome us all. In its meaninglessness, it aspires to greater meaning, the way, say, our parks and canyons and monuments are open to everyone. Language can undercut commonality, but silent space knows no identity other than that of all. Silence is, in a word, collectivity. We is its pronoun, as in we are not alone. No matter how difficult may be the stages of overcoming addiction, Akbar’s silences imply, there are others with us. The silences I see in his poetry of addiction are perhaps the most hopeful of all the mental moves I’ve observed.

    * * *

    Poetry of the caliber of these three debut poets reminds me that the mind is not a linear muscle. How can it be that I so easily forget this? Wasn’t it just last week that a stain in my bathroom sink reminded me of the cigarette burn at the edge of my grandmother’s porcelain tub from forty-five years ago? Didn’t that image trail with it the smell of her Slavak cooking and her devotion, in absurdly equal proportion, to the L.A. Dodgers and As the World Turns? Standing in my apartment a few days ago, at the sight of a mar on my porcelain my mind catapulted back to four years before I took my first drink before ricocheting into a present that contains the seven years (this month) since I’ve had my last. It happened so suddenly that it shocked me.

    Which is frequently how our minds work. What sideways language does is enact this process, so that we can see it in action. It’s the conduit between our current and past selves, making us privy to states of being we might otherwise miss.

    Though the majority of Americans express intimidation and disinterest in poetry, I wonder if in doing so they aren’t inadvertently expressing a fear of language that moves the way the untethered mind does. Sideways language may nudge us to wonder if it’s not linear logic, rather than its sideways counterpart, that enacts distortion. Minds of addicts and non-addicts alike traverse multiple planes of experience simultaneously. Poetry, in enacting the mind in all its vicissitudes and pyrotechnics, its leaps and mental gymnastics, is an art that counters, not codifies, linear distortion. Shouldn’t we honor, rather than disparage, the depiction of mental states as we actually experience them, something that Sam Sax, William Brewer and Kaveh Akbar are teaching us to do?

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Is There Life After AA?

    Is There Life After AA?

    I was fed up with the fear-based conditioning of being told that if I left, I wouldn’t stay sober, and I was tired of the constant message that my future was up to some mystic higher power.

    When I walked into my first AA meeting, I felt like I was broken into a million pieces. My bloated body housed a mosaic of a woman whose sense of self was shattered. I had zero self-confidence, and my self-esteem was so fragile that if you poked me, I’d erupt into a blubbering mess. My life seemed like a blur. I had no comprehension of where most of my twenties had gone—they seemed to have been washed away by a tsunami of wine and drugs. I’m not sure what I expected when I stepped foot through that door, but I distinctly remember feeling utterly defeated, completely lost, with no idea what to do next. I knew I had to stop and this is where I was told to go.

    I quickly adjusted to life in AA; they welcomed me, guided me through building social supports, and gave me a framework to live by. Initially, it stuck, and I stayed sober. The 12 steps seemed to be a very simple way to live my life as a sober person. At that time my life was simple: it consisted of endless meetings and a shitty job. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. It was like I was wearing someone else’s hand-me-downs: every time I looked down I was acutely aware of my long limbs being two or three inches too long—they were functional, but they weren’t the right fit and I felt constricted.

    Those feelings would resurface every time someone in the rooms gave me a suggestion, or made a remark, that seemed overly-controlling or dogmatic. Some of the highlights include one sponsor screaming down the phone at me for 30 minutes until I was in tears because I wasn’t doing what she wanted me to do. Another memory is of her sponsor insisting I call on a daily basis to “check out my thinking” and report my plan for the day. Then there were the messages that those who leave the program were destined for one of two fates: returning to alcohol/drug use, or death. Certified Recovery Specialist and MSW Adam Sledd, recounts: “The biggest lie of all was the one that said I couldn’t manage my own recovery. This myth singlehandedly disenfranchises millions of people.” Another damaging myth that keeps people from exploring other potential methods of recovery is that if you are able to get sober somehow without 12-step programs, you must not have been a “real” alcoholic to begin with.

    While I do not discount that AA contributed to my development as a woman in recovery—I stayed sober and I built social supports—I reached a point that it hindered the development of my sense of self. I had no life outside of AA and I felt like my core values of integrity, justice, and equality were reframed as character defects.

    In retrospect, I can see that having other people in recovery guiding you through the twelve steps leaves a wide margin of error. They are not trained therapists and they are not trauma-informed, leaving the risk of misinterpretation and potential harm. Through intensive therapy, I now see that my core values weren’t character flaws—they are a fundamental aspect of who I am. I also discovered that I suffer with complex PTSD, so being conditioned to believe I was powerless and had these presumably fatal character flaws wasn’t helpful—it was harmful. I needed to empower myself, not diminish vital parts of my identity. 

    Even though I rigorously applied the steps, I found myself increasingly numbing out feelings of doubt with food and cigarettes. It became clear that even though I wanted to stay sober, my life in 12-step fellowships wasn’t a life I wanted. I was depressed and didn’t want my life to revolve around sitting in church basements telling sad stories and disempowering myself by identifying as the same broken woman who walked through that door two years earlier. I was no longer that woman, and I was sick of suppressing the new person I had become. I was fed up with the fear-based conditioning of being told that if I left, I wouldn’t stay sober, and I was tired of the constant message that my future would be determined by some mystic higher power.

    In writing my blog and interviewing people around the world about what recovery looked like for them, it became startlingly clear that there were endless ways to recover—dispelling all of the myths and dogmatic conditioning we hear in the rooms. I began to see through the lived experience of others that the parts of me that I’d considered to be broken were actually the making of me. No longer was I defined by my past and instead I could embrace my core values and personality traits. That experience led to the realization that I had not been thinking big enough. I was shrinking myself to fit into a program that didn’t work for me, and I was too frightened to leave.

    Moving to America gave me the impetus to cut ties to 12-step fellowships in favor of trying something new and expanding my life. It was difficult at first. When you build a recovery founded upon the belief that you have to rely upon others to survive, it is inevitable that you will wobble once you remove those supports. But once you realize that you are in charge of your recovery, everything changes.

    I started to break free of those dogmatic beliefs that were simply untrue for me. I saw the evidence that many people just like me were thriving without a 12-step recovery. Gone was the conditioning of looking at myself as broken. Instead, I realized that I am no longer that woman who walked through the doors of AA six years ago. I no longer have to shrink myself or berate my character for being out of line with the core beliefs of a program that doesn’t work for me. I see much more value in looking at what is right about me, what I have endured and overcome, and rising to the challenge of helping others to see their strengths and striving to have a fulfilling, self-directed life.

    That experience stills saddens me today. The fear-based conditioning is still occurring in 12-step fellowships and in online forums in spite of a body of evidence demonstrating that there is more than one way to recover. In my work as a writer, I challenge perspectives on recovery by pointing out this evidence on a near daily basis. I passionately believe in showing others that they can find and succeed in recovery another way if the 12 steps do not work for them.

    To that end, I set up a Facebook Group, Life After 12-Step Recovery. The purpose of the group is to provide hope, tools, and resources for people who leave AA, NA—or any other A—because it wasn’t the right fit for them. I wanted to provide the real-life experiences of people thriving once they have left these fellowships and taken control of managing their own recovery.

    In setting up the group, I asked people on Facebook who had left 12-step groups about their experiences. I was inundated with examples of people leading fulfilling, empowered, and self-directed lives. And there was one person who said: “I know lots of people who have left 12-step recovery. They are all drunk or dead.” I think this illustrates not only the need for this group, but the need for articles like these to dispel such untruths.

    While I equally respect and consider the views of people who find the 12 steps do work for them, the reality is that we all have choices in our recovery, and we have the power to decide what works for us.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • PTSD Service Dogs Are Saving Lives

    PTSD Service Dogs Are Saving Lives

    “If I could pin a medal on Aura, I would,” Evans asserts. “I feel safe in my own world since I’ve had Aura. She’s life saving.”

    United States Army Command Sergeant Major Gretchen Evans’ life changed forever in 2006. This was her ninth combat tour since joining the Army in 1979. It was early spring, Afghanistan, and snow still peaked the mountains, but the chill in the air was beginning to shudder into the warmth that heralded the time for going home. One instant shortly before departure would change her homecoming from routine to medically urgent. While taking enemy fire, a nearby rocket blast left Evans with a traumatic brain injury and total hearing loss. She also suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the injuries sustained on that last tour in Afghanistan meant the end of Evans’ 27-year military career, she believes she’s had PTSD ever since her first tour to Grenada in 1983.

    “You just learn to keep that stuff in control because it wasn’t okay or acceptable to exhibit PTSD symptoms while in active duty,” says Evans, who began finally treating her psychological trauma in 2008. Since accepting and addressing her PTSD diagnosis, Evans has used several different treatments including therapy, medication, and identifying her personal triggers. But one of her most helpful aids comes in the form of her faithful service dog, Aura.

    Companion animals have entered the mainstream conversation in recent years as reaping a host of physical and mental health benefits for their owners. These boons include everything from lower blood pressure to decreased anxiety. Emotional support animals have gained popularity among people struggling with disorders like depression and anxiety. These animals are able to provide comfort, companionship, and a sense of purpose to some people who have shown resistance to other, more formalized treatments. Given the rising popularity of emotional support dogs and other pets, it’s important to recognize their distinction from service animals. Service dogs, which include Psychiatric Service Dogs, receive specific training related to their handler’s disability. We have probably all encountered a seeing-eye dog helping his visually impaired handler keep from walking into a busy intersection, for example. Emotional support dogs are less specialized and not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act—which means you can’t claim discrimination if your therapy dog gets kicked out of the supermarket. The distinction may seem unfair for those who swear by their companion dog, but it does allow those with a qualifying disorder to receive highly specialized assistance. For people with PTSD, that assistance can be life changing.

    The science on service dogs for PTSD is still relatively sparse. That which does exist tends to focus on the benefits for combat personnel, like Evans, which leaves little to no evidence for the use of psychiatric dogs in the treatment of PTSD related to sexual assault, natural disaster, or other forms of trauma. Nonetheless, there is strong anecdotal support of service dogs for the treatment of trauma survivors, and PTSD is now a service-dog qualifying disorder in the United States.

    Evans received Aura free-of-cost through an organization called America’s Vet Dogs, which provides service dogs to disabled U.S. veterans and first responders. Organizations like these are important because Veteran’s Affairs does not currently provide service dogs for their members. Aura is technically categorized as a hearing-aid dog because Evans’ deafness is considered her primary disability, but Evans says the training Aura received for her PTSD has been life-changing after a series of false-starts when it came to her psychological recovery.

    “In the beginning I tried excessive exercise…I tried meditation…I swam with the sharks, which is not really all that relaxing, and I did virtual reality…which works for a lot of veterans, but I had ten million things that happened to me, not just one trauma.” In the end, she says, a combination of medicinal, psychological, and community support helped her come to a place where her PTSD is manageable. And Aura.

    One of Aura’s dominant PTSD-related tasks comes in the form of something that may sound simple to those who have never experienced a trauma nightmare: waking Evans up. This is a task echoed in the emerging literature on PTSD service dogs. The animals act by removing covers from their handler, nudging them, or even jumping onto their handler’s chest if other efforts are unsuccessful. This assistance alone is crucial, because, unlike average nightmares, PTSD-related nightmares typically replay the events or emotions of the trauma in such vivid detail that those who suffer from them may fear returning to sleep, leaving them fatigued and emotionally drained before the day has even begun.

    Evans says Aura also helps her feel safe in the world. The combination of hearing loss and combat-related PTSD can leave Evans feeling vulnerable in public, especially in settings where she has to stand in line or navigate a crowd of unfamiliar people. Her service dog helps to alert her when strangers are approaching from behind, and to provide a berth that minimizes unwanted contact—all of these important for the reduction of hypervigilance, a common PTSD symptom that leaves sufferers feeling anxious, alert, and physically fatigued.

    The biggest criticism emerging from the practice of using service dogs to support PTSD recovery is that dogs have a considerably shorter life span than humans, which could potentially leave an attached handler devastated by the loss. Though merely speculative at this point, this concern merits further research, especially when it comes to the care of survivors who witnessed or experienced loss of life.

    Research on PTSD dogs is still young and much of the extant literature relies on self-reports. Like many aspects of trauma research, it has thus far focused mostly on combat veterans. It will likely be years before we have a large body of data confirming the experiences of combat trauma survivors like Evans, and even longer before that is applied to survivors of other types of trauma. Until then, we have the testimony of those whose lives have been changed by these animals.

    “If I could pin a medal on Aura, I would,” Evans asserts. “I feel safe in my own world since I’ve had Aura. She’s life saving.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Jackie Kashian: From Drunk Driver to Hero of This Story

    Jackie Kashian: From Drunk Driver to Hero of This Story

    I would love to just check out with booze. But whatever I want to check out from will still be there when I sober up – plus whatever drunken stealing, screwing or hitting I did while I was drunk will have to be fixed.

    Last summer, I had a 12-step sponsor who counted performing as a relapse: weed, alcohol, stand-up comedy. Those were the things I needed to stay away from. She promised I was building a foundation for a life “more profound than pussy jokes.” But that’s not a life I want. Without comedy, and before comedy, I never cared about my life enough to even want to stop drinking. This summer, my sponsor is a fellow comedian, but one who started comedy in sobriety. So I’m asking all my favorite sober stand-ups how they do comedy and stay sober. AT THE SAME TIME.

    On Jackie Kashian’s website, there is a page of the advice she was given in 1986 as a new comic. It ends with: “You are a sweet, intelligent, powerful, exuberant comic.” Watching her perform at the Portland Maine Comedy festival a few weeks ago, I couldn’t come up with a more fitting description, other than to add on what she’s gained through the years: powerhouse. And one she rarely mentions: sober. 

    I first came across Jackie when I moved to NYC three years ago and began listening to her second podcast, “The Jackie and Laurie Show.” Jackie and her cohost Laurie Kilmartin had been there, done that, and sold the t-shirts. They are authentic, wise, and most importantly, hilarious. I spent my first year in the city feeling invisible, drinking intermittently (I bombed at an open mic! Time to throw away seven months and GET WASTED!) and waiting for their next episode to come out.

    Her latest album may be called I Am Not the Hero of This Story, but she’s certainly a hero of mine. 

    The Fix: How did you get sober and continue to do comedy?

    Jackie Kashian: I stopped drinking and “got sober” after I got my second DUI. One in Minnesota and one in California. So they both counted as “first DUI’s” because different states and we do not—still to this day and counting—have a national ID card. I couldn’t go on the road for three months which helped me get a solid block of time of me not drinking at comedy clubs in town. I would go do sets, get a Diet Coke and last as long as I could after the show. It wasn’t that long because watching people you like get drunk is not attractive. And not getting drunk was not fun. 

    Note: no one else was psyched when I got drunk… just me. 

    When I first went back on the road I was terrified. I was doing a run of one-nighters in Illinois and ended up featuring the week with this guy (I can’t remember his name but it was a city and a name, like Boston Bill but it was Charleston Chuck). He was a real road dog guy in the fact that he only worked the road. His stand-up was good for the one-nighters and I was worried he was going to be one of those guys that encouraged shots and tried to get laid. Turns out… that guy? He was 15 years offa the booze juice. And he was super supportive. So he didn’t get drunk. He didn’t cheat on his wife after the show and we had a couple brunches that week. It made me realize that it could be done. It was an awesome coincidence that helped a lot. And a friend of mine who’s sober also sent me on the road (it was a three week run) with 21 envelopes, one to be opened each day. Inside was the name of a famous writer, comic or whatever person who was sober. That was inspiring too.

    What is the hardest thing about being sober in showbiz?

    The hardest thing about being sober around comics and showbidness is that I have a constant committee meeting in my head telling me I’d be further along if I partied with so and so. I’m sure if I wanted to sleep around, the meeting minutes would be about how I’d get more work if I slept with more random dudes. It’s not true by the way. When I stopped drinking I was mostly scared of not being funny anymore. It turns out that life is, actually, more absurd stone cold sober. 

    What is the best?

    The best thing about being sober is not being in jail for driving drunk. I’m sober so the things I get from not being drunk all stem from the fact that I drove drunk every night I drank. I never did have one shot and a beer. See how I didn’t just type one beer? I needed to add the shot. And I did stand-up at least four times a week and stand-up is most often in places with booze. So at least four nights a week I was drunk driving. The best results of not doing that… hell… let’s list them after not being arrested. I wake up without a hangover at a reasonable hour (let’s go with 9am because I’m a comic). Even if I screw around much of the day I can still be awake and writing and sending avails and asking for jobs and shows for two hours a day. That bare minimum of a work ethic gets me 40 weeks of work a year. 

    How do/did you deal with hanging around/with other comics?

    I don’t do late hangs and have recently just been organizing brunch hangs with comics. I love hanging with comics and comics love an 11am something. So I invite comics to meet me at a diner around 11am every week and we riff and bust each other and talk shop and eat eggs. It’s the best. 

    Advice for the chronically relapsing comic?

    Comics (and people, but comics a lot) are certain, because they’re so smart, that they can practice, think or work around the problems. I tried to stop drinking for a couple years before it took this time. I used to “practice” turning down drinks. Some woman once said to me a couple things: “Who’s offering you drinks in your mind?” She was right, because I was buying my own drinks. And “No is a complete sentence.” You don’t need to practice it. “No thank you” if you’re feeling polite.

    How do you feel about selling booze (part of the job of a comedy show) as a former heavy drinker?

    I am so interested in what everyone else is drinking. Saw a guy the other night at a comedy show – he had five glasses of wine. How do I know? I don’t remember counting them but hot damn, I was. I’m not a prohibitionist if that’s what you mean. I say, drink as long as you can. You’ll know if it’s screwing up your life. You know. I tell my nieces and nephews “if you treat it with the right amount of wariness you might last longer than me.” Unsaid is, “cuz yer probably a crummy drinker like me and will have to quit eventually.” Ah well.

    Anything else?

    Other than that… it’s a simple idea to not drink. But things that are simple are not easy, right? It’s like you’re banging your head against a door. It’s the right door but that doesn’t mean that your head doesn’t hurt. I don’t know if that analogy works. But maybe you get it. It’s a simple idea… but I have to remind myself all the time that I don’t drink. Because I would dearly love to check the fuck out and booze is really good at making that happen. But whatever I want to check out from will still be there when I sober up – plus whatever drunken stealing, screwing or hitting I did while I was drunk will have to be fixed. So I’ll have double the nonsense to fix. Sober is preferable to fixing double the nonsense. Best not have the drink.

    ***

    I spent some time last spring after my winter relapse (like an old familiar scarf that you’re also allergic to) introducing a joke about alcoholism by saying, “If you’re thinking of buying me a drink after the show, don’t!” But when I read Jackie’s answers to my questions, I realized that scenario was only happening in my mind. Nobody was thinking of buying me a drink after the show. Except for me, trying to put the responsibility on the audience.

    Recovery is not about running from all you love so you can hide away in a safe space with no triggers. That former sponsor who told me to stay away from comedy was a would-be photographer with almost ten years clean – and still not feeling ready to pursue that dream. Recovery is about taking away the thing that is slowing you down – the active addiction- so that all is left is to run towards what you love.

     

    Jackie is fond of saying: “Tonight I get to do my favorite thing in the world, stand-up comedy.” If you’re still searching for your passion, check out Jackie’s original podcast, Dork Forest. It’s 476 episodes of people talking about their favorite things in the world. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Relapsing While Famous: Demi Lovato, Stigma, and Compassion

    Relapsing While Famous: Demi Lovato, Stigma, and Compassion

    “We would typically not blame a patient with a chronic medical condition for their problem; nor imbue the patient with shame over their offending organ—why do we seem to do this with addiction?”

    The news that Demi Lovato was hospitalized of a suspected drug overdose has sent her celebrity friends and fans into overdrive; they are full of praise and well wishes for the singer.

    The support offered has been a beautiful response to witness, and this outpouring of encouragement is the exact caring that Lovato needs right now.

    This overwhelmingly positive response is a very different reaction than we normally associate with people falling off the wagon. Our society has painted the ordinary (non-celebrity) person with an addiction—whether it be to drugs, alcohol, sex or some other negatively perceived behavior—who loses their sobriety as a monster, as someone who cannot fix themselves, as a loser, as an undisciplined and unhealable soul.

    How many Internet memes have been generated that show the unforgiving and unflattering face of addiction? How many ill-conceived jokes about addicts relapsing have you heard? How often do you see mockery of those who have lost their fight? Or a sense of them being not strong enough to withstand the urges we all face?

    But the reality is that relapses are oftentimes part of the process, even for those who have spoken about their recovery. Just because someone has stood up and celebrated their recovery does not mean they will never possibly have a setback.

    Demi Lovato has been open about sharing her struggles through addiction, eating disorders and bipolar disorder. In her music (her song “Sober” details her ongoing struggle with sobriety), her interviews and social media accounts, Lovato has never shied away from speaking her truth. She is proud to be a mental health advocate and has spoken about how she knows her music has helped other young women struggling with some of the same issues that she has.

    Lovato’s openness in sharing her fight and the help her art has provided for others is all the more remarkable considering she was on the Disney Channel when she first entered rehab. There were many pressures and expectations upon her young shoulders and no one would have blamed her for wanting to keep that part of her life private.

    But admitting that the struggle continues after a setback can be the hardest part. Often, as a culture, we are not gung ho on offering people second chances, and especially not third or fourth chances.

    What’s that famous saying? Hurt me once, shame on you. Hurt me twice, shame on me.

    As a society, we can be unforgiving when it comes to people relapsing, but we seem to be much more sympathetic and forgiving with celebrities who struggle with addiction than we are with our ordinary peers.

    There is an unwritten social contract that we follow with celebrities that allows them to loom larger in our minds than normal, everyday people. We see them as larger than life while at the same time feeling intimately connected to them, as though they are family. We feel we know them.

    And we do know them when they share their personal demons with us. We recognize our own struggles and feel buoyed up by their example of openness and honesty.

    Could Lovato’s suspected relapse be an opening for a new understanding of the addiction cycle and conversation about the role of relapse in recovery? Perhaps her experience can shine a light on why no one deserves to be stigmatized for their illness.

    Of course, this goes for all mental health conditions, whether the diagnosis is addiction, bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia or others. Historically, our culture has stigmatized people with mental illness so that they feel embarrassed or that they need to hide their condition. It is only in recent decades that more individuals have been brave enough to come forward and speak about their struggles.

    Lovato’s overdose can serve as an example and a beacon to help people understand that addiction and other mental health issues are illnesses which aren’t always cured on the first, second or even third try.

    The fact that wealthy celebrities, who often have the best treatments and practitioners at their fingertips, still suffer relapses shows us how devastating mental health conditions can be. How can we expect our neighbors—who have those same diagnoses but may be struggling to make ends meet—to fare any better than our most celebrated and privileged?

    Many individuals prefer to suffer in silence rather than seek help because of this prejudice. They would rather live with often debilitating diseases rather than expose themselves to the potential stigma that comes with admitting they need help.

    What can we do to help alleviate the suffering of those around us?

    We can read and learn more about addiction and how difficult the road is to recovery and we can work to understand that the road is not always without bends and turns and sometimes brief exits.

    “Research has consistently shown addiction to be a chronic/relapsing disease, where multiple treatment episodes are often necessary, and that recovery may be a cumulative and progressive (non-linear) process,” says Dr. David Greenfield, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at University of Connecticut Medical School and a specialist in addiction medicine. “We would typically not blame a patient with a chronic medical condition for their problem; nor imbue the patient with shame over their offending organ—why do we seem to do this with addiction?”

    We can have compassion for those who struggle and sometimes fall in their recovery, which will help alleviate their feelings of shame. For those closest to us, we can be supportive without enabling them or being codependent. The celebrity outpouring of love and caring through social media is an example of how compassion can be expressed through this modern tool.

    But Lovato’s friends are not the only ones sharing the love; her fans are sending messages of support, too.

    How Demi Lovato speaks to the public about her reported relapse can have real consequences for the greater conversation society needs to have. Hopefully, she will use her celebrity status to continue the dialogue with her fans about addiction; at the same time, she may express a need for privacy and time for reflection.

    The real opportunity for change will occur around the water coolers at work or on our social media feeds. When we can openly discuss mental health conditions—not as signs of weak moral character or evidence of being less than or incapable—but as true illnesses which require assistance from all corners—financial, family and friends, and sociocultural—we will then be truly supporting not only the celebrities amongst us, but our neighbors and ourselves as well.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much": Judith Vigna’s Misguided Bibliotherapy

    "I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much": Judith Vigna’s Misguided Bibliotherapy

    Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children.

    Although the following review is not positive, I empathize with what Judith Vigna tried to accomplish. In the late 1980’s, she took on a topic that few writers of children’s books would choose to address: how to explain family difficulties brought on by alcoholism and addiction. Beyond the intimate connection of a parent or trusted family member talking directly to a child, raising this issue on a public platform is like walking through a minefield. It’s so easy to make a single misstep that blows the project straight to heck. Not to hell, mind you, we’re talking about children’s books.

    I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much (1988) and My Big Sister Takes Drugs (1990) were published by Albert Whitman & Company as fictional self-help stories to educate kids about alcoholism and substance use disorder. With these books, Vigna invents a kind of misguided bibliotherapy designed for children in preschool to grade 3. The books do a belly flop, and it’s hard to imagine that either would successfully educate or console a young child, although that is their goal. Moreover, both books are culturally biased since they focus on white characters in either suburban America or a strange rural environment where isolated houses exist in the middle of nowhere for no good reason.

    Is such grim reality needed in children’s picture books? In the context of both of these efforts, there is a sense that something precious has been hijacked to accomplish a worthy educational goal. Children’s storybooks and picture books are a beloved part of childhood, combining the visual imagination with language. The innocence of the genre is a key element to the lasting success of so many outstanding children’s books from Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and Margaret Wise’s Goodnight Moon.

    Although each of these stories teaches a life lesson about good behavior and decency, they don’t cross the line by subverting the fantasy to morality. Indeed, the fantasy bolsters the moral message, taking it to the next level by presenting the ideas in an artistic context that provides access for a child. When I recall first reading books as a little boy, I remember the fun I experienced and the thrill of turning the pages. In Judith Vigna’s stories, the fun is replaced by a dull melancholy ruptured here and there by a disturbing undercurrent of anxiety and fear. Even when hope is presented in the end and partial solutions proffered, the ugliness remains, like the father’s undeterred alcoholism in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much.

    The best example of this replacement happens in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, aimed at kids in pre-school to grade 2. The night before Christmas is disturbed when young Lisa’s drunken father stumbles into her bedroom dressed as Santa Claus. On the very first page of text in the book, Lisa explains that the costume did not fool her for a second. She says, “I knew it was only Daddy in a Santa Claus suit because he bumped into my bed twice and spilled beer on the rug. I didn’t like that. When Daddy drinks a lot of beer, he acts funny.”

    In other words, even a child knows that Santa Claus doesn’t show up drunk. Still, Lisa is excited because her father is going to take her sledding the next day. Santa even leaves a note taped to her new sled that says her daddy promised him that they would go sledding and try out the present after breakfast. Unfortunately, Daddy is too hungover to go sledding. Lisa asks later in the day if they can go, but Dad is drinking beer while watching television, focused solely on the hair of the dog that bit him the night before.

    Lisa’s father ignores her request, and she gets mad, telling him that he promised. The face of the little girl is drawn with such sadness and disappointment. Reacting to her feelings, her father lashes out and yells at Lisa. She ends up playing with her sled in the house, imagining that she’s in the clouds but feeling sad and scared.

    Although there is no direct physical violence in the book, beyond loud fights between the mother and father, the threat looms. The bad times continue and culminate with an intoxicated failed attempt to go sledding. Later, Lisa mopes outside as her mother and father have a big screaming match inside the house with sounds of breaking glass.

    The story ends when Lisa and her mother escape her father’s drunken anger by going over to Mrs. Field’s house. They have a nice Christmas dinner with this old lady, and Lisa opens up about how her father’s drinking destroyed Christmas. Mrs. Field tells Lisa that she used to drink too much before she got help. One day, her father might be ready to get help as well. Until then, she advises this little girl, “you can learn to be happier. You can try to do one of your favorite things every day.”

    And that’s about it. There’s a closing bit where Lisa returns home and her father promises to take her sledding on Sunday. But nothing changes, and Lisa remains in a crappy situation with little learned and less relieved. Telling a child to do one of her favorite things every day as a response to alcoholism in the family is like telling a cancer patient to go to Disneyland every weekend. It profoundly fails to address the primary problem.

    Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children. Story time is not when the dark issues of humanity should be raised with children. Going out and doing a favorite thing is not an effective approach to dealing with an alcoholic parent.

    In complex.com’s list of The 25 Most Ridiculous Holiday Children’s Books, Vigna’s book comes in at number one. It’s an impressive accomplishment because the competition is stiff, ranging from How Santa Lost His Pants and How Santa Lost His Job to Santa Cow Island and The Flying Canoe: A Christmas Story.

    My Big Sister Takes Drugs is Judith Vigna’s second attempt at the bibliotherapy children’s picture book genre. Designed for Grades 2 through 3, a slightly older crowd from seven to nine years old, the book tells the story of little Paul who is dealing with the fact that his teenage sister, Tina, is using drugs. The drugs profoundly change Tina in a negative way. Rather than play games with Paul, she offers him prescription pills. Later, after being busted by the cops for smoking crack in the park with her delinquent friends, Tina is shipped off to rehab. Tina’s drug use causes Paul to lose friends because other parents don’t want their kids around his older sister. Also, once Tina goes to rehab, there is no money left to send him to soccer camp.

    As part of a Vigna’s desperate drug education and awareness program, this dank children’s picture book only succeeds in stigmatizing substance use disorder. Okay, Tina has become a mean big sister and hangs out with mean kids. Paul feels threatened in his own home. However, these scare tactics of losing friends and opportunities because of drug usage are counterproductive to any real understanding of addiction as a disease in general and a family disease in particular.

    The story is poorly told and not believable. For example, there is a weird section where Tina tries to get her brother high on New Year’s Eve, offering him prescription medication while she reclines on her bed. Paul declines and Tina calls him a chicken. When Paul inevitably tells his parents about the incident, Tina is grounded for a week.

    Such a sequence makes little or no sense. Why would a teenage sister want to give her little brother drugs? Why would she be home on New Year’s Eve with her little brother and not out with her friends? Does Vigna understand drug culture and teens at all? Tina is way too open about what she is doing with both her parents and Paul. The generally secretive nature of adolescent drug use is replaced with typical adolescent rebellion, a replacement which does not do justice to the truly insidious nature of drug abuse and addiction. I wondered why Judith Vigna did not do more first-hand research before writing a book designed to educate children on such a crucial issue.

    At the same time, at this very moment, I feel a bit guilty about being so hard on Judith Vigna. Although her idealism might be misdirected, it comes from a loving instinct to do good in the world and help other people. At the end of I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, she includes A Note to Grown-ups. In this note, Vigna writes about the challenge of alcoholism as a family disease: “The children tend to blame themselves, and without adequate support, may feel ashamed, confused, and alone… Parents and other caring adults can help by reassuring children that they are not responsible for the drinking.”

    But despite such good intentions, Vigna’s attempt to offer such reassurance and educate children about substance use disorder, a worthy and necessary goal, falls flat. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Meditating on Meth

    Meditating on Meth

    Trying to sit with myself, high or not, was unbearable. The feelings that came up were the reason I used. For years I had been running from myself.

    The last time I had meditated was that week I was on crystal meth. Not because I was seeking any form of enlightenment, but rather for the college units.

    ‘The Art of Zen Meditation’ – a five day silent meditation retreat.

    Compared to the statistic classes I had been taking, it seemed like an easy alternative. I was deep into my crystal meth addiction at that time; I’d been using every day for the past six years—minus the times my dealer was in jail.

    My plan at the retreat was to “cut back,” maybe not even use at all. But I simply had to bring a little. I arrived with a stash of crystals in the sole of my running shoe. Within an hour of arriving at Mount Baldy Zen Center I had broken three of the four Golden Rules:

    No Sex.

    No Eye Contact.

    No Drugs.

    No Killing Spiders.

    1. My boyfriend had driven me to the retreat and before he left we had sex. 2. I had sought eye contact with a monk and 3. I had stepped on a spider. But I hadn’t done drugs and by the end of the first day I still hadn’t done drugs. I actually gave myself credit for this even though I had snorted three fat lines before leaving the house and hadn’t arrived at the retreat until six.

    At 4am the next morning a bald monk in an orange robe struck the gong outside my cabin window. I wrapped a wool blanket around my shoulders and walked up the trail to the zendo where I joined 12 students for the first meditation of the day.

    I sat cross-legged in lotus position next to a woman who was wearing a purple shawl, amber rings, and mala beads. As cymbals came together we were instructed to close our eyes, breathe in on the count of three, out on four. I smelled patchouli, my nose itched, my eyes fluttered. Inhale, exhale, that’s all you have to do, I told myself. I sneezed, my head itched, I felt hiccups coming on. I forgot all about my breath.

    My thoughts raced. I made shopping lists in my head: New underwear, pens, thank you cards, clean the fridge, go to the DMV, call Sarah back. She’s irritating though, why should I even call her back? I’m not going to. Definitely not. No, I better call her.

    How much longer is this meditation going to last, has it even been 15 minutes? My fingers began twitching, I needed water, my mouth was dry. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the next hour let alone five days of this. I kept opening my eyes, sneaking a peak at everyone else sitting there looking so peaceful and serene. Were they? Was I the only one who couldn’t bear sitting a moment longer? I wanted to be one of them. Anybody but myself. All that sitting there gave me too much thinking time. I was used to distraction; distracting myself as far away from me as I could.

    After an unbearable amount of time, the cymbals came together again: breakfast time. Instead of following everyone to the main hall for granola and chai, I went straight to my cabin and to the sole of my running shoe. Kneeling down on the floor, I crushed the lines on top of a book, Be Here Now, and stuck the tip of a McDonald’s straw up my nose and snorted. An immediate sense of relief came over me as the familiar burn dripped down my throat. I looked up. A Buddha with pink petals by his feet stared back at me. I turned the picture to face the wall and snorted another line.

    I spent the next four and a half days sitting crossed legged in the mountains in between walking meditations along wooded paths, eating tofu and rice, and doing crystal meth.

    Trying to sit with myself, high or not, was unbearable. The feelings that came up were the reason I used. For years I had been running from myself. To sit quietly and breathe, to feel a sense of grounding in my body was foreign to me. Yet it was something I always wanted. To be able to “sit” with myself. But how could I do that in the midst of my addiction?

    I had always had negative feelings about meditation. I was exposed to it early. When I was a little girl, my dad had a meditation group at our house. He meditated, and stood on his head everyday. We went to ashrams, communes, meditation centers. When I was six I was given a pillow with an orange OM symbol on it.

    “Your meditating pillow,” my dad said.

    Every Sunday, I was to bring my pillow into my dad’s studio and sit with the adults to breathe for an hour. I wanted to throw that pillow out the window and play hopscotch with the other kids.

    It wasn’t until I was five years sober that something shifted. And it wasn’t through someone telling me what to do, it was merely a kind of attraction. Attraction rather than promotion: one of my favorite principles in the program.

    When I turned five years sober, my best friend was visiting me from Canada. She was sober, too, and every year she came to give me a cake. This time, she had a ritual. Every morning she would sit in lotus position on my wood floor and meditate for 20 minutes. After, we would drink coffee together in my backyard under a canopy of trees. I had known her for 30 years and even though it was subtle, I sensed something had shifted within her. She seemed to be more serene, content within herself. That didn’t mean on any given day there wasn’t some obstacle or, as my sponsor would say, “spiritual opportunity,” but she handled whatever was presented with more ease, an effortless sort of grace.

    I wanted what she had. I downloaded a meditation app and started with three minutes. I fought it at first: my thoughts went from, I’ve got to clean the bathroom sink, reply to Laura’s work email, what a jerk she is to questioning whether I should have Caesar or Chinese chicken salad for lunch.

    After a few weeks of a daily practice I started to notice a subtle change as I went through the day. I was more connected to my breath, more in my body. It was a new sensation; I had never felt this way before. After years of being completely out of body with no sense of grounding, I began to appreciate this new awareness. When I would get agitated or emotionally distressed, I’d put one hand on my heart and one on my belly and concentrate on my breath: inhale, exhale. That’s all I had to do, breathe. It was and is like coming home; coming home to my center.

    I’d like to say I’m at the point where after three years of maintaining a daily practice I am now doing 20 minutes. Once in a while yes, sometimes I even go to a 30-minute meditation meeting. But for someone like me, who for so many years did anything to avoid sitting still and in my body, maintaining a practice of a minimum of five minutes a day has been life altering.

    Next week I am going to a meditation meeting with my dad. As for going back to Mount Baldy, that’s a stretch.

    View the original article at thefix.com