Recently, the lovely Ellie started a website for women to share their stories of addiction and recovery. I immediately threw myself at her and she let me join in as a co-moderator.
So this week, it’s my turn to share the first part of my “what it was like” story. Please come on over, and give a thought to sharing your story, too.
Filed under: damages
Of the many, many insane things I did in active addiction, turning myself into an experiment was one of the most dangerous. By the time I became truly addicted, in the fall of 2008, I’d fooled around with Xanax for so long I could gauge its effect on my body to the minute.
It had first been prescribed a decade before then, and at the time I thought I’d discovered a miracle. I could be paralyzed with anxiety, swallow a pill, and within 15 minutes the grip of panic would begin to loosen. Within half an hour, I’d be okay. It didn’t matter where I was — on a smelly bus deep in Ukraine, creeping through a tiny Pakistani airport in the middle of the night, camping at12,000 feet on a snowy mountain.
Without the pills I was scared to leave my bed; with them, I could go anywhere. I was free.
I would tell myself, and I soon found a doctor who would also tell me, that I had a medical condition, very much like diabetes. I had a glitch in the system, a malfunctioning chemical pathway, and just like a diabetic administers insulin when she needs it, I took Xanax. No big deal. Better living through chemistry.
Add caffeine and the equation is complete. You can find coffee anywhere; even at 12,000 feet someone will have Sanka in his backpack. I’d never been able to drink more than one cup without getting the fearful jitters, but this soon became a non-issue. Over the years, knowing where to get coffee became as vital as knowing how many pills were sewn into the lining of my purse.
My formula was crude but effective: Xanax to soothe, coffee to awaken. If I took too much of one, I always had the other to balance it out. Such hubris: I truly thought I could lift myself up and down, toward and away from consciousness, at my will. And what’s more, I thought this was good. I could study deep into the night, reach a stopping place and swallow a Xanax and, reliably, I would sleep for a few hours. A cup of coffee, a shower, start all over again.
When Mimi came along, everything intensified, as it does. Fifteen-hour train ride from Moscow to Kirov? No worries. Up all night? Reverse the equation and fall asleep, on cue, as soon as Jon wakes up for his turn. I felt like a machine, stepping on the gas pedal to go and on the brakes to slow down. I was in charge of my body; whatever could be wrong with that?
Sometimes I miss the sense of control — no, I constantly miss the sense of control. That’s the great paradox of the alcoholic and addict. We’re among the most fragile people on the planet, the least in control, yet we assure ourselves that we have it all wrapped up. We feel relieved of the fears and limitations that have imprisoned us our whole lives.
And it works, until it doesn’t. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, I increased this dose or that dose. My alchemy became less reliable. I would need more of one or the other to achieve the same effect. I discovered that alcohol boosted the effects of the tranquilizers, and because I didn’t need a prescription for booze I added more and more of it, which of course meant I soon was drinking more and more coffee later and later in the day. In what I assured myself would be a one-time thing, but which in fact became a habit, on the first day of Lent in 2009 I just cut to the chase and started the day with Irish coffee.
And that was the beginning of the end.
So, after a weekend of struggling with this, this is where I am. The issue is personally painful still and also interesting, in that it highlights the intersection between my public and private lives. As I said on Friday, I want the two to be seamless; at the same time my writing life necessarily offers only my perspective — events as I alone see them. Add to that that I choose to write anonymously, to protect my family from unwanted attention; they, however, do have full access to this site. So it is a weird situation all around, neither fully anonymous nor fully public.
Like so many other bloggers, I write because I feel compelled to; it offers connections in my all-too-stretched-out social world; it is what we do in the 21st century instead of pony express or meeting on the town promenade. The process of writing also helps me be a more thoughtful person and by inviting comments it helps me understand myself and others better, too. It is a virtual record of Mimi as she grows, and of my recovery as it, too, grows. I can use this as a forum to share my life in the West with my relatives in the East. It also has helped me find, and participate in the lives of, other people in my situation. Mothers in recovery is still a pretty esoteric group, and we rely on each other powerfully.
Although I would suggest that every writer ever has drawn on her life for inspiration, it will never be my intention to live my life in such a way as to generate things to write about. These things happened, in all the decades I lived before I started this, and still happen, every day. I participate, observe, photograph, write. I hope it is ultimately for the better.
In the end, I value my human relationships more than the blog, if it had to come to that, but I hope it doesn’t. I have exaggerated for effect before, and I apologize very much for that, and I will be extra careful not to do that in the future. I do not think this blog is fundamentally mean-spirited. It is not gentle, but I just don’t think it is vicious in word or tone. I do not intend to harm any real person in my life (celebrities and other people who willingly put themselves on TV are fair game to me) and if I fail to see that I do so, by all means call my attention to it. I will appreciate it.
I received a call earlier from someone I hurt deeply with this blog, someone whom I would never want to harm, but I did. That is an amends I will face privately. Here, in the same public forum in which I did the damage, I mention it because I want to say: please remember to be gentle with the feelings of others. I wasn’t, and that wouldn’t be bad if it had hurt only me, but it hurt someone who wasn’t even here to take part in the conversation.
I’ve spent the evening thinking about what this blog is all about. It was started as a place to chronicle life post-rehab. It is growing into a community; I am connecting with people whom I would not have met otherwise. In sharing my own story, though, I’ve blurred the line between the life I share on this blog and the one I actually live. I can’t forget what I am, though, not ever. When I got off the phone my first desire was to ask Jon to open the locked-up suitcase in the garage that contains my old prescriptions so I could have one, just one, tranquilizer. It’s all about numbness for us, about refusing to accept that I am going to be sitting up all night with a sick conscience.
My name is Robin, but that is not my first name. My husband’s name isn’t Jon, and my daughter’s name isn’t Mimi. I know I am not the first blogger to shield her family behind false names; that is common. This isn’t about that. This is about honesty and selfishness and consideration. Honesty is an odd concept to discuss in an anonymous forum, but I know that while I was busy applauding myself for my emotional honesty, I failed the simple truths that must be maintained in order to claim ANY kind of integrity. I have not, as we say in recovery, been impeccable with word and deed.
My blog-world is only as healthy as my real-world, and both could use some attention. Be careful out there.
Dear Disease,
There’s an empty wine bottle stuck in the top of my bedroom closet, been there since May, it mocks me but I don’t want to touch it. I could ask Jon to throw it out, but I just can’t face the associations. He’d be kind, I know he would be, but I can’t expect him to smile during such a chore and I can glean so much meaning from the tiniest of grimaces that it would knock me down.
This was the month when I faced, head on and with eyes wide open, the wreckage of my life. Sifted through the ashes. Recovered what I could, mourned that which I could not save. Cringed at the damage. This was the month that forced me onto my feet and forward. I returned to California, left my support system behind in Florida, and reclaimed my life. On Sunday, we’ll see friends for the first time in ages. Next weekend we have a playdate arranged for Mimi. She has had so few in her lifetime, it’s criminal. And last night I taught my first class since May, since I dropped out of life nearly completely. It was a mess, but I forgive myself for that because now, I can. I can evaluate what I did well and what I did poorly and go on. I couldn’t do that then, last spring, my darkest days.
I feared finding bottles or pills in my office. I didn’t, although I did find a cork. It was the vestiges of my old, successful-appearing life that shocked and pained me. When I opened my office door, it looked like I had simply gone home the night before. The teapot was half full, a book was open on the desk, the answering machine light was blinking. Papers were strewn everywhere, half written, now useless. Papers that were meant to be articles that were meant to be in journals that were meant to be published by now. That is where I was meant to go.
Instead, I went to rehab. I like to think that there was something in me, some part of a salvageable me, that rose up to fight for survival and got me to treatment. Some essence of me didn’t want to leave this life, leave Mimi. Some spark got us on a plane to Florida where I knew Mimi’d be cared for, deposited us at my mother’s house, planted wine bottles all over so my family would finally believe me, begged my sister to drive me to the hospital. I touched down there like a tornado, catching everyone by surprise. By then I’d spent hours on the internet, looking up treatment programs, recovery groups… but always in secret. My husband had been hounding me about my drinking for a while but that was in private and even he didn’t know how much Xanax I was also swallowing.
I suppose these memories are rushing up right now because this, where I sit right this minute, is where it all fell apart. And I do mean, fell apart. I can barely connect the dots from sitting here miserable to lurching through the first weeks of treatment, sobbing myself to sleep with the one picture of Mimi they’d let me keep tucked under the hard little pillow. Some days I couldn’t find the picture as soon as I woke up and I’d toss sheets and blankets around the room, wailing like a madwoman. On my last day of rehab, I threw away that picture. I still feel a twinge of nausea when something tangible reminds me of that time… the sweater I wore against the institutional chill, applesauce (which I think is a food group all its own in hospitals), Sandra Bullock. On Saturday nights they’d show movies and one I remember was about a woman going to rehab and she was played by Sandra Bullock. Whom I now see everywhere I turn.
Oh my God. When I look at these words I feel like I am telling someone else’s story. Right this minute I am crying so hard I can hardly type.
I remember a friend who lost her home in a fire telling me that the oddest thing was that all of her underwear itched. She had had to buy all new and she didn’t have even one pair of those comfy old cotton undies. That was 10 years ago; I imagine she has plenty of comfy undies now. And I imagine she appreciates them that much more. Which pretty much describes how I feel. I won’t say I like these tears but I will say that I welcome the sign that my soul is in there somewhere, that whatever essence-of-Robin fought so hard for survival is finally joining forces with the rest of me to make one whole person who can breathe, think, make decisions, and, oh my God, feel. This month was all about integration, I suppose; this was the month that forced my present to meet my past. I will have to face that wine bottle, I know, soon. I will have to acknowledge its existence. But you know what? It’s up there, uninvited, in my closet, but it’s empty. Hollow, unoccupied, void, containing nothing. It no longer has power because I no longer let it. It is inert.
And I? Fina-fuckin-ally? Am Not.
Love,
Robin
