Bridge Over Troubled Water
“You can build a thousand bridges, but if you suck one cock, you’re not a ‘bridge builder,’ you’re a ‘cock sucker.’” My friend Morgan has a way of explaining human psychology to me in a manner that makes perfect sense. His nugget of wisdom coincided with one of the resonating pieces of advice given to me by my parents when I was a teenager. My father said, “I’ve never met someone who did cocaine and didn’t ruin their entire life—ergo, don’t do cocaine.” But my mother said, on the day I started high school, “people are going to remember you for your worst moment. Not your best.”
My mother’s proverb seemed like fortune cookie pessimism, but I’ll be damned if she wasn’t 100% correct. Luckily, I behaved and flew low under the radar in high school. I know/knew a woman who now runs a Forbes recognized nonprofit for childhood cancer, published a book with Harper Collins, and has a career speaking publicly about how she accomplished both. To me, she will always be the girl who got up from her table in the lunchroom and walked over to mine, just to say, “you know, its sad how hard you try to make people laugh just to get a little bit of attention.” I also lost a good friend to the “popular girls” between 8th and 9th grade, as is the natural order of things when you get boobs over the summer. She graduated from Duke Law and worked for a Senator in DC before marrying a handsome trust fund. She raises babies, blogs about zucchini noodles, and wears pearls now… but I can’t help that, when I see her on facebook, I still think, “yup, that’s the girl who did ass-to-mouth with the quarterback.”
I’ll begin today’s lesson by openly admitting that I am a hypocrite. …Ok, that’s done.
Twice this week, I was asked the same question by two different people, in two different ways. The first was by a woman I met in rehab, who was one of the few people I allowed myself to get close to. We were kindred spirits in the sense that, we both had a lot to live for, we both desperately wanted to quit drinking, but we were only being handed redundant reasons for why we should stop—but no explanatory reasons for why we felt like we couldn’t. We commiserated in desperate frustration. She asked me, “how did you get the guts to admit to the world, family and friends included, that you had a drinking problem?”
“Guts” have nothing to do with it. I’ll explain in a bit.
A similar inquiry was made by my best friend when we met up to go kayaking earlier this week. Despite how close we are, she’d never asked me any pointed questions about my addiction; either out of politeness, or because she was waiting until we paddled out to where only the turtles and the catfish could hear. While she’s been aware of it and overly supportive from the start, she wanted to know, “what made you start an (uncomfortably revealing) blog about it?”
The questions were slightly different, but my answer for both is the same. What made me go public? Why did I expose myself? Why am I type-screaming about alcoholism at the top of my lungs…? Easy. I had to.
There is so much hurt… gnawing at me, gnawing at my family, gnawing at my friends, gnawing still at the people who thought that getting away from me would eradicate it. So much hurt that I know it cannot just be me, my people, my addiction, my situation. It must be universal. I am the alcoholic auspex, but my addiction effected and embittered everyone around me. The kind of hurt I am describing is the kind that turns a heart stone-cold. It emboldens mouths and spackles over ears. It reinforces walls and bricks-up doorways. It commits mass genocide on affections. It maims my heart every time that I sit down to write, but I don’t have a choice. Even if I am yelping into the abyss, a conversation has to happen. A conversation would have saved so many people so much unnecessary suffering.
It starts with accountability. Get some. Everybody—not just my addict following—have accountability, all of you. Assign accountability as well but do it justly. Trust me, something is your fault. Everything can’t be someone else’s fault either. For instance, I drank. I brought a plague into my home that my family had already suffered through and barely survived years earlier. I knew better. I did it anyway. I was arrogant and naïve enough to think that I was immune to alcoholism because I had already seen the secondhand effects and because I loved the way it made me feel so much. I didn’t want to face the reality of what that reliance would become.
The roads of the addicts and the non-addicts diverge when it comes to accepting that addiction, and the human psyche, are both nuanced. I cannot and will not sit here and say that the acts of selfishness, crime, negligence, hate, anger, or any other infraction committed by someone under the influence (or tweaking and desperate to get under the influence) can be attributed to their genuine character. I don’t have the luxury of writing people off because of their maladies and coping mechanisms. I know too much. Us addicts are flakey and fragile, but we aren’t stupid. We know that no good comes from starting or continuing a drug dependency, and the selfish part is that we do it anyway because its easy and it gets us “right.”
My mother struggles the most with understanding the fact that things that I said and did under the influence were complete and utter bullshit. Not in a negative way, not in a blamey way toward me. I think she internalized a lot of what was going on and blamed herself, as if she could have been a different or better parent at one point and all of this would never have happened. That worry is useless for a number of reasons, mostly because she couldn’t possibly have been a better parent. I get lucky a lot, but never as lucky as I got with having my parents as my parents. Drunk me, however, was overly blamey toward everyone but myself. All I knew when I was sober was that I was hurting. Badly. Then I would start drinking, and I would feel better. I was merely surviving on a tragic carousel, and everyone was mad at me for doing what I needed to do to be ok… so why was I hurting? Where was the source of my heartache? It obviously wasn’t me; I wasn’t doing anything. So, I grasped at straws, called out everyone else’s bad behavior, their personality flaws, missteps, and mistakes.
Addiction changes our brain chemistry and steers it in a direction away from rational thought. We don’t feel bad (in the moment) about insulting and accusing others of making us addicts. In our fog, we feel as if we spend most of the time whimpering under the rolled-up newspaper whacks of the world, and then occasionally we fight back… in the worst possible way. Those are the only two actions we know: surrender and delusional conflict.
Again, and I can never say this enough: I am not now, nor am I ever justifying addiction. Or addicts. We take that first drink, we are to blame for what happens after that. We are the catalyst. We introduce a substance to our system, we introduce ourselves to others, chaos ensues. It starts with our reckless and poor judgement. But we are not broken. I mean, emotionally we are. But we are not just “throw-away” human beings. Addiction is terrible in a lot of ways, but it’s great in that—it can end. It can go away. You don’t have to lose the person. If the person loses their addiction, you get your person back.
A conversation would have prevented, or rescinded, so much of the hurt within my life. Within my people. No one really ever asked me, “Hey, Kara… what happened?” The answer would be as complicated as it is simple: “I don’t know what happened. But I love you and that’s why it’s over now.” It’s so frustrating in its lack of explanation, but so is rehab. Maybe it doesn’t need to be a back-and-forth conversation, maybe I just need to keep repeating over and over again the things that I know to be true about addiction and about the people who are still hurting because of it.
I love you and I have always loved you. I never chose addiction over you, because the two have nothing to do with each other. My flaws do not discount your strengths. My worst did not reflect your best. Truth prevailed when I finally realized that I didn’t need booze; I need you. It took longer than any of us would have liked, but love won. I reached that conclusion traveling a road that I never want to travel again. I will do everything in my power to make up for the past, and to live in a way that never again requires anything more than love to make me feel safe and sturdy. I hope that my harsh words, my impulsive actions, my terrorism, and my disregard put upon you in my addiction will someday dissipate, because it was never true, and it was never real. With clear eyes, a sound mind, and a calm spirit, I look at you and you are perfect. You are right. You are love. You are loved.
