But Tell It Slant
My friend Hannah had sex with her daughter’s grandfather when she was 8 months pregnant. That was the price he asked her to pay for his Percocet prescription. Yes, she slept with her boyfriend’s father. Yes, it was when she was pregnant with his son’s child. Yes, she did it to obtain drugs because—while she was pregnant—she was also on drugs. Yes, she is my friend. When I refer to her as such, I do it proudly. Hannah did something rare and unthinkable with her life… she told the truth.
The saying goes: “Your secrets keep you sick.” Or, alternatively: “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” Just another abstract and subjective recovery cliché for your viewing pleasure. It is a privilege, not an embarrassment, to have as many friends as I do who struggle with addiction. Some of them are clean, some of them are not, all of them are tired of drinking and doing drugs and are making the effort to get and stay away from them. In those efforts, a lot of unflattering realities are revealed.
The environment of addiction recovery is adamant about exposing difficult truths because none of us are drinking and shooting-up over a humdrum Monday we once had. We’re addicts because we’re desperate to run away from something and our legs can only take us so far. And what we are running from is not always a wrong done to us by someone else. Many of us are running from a wrong we’ve done to someone else. Or a wrong we’ve done to ourselves. We get high to disassociate from the “me” we don’t like. We drink to drown the girl that did the bad thing.
In a room full of analogous addicts, there is no shortage of dastardly deeds. As repugnant as some of their actions have been, I can still say that I have never met an addict who did a terrible thing because they are a terrible person. I have met many fine people who did a terrible thing because they were desperate. Scared. Hopeless. Pitiful. Optionless.
My good friend Hannah was desperate, scared, hopeless, pitiful, and optionless. Hannah will also tell you, without a coating of sugar, that it was absolutely her own fault that she was in that position. Telling the truth is hard enough, but when your truth is that you were pregnant, getting high, and fucking your unborn child’s grandpa for more drugs… you aren’t going to get any sympathy. Even from other addicts. Especially not from the holier-than-thou, 29-year-old, middle class, moderate-to-severe alcoholic who just showed up in rehab and swears that she doesn’t belong there… But Hannah forever has my love and friendship. And she certainly has my respect because she owns her story.
Hannah is not proud of the fact that she was too high to notice that she was pregnant until week 16 and, therefore, disqualified from any family planning alternatives. She is a bit proud of herself for immediately wanting to seek the proper help to safely come off the drugs and admit herself to an institution for drug-dependent expectant mothers. However, she lost all resolve when the rehab turned out to be a penalty box, rather than a medical facility. Instead of methadone or suboxone, their method of squelching addiction was to let her violently withdraw from opioids and explain that a resulting miscarriage would “probably be for the best.”
Hannah should have done more research and found a better clinic to assist her throughout the rest of her pregnancy, but she didn’t. She stayed just high enough to keep out of withdrawal and that was a challenge for addict with zero ability to moderate. By the time she was very noticeably pregnant, her dealer located a conscience and refused to sell her anything. Hannah spent many an afternoon and evening at her boyfriend’s house, panicking about how to avoid dope-sickness in herself and her baby, which her boyfriend’s father witnessed. Once his son left for work one day, he told Hannah that he had some Percocet that he could give her… “but not for free.”
Worst story you’ve ever heard, right? Same here. I can’t imagine a heavier burden than Hannah’s. If it were my story, I probably wouldn’t tell it. I’d sit on it. I’d get high not think about it. I’d reason that I had already fucked up as badly as a person can fuck up, so I might as well keep fucking up because there is no coming back from a series of actions that thoroughly sinister.
That thought process is how most addicts become worse addicts. They fall, they fail, they overdose, they die. No one cares. They were repulsive fuck-ups anyway.
Every week I write. I try to put a sassy hand in the face of people who think that addicts are just pests of humanity who live in a cycle of “addicts are terrible people, only terrible people are addicts, addicts can never be anything but terrible because they had to be terrible before becoming addicts and that’s how they became addicts.” People who subscribe to that belief are not just small minded, but they are making the problem worse. If you tell someone that they are nothing because they do drugs, they will probably keep doing drugs to cope with being told they are nothing. Its not an excuse. It’s a mentality. And a very hard one to shake.
Earlier this week I was asked by a friend to be the guest speaker at his one-year celebration. It was my first time being the speaker at an Alcoholics Anonymous Speaker Meeting and for the first time in my life, I was terrified to stand and give a speech in front of an small audience, even a small audience made entirely of drunks. I love talking about myself, that’s obvious, but only when I can brag or boast knowledge on a subject. Standing at a podium and openly admitting to how I became an alcoholic, what I was like as an alcoholic, what being an alcoholic cost me, and I how I stay sober as an alcoholic was more information than I wanted to share. I’ve told portions of the story in meetings and to my therapist, but I’ve never taken that train directly from point A to point B and hit every Podunk town on the way there.
I wrote two speeches. One that told the whole truth, and one that told the truth I was okay with sharing. I put both in a folder and drove them to Apex United Methodist Church where I would decide in the moment what I was going to say. I was stopped in the parking lot by a friend of mine, one who happened to be with me in rehab and also happened to live here in Raleigh. I hadn’t seen her in a while, but I told her I was speaking that night and she made the effort to come and support me. We chatted briefly about how everyone we kept in touch with was doing, and she asked me if I’d spoken to Hannah recently. I had.
Hannah and I had facetimed two weeks ago, early in the morning. I had just gotten finished my half-ass living room pilates, and she was chugging coffee, rushing to pack lunches for her two kids: Hannah’s own perfectly healthy, happy daughter and her new husband’s 8-year-old son.
“Aw, fuck.” Hannah yelled over the phone, licking peanut butter off her knuckle. “Can I call you back? I’ve got a situation over here.”
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Is everything okay?”
“Uh, no. I cut both sandwiches down the middle and I forgot that Madison is only eating diagonal PB&J at the moment. It’s a whole thing. Talk to you later.”
The day Madison was born, Hannah gave her immediately over to her father and stepmother. She reported the temporary guardianship to social services herself. I met her on the tail end of arguably the longest self-induced rehab stint in heroin history because Hannah was not fucking around. Her story was not her excuse to keep using. Her story, and her baby daughter, were her excuse to change her life and to deviate from the expectations that the world had for a vile drug addict like her. Additionally, she attends regular NA meetings and tells that story as often as she can so that no junkie can leave the room thinking, “I’m the worst. I can’t be fixed. So, why would I even try?”
On Monday night, I told the truth. The whole truth. I’m sure I lost the respect of a few old, white, male republicans, but I can live with that. I can live with a lot of things, as long as I keep endeavoring to do better. As we learned in the process of falling into addiction, our legs can only take us so far. Booze and heroin run out of steam too. Telling the truth is a brave way to let others in recovery know that whatever they are dealing with, they are not exceptionally bad and they are certainly not alone. At the same time, we need to tell the truth out loud for ourselves. Turns out, you don’t have to drink to drown the girl that did the bad thing… just don’t give her anymore air.
