… And Your Little Dog, Too!

I think we can all agree that witches get a bad rap.  Most of them were just minding their own business, dancing naked in a forest when some puritans trotted up and ruined the whole thing.  Now Salem is full of female ghosts that manifest themselves occasionally to say, “really, assholes? You call that a trial?”  Witches have been historically misunderstood, like the Wicked Witch of the West.  I read Wicked.  Ok, I didn’t read Wicked.  It was a honking long book and it got super political.  But I saw the musical Wicked, and that poor green shiksa started with nothing but good intentions.  The world turned her sour.  Even in the movie, her sister gets murdered and when she shows up to the crime scene she finds a shoe-stealing farm girl high on a combination of barbiturates and amphetamines, and a bunch of agenda-pushing midgets waving lollipops and applauding for the bottom half of a dead body.  We are so quick to make villains out of people who act out, but we rarely stop to ask, “what made them this way?  What is driving this behavior?”  Generally, someone who is acting witchy- cursing the world, casting hateful spells, damning the people around them, is not just acting.  They are reacting- to a world that hurt them deeply.

Humans are, unfortunately, complex beings.  It would be great if our range of emotions stopped at the pivotal three: hungry, horny, sleepy.  Instead, along with the opposable thumb, we developed a varied palette of feelings to accompany our ever-changing circumstances.  Happy, sad, annoyed, feisty, self-conscious, betrayed, scared, anxious, proud, regretful, awestruck, motivated, or any combination of the previous mentioned along with the thousands of emotions I didn’t mention.  I’ve felt them all.  Most of them I’ve felt just this morning between 8am and noon.  I can handle most of my feelings with a shrug and a sip of coffee, but there is one particular sentiment that is new, potent, consuming, and terrifying.  Anger. I don’t mean “a little peeved from being cut off in traffic” anger.  I get bouts of unpredictable, untamable, seething, teeth-grinding, fist-clenching, eye-watering, send the flying moneys, master broom aviation, pure, unadulterated RAGE.  And I hate it.

Recovery programs love to encourage you to relinquish control of your life.  It’s a hard pill to swallow until you realize that you never had control of your life to being with.  Sure, we can decorate our living room and decide where to go for dinner, but beyond that, we command nothing.  Not even the inertia of our own thoughts.  I learned this lesson long before my journey to sobriety.  When I was 21, I started having panic attacks and I had to get square real quick with the fact that my mind was always going to be working against me.  Other people had brains that could do math, and help them plot out feasible, achievable paths to success in their careers and personal lives.  My brain told my body to stop breathing on elevators and airplanes.  So.  You know.  There are two kinds of people in the world…  When I finally received the right medication and the right therapy, I was able to reconcile with the fact that there was nothing wrong with my body, there was something wrong with my mind.  My chronic anxiety diagnosis didn’t make me angry.  In fact, I was relieved.  Would I struggle with it for the rest of my life? Yes.  But would it be the end of me? Absolutely not.  Then later on down the road, as a means of dealing with my chronic anxiety, came the crippling addiction.  Even from the other side of it, there is very little relief.  When I think about addiction, I am blinded and deafened by a ceaseless, explicit fury.

Why me?  Why this?  Why now?  Why didn’t I see it coming?  Why couldn’t I stop it sooner?  These are the questions that simmer in the cauldron of my mind as my hands start to sweat and I desperately search for a mental escape hatch.  Isn’t that what we do when we feel threatened? Fight or flight.  I don’t have the luxury of “flight” any longer to get away from myself- that’s what my addiction was.  Every night was a one-way trip on Vodka Airlines to numbness in Nowhere-ville.  I was committing the only action I knew to free myself, but every drink was another brick and spread of cement to seal me in my own tomb.  So, fleeing is no longer an option.  All I’m left with is the fight.  But its not a fight like I’ve ever know before.  I’m not running races, slaying dragons, or throwing punches.  The fight is just to sit and be calm with whatever is on my mind and in my heart from moment to moment.  Frankly, I’d rather go round for round in the ring with Anthony Joshua than spend another minute, knees to chest on the couch, wondering why, of all the people in the world, and all the possible afflictions, it had to be me and it had to be addiction. 

While I’m struggling with my conditioned aversion to feeling anger, I’m actually quite proficient at taking the anger of other people.  After all, it was I, the drunk, who made them angry.  I’m angry at addiction, they’re angry at me via my addiction, I’m angry at the high number of liquor stores in suburban North Carolina, they’re angry at my lack of self-control… the blame is multi-directional and the result is convoluted.  Its an entirely infuriating situation.  So, fuck it, let’s be mad together.  I’d prefer the people I care about be mad at me than be indifferent.  It means that they care about me too.  Let me tell you, of all the aggravating aspects of addiction, nothing affronts the senses and stings like being written off by someone because of your struggle.  It happens all the time.  Everyday.  I’m alive and well, but I am treated like a casualty.  I manage to direct most of my frustrated screams at my dashboard and into decorative pillows, but I get overwhelmed every time I am looked at like a paper doll, instead of a person.  I have to fight the urge to go nose to nose with the careless and yell, “hello! I’m right here! I have a pulse! I have a soul! I have a carefully curated PowerPoint presentation on the statistics of people affected by addiction that I would love to show you!”  Its not my most badass retort, but I’m more about information than confrontation. 

The Wizard of Oz not only taught me empathy for the wicked, it taught me that most stories aren’t just black and white.  People get angry when they are misunderstood.  You can be mad at addicts all day long, but while you were hunkered down in the cellar, we were out in the storm.  We lived the disaster, we survived, and we were set down in a real world more vivid and full of life than any high could have ever fabricated.  We’re lucky.  We’re also angry.  We’re angry that we ever let ourselves get that close to a twister.  We’re angry at the amount of damage in our wake.  We’re angry at ourselves.  We’re also angry that our diagnosis means that, every day, we have to conjure just enough self-worth to keep from destroying our lives again with drugs or alcohol.  We don’t have a lot of self-worth to being with, let alone after some people take a brief glimpse at our history and yell, “burn the witch!”  Fine.  Believe what you will.  But I’m fighting for my life over here, I’m not about to fight with your ignorant ass too.  Maybe I’m a little salty, maybe I’m a little savage, but I’m constantly battling with myself and the men with the buckle shoes are coming at me with torches.  I’m not perfect (holy shit clearly), but I am trying my best and its frustrating when people don’t see that.  I’m an addict.  I’m not wicked.  I haven’t been wicked since I quit drinking.  So, when you see me chilling under my pointy hat, sipping on a frosty glass of eye of newt, don’t assume you know my story.  It angers me.  One of these days I’m going to get tired of screaming into pillows and I’ll start to attack my rage at its source.  In other words, I’ll get you my pretty…