Liquid Phenol Life Jacket
Have you ever laughed hysterically during a moment of complete torture because, whatever was happening, hurt too badly to cry? For once, I’m not referring to adulthood melodrama. My experience with this level of pain came from my father’s firm reliance on Campho-Phenique. For everything. In his defense, the FDA list of uses for it is both wide and vague—in the same way that cocaine used to be prescribed for depression and Typhoid. Also in his defense, it is technically an anesthetic that is said to instantly relieve pain. Did it relieve pain? Yes. Instantly? My ass. Campho-Phenique will numb you. Eventually. First, its gonna sting like a sumbitch.
My lips used to chap horrendously in the winter. Not only did they crack and bleed right around my mouth, but I would over address the issue with my tongue and end up with a raw, crimson margin of flesh between my upper-lip and my nose. From November to February, it looked like I spent everyday drinking fruit punch out of a dog bowl. My mother would slather Chapstick on me constantly, but I hated the slimy feel. The second she looked in the other direction I was scrubbing it off on my sleeve, my bedsheets, my sister, whatever was closest.
Months went by and my mouth wasn’t healing. My Dad’s solution—hold the kid’s head steady with one hand, dab liquid phenol on its face with the other. Within seconds my lips were an icy inferno (yes, I know it’s an oxymoron, but there is no other way to describe it). Red in the face and teary-eyed, I began to cackle. I paced the living room, bumped into walls, shimmied my shoulders, and kept on laughing, like a dazed, injured hyena.
“What the Hell is wrong with you?” My Dad asked.
Through hoots and chortles I screamed, “it hurts too bad to cry!”
I’ve said before that sobriety is this: life without an anesthetic. It sounds like a harsh exaggeration—like getting sober is equivalent to having your leg sawed off in the Civil War with nothing to ease the pain but poppy seeds and the yearning to return to the theme park under your beloved’s petticoat. … is it an exaggeration, though…?
The drive to stay in active addiction is really just a drive to maintain a numbness and indifference to the world around us. Yes, we’re aware that numbness blocks the wonderful feelings along with the unsavory feelings. Depending on the level of torture brought by the unsavory things, it often seems worth it to detach from life entirely.
What is the saying? “The only things that life guarantees are death and taxes?” That’s not even doom-saying, it has a built-in solution—die, then you won’t have to pay taxes. If you really want to screw the system, leave your estate to a non-profit and piss off your ungrateful grandchildren. That saying, famous as it is, skips over a lot of life’s inevitabilities, like pain. Pain is a promise from the universe, and the universe always keeps its promises.
This isn’t new information. Think about how much time and effort everyone puts into avoiding pain in their lives. At least we get help avoiding death: life jackets, seat belts, airbags, helmets, elevator phones, crosswalks, ambulances, inflatable airplane slides, guard rails, jumpy Fathers in the passenger seat yelling “oh shit!” while their 16-year-old is driving (because apparently, that does something?). While the government loves to regulate our personal lives, it really dropped the ball on giving out a set of prosecutable rules for how to stay unhurt by the world around us.
So, we all try to make our own rules. Its anarchy with bubble wrap. Suddenly, everyone is a Master of Philosophy. To avoid pain, you: have a lot of friends, have NO friends, have a secure relationship, never get into a relationship, keep your family close, keep your family on the opposite coast, have expectations for everything, have low expectations for everything, be independent, be comfortably codependent, treat yourself, deny yourself, better yourself, love yourself, do all of these things in moderation… guess what? You’ll still hurt. We’ll all hurt.
While the schtick about “death and taxes” is half-true, there are rampant cliches floating around out there that are, dare I say it? Fake. News. For instance, the old “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” OOOhhhhhh really? Is it? I felt pain and I went looking for the suffering off-switch… you know what I found? A straw. A long one. It fit directly into a fifth of Absolut. Cheers. Of course, that’s just an alcoholics perspective, but you have to be behind that way of thinking to get ahead of it.
Most adults treat their pain with alcohol in micro-doses (known to us addicts as regular human people drinking habits). We can all agree that alcohol consumption tends to correlate directly to the amount of suffering that we are enduring at the time. Pain is a monster that wants nourishment from ethanol. If you don’t feed it, it dies. True of goldfish, true of dependency.
Again, I’m never suggesting that moderate drinkers need to jump on the temperance bandwagon and start using their moonshine jug as a wind instrument. At the moment, I think I’m speaking from a place of a tedious jealousy that the immense pain I was drinking about now has no option but to be felt. Most days are great, but a storm is coming. A storm is always coming. Secretly, I think that all alcoholics are saving their next binge for the opportune moment, but in our worst moments we fight it by continuing to say, “no, not yet.” The stakes are far too great. We aren’t saving our relapse the way normal people save a bottle of Veuve Clicquot for a celebration. We’re saving our next drink the way a spy saves his cyanide capsule for enemy capture—we know it will end us. Which is why we are constantly pushing past our pain threshold like marathon runners. We know that the feeling of wanting to die will come and go, and we’ll hit our stride once again.
After all of my babbling, you’d think I have a solution for how to avoid, or successfully deal with pain. I do not. Can I at least say that suffering through all of life’s painful dividends will be worth it? I don’t know that either. What I do know is that I very rarely miss drinking, and I very frequently think about how good it feels to feel again. Walking through campus last night, I smelled fresh cut grass. You don’t notice those kinds of things when you are drunk. I spoke with a friend on the phone the other night, and I laughed. Really laughed. We talked until 1:30 in the morning on a weeknight, and I was mystified by how late it had gotten. Not because I was blacked out, but because I was that immersed in the conversation. You don’t get the privilege of those moments when you are constantly self-sedating.
Cravings for things like drugs and alcohol will dissipate. Chapped lips will unchap. Bad days will dissolve into good days. Both fortunately, and unfortunately, the sun will always rise in the morning. I can’t speak to whether the pain is worth the pleasure in this life, but we’re ensconced in this world regardless and we have to take every dose of medication that we’re given. While I still believe that Campho-Phenique on raw skin would be a lot more effective at Guantanamo Bay than waterboarding, I can also say that it helped. A lot of pain for a short amount of time lead to zero pain for the rest of the day. I stopped licking my wounds long enough for the healing to begin.
