Rock Bottoms Up

I hate clichés.  Maybe it’s the amount of time I spend reading literature, maybe it’s the number of times I’ve been told by another alcoholic robot to take things “one day at a time,” but my tolerance for platitudes has severely diminished over the years.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I am bombarded by an exhaustingly overdone troupe… A hot professor.  I’m clearly not the only coed that has that opinion of him, based on the way these girls get made-up for class.  It’s a Zoom meeting, you don’t even have to wear pants, let alone draw on winged eyeliner.  Yet, twice a week my screen is infested with little squares that look like audition tapes for “The Bachelor.”  Smokey eyes, curled hair, glossy lips, tits up and out- you can smell the pheromones through the WiFi.  The irony is not lost on me that it’s a biology class.  I get it.  He pretty.  But I’m almost 30 and jaded so I skip the mascara (and pants) and ignore the dapper fit of his sweater vest to focus on the Power Point.

As I said, I’m almost 30 and I’m a college student.  I’m a little behind the curve… or a lot behind.  Last week, that handsome PhD-having devil was quickly reviewing the law of superposition.  Very simply put, it’s the geological rule that, in a vertical sample of earth, the bottom layer of rock sediment is going to be the oldest and the rock sediment on top is going to be the newest.  Easy-squeezy.  Sort of.  The problem is that we live on a volatile planet and things like avalanches, chronic erosion, volcanic eruptions, floods, wildfires, dust storms, tornados, and hurricanes happen pretty frequently.  Any one of these occurrences can stir up sediment and toss it back down in whatever fashion it so chooses.  What Mother Nature lays to rest, she can also awaken and disturb at leisure.

Of course, a lesson in “rocks on the bottom” was a perfect opportunity to discuss, yet another, cliché that I am quite familiar with: rock bottom.  That term gets tossed around like a trailer in a tornado when people talk about addicts.  However, in a room full of actual addicts, that concept doesn’t get brought up too much.  Not every addict had to hit rock bottom to recover.  The ones that did have very different experiences with their personal “rock bottom” moments.  We don’t tell competing stories because, in that competition, we all lose.  One person’s “rock bottom” may sound like another person’s average Tuesday night and that’s just another shining example of how diverse the affliction of addiction is.  Part of being in the alcoholic community is cooing at the pictures a man shows you of his grandchildren, then nodding as he tells a story about meeting a prostitute at a bar in Ft. Lauderdale, letting her drive back to the hotel because he was hammered, then shoving him out of the passenger seat into the parking lot of the EconoLodge and speeding off with his wallet in his rented Chevrolet Celebrity.  This is why we don’t compare stories- someone is going to hear that and think, “a Florida hooker has never stolen my car, do I really need to be in this meeting?”  The answer is yes.  Yes, you do. 

Addiction is addiction.  Our demons may be different, but at the end of the day they all meet up at the same dive bar, high-five their cloven hooves and brag about how they fucked with us.  People don’t realize the level of self-deception and self-sabotage involved in addiction, or they wouldn’t fixate on this concept of “rock bottom” so strenuously.  They think that the only drive that people have in active addiction is “do whatever I have to do to get high,” “do whatever I have to do to get drunk.”  To an extent, yes, that is the drive.  The reasons, however, are rarely “I just like getting high,” or “I just like getting drunk.”  Another huge mistake is thinking that addicts are just trash automatons with one setting- get high.  Get drunk.  Wrong.  The problem is that we are not automatons- we have too many thoughts- too many feelings.  So much so that we have to get away from them in any manor possible.  Nobody understands how unlivable the space in our skulls has to get for us to turn to drugs, and it becomes unlivable every. Single. Day.  This is why I harp on mental health as much as I do- a mind in a good place doesn’t need an outside substance (apart from those that are prescribed).  A mind in a good place would recognize rock bottom, which is why addicts don’t recognize it.  Not only that, “rock bottom” is going to have degrees.  A single DUI doesn’t have the same impact on a fraternity brother as it does a Sunday school teacher or a soccer mom. 

In my endeavor to explain and defend the complexities of addiction, I’ve had to go exploring in some very strange, uncomfortable places.  I’ve had to draw parallels between myself and people who, previously, I could never imagine connecting with, let alone defending.  The closer I got to people who I would’ve sworn were nothing like me, the more I began to understand myself.  So, let’s go, let’s do it.  Join me in the Hell-avator and push the button marked “RB”- we’re going all the way to the bottom.

So, what’s rock bottom to an addict?  Spending the night in jail? No.  Social services taking your kids away? Nope.  Everyone you care about walking away from you? Nah.  Becoming homeless? Nuh-uh.  Overdosing, dying, then being brought back to life? No.  Let’s keep going then.  Beating on someone you love? Still not there.  Breaking into an elderly person’s home and stealing money that they need to survive on? Not yet.  Taking pain pills away from someone in Hospice? No? How about driving drunk, hitting someone, fatally injuring them, then, as they lay dying… driving away… Did I finally go to far?  Get comfortable.  We’re staying here for a minute.

I’m not going to defend or excuse the deplorable extremes of an addict.  There is no defense.  No excuse.  You may not be capable of a hit-and-run sober, but there is no end to what someone under the influence is capable of, and that is terrifying. My aim is to warn everyone to stay the Hell away from drugs and to only drink responsibly. You take the slightest step across that line and you will be baffled by how quickly your little world becomes utter chaos, and how that chaos spreads like a wildfire, igniting everything and everyone around you. Everything stops making sense.  People have short memories, so they don’t connect the dots that you are still your perfectly wonderful self, you are just actively struggling with something.  They think you woke up one morning and made a conscious decision to vacate your morals, hopes, dreams, standard level of kindness, and general sense of humanity.  So, they treat you like garbage.  They might even inform you that you are garbage.  If you are told that you are “garbage” enough, you will start to believe it.  Likewise, you’ll start to live it. 

So, you ask me, “Kara, you’re just a charming little drunk with no criminal record… how can you possibly empathize with someone who had their children taken away and still kept using crack?”  My answer: “Very. Fucking.  Easily.”  We may have different situations, different circumstances, different addictions, and different lifestyles, but we have the same struggle.  In the same society.  With the same stigma.  Society sees a woman who is tweaking so hard that she doesn’t care if her children are fed, let alone if they are confiscated by the state.  All she cares about is where she is going to get her next fix.  What I see is a woman who cares about nothing because she’s been conditioned not to.  She got to a point where she felt like she couldn’t hold on to anything anymore and reached for an outlet.  That outlet was crack.  Crack did what crack is designed to do- it became a habit.  A necessity.  Mental relief, if sought improperly, comes at quite a cost, my friends.  Suddenly, her real problems became immaterial because of her addiction.  Nobody asked, so nobody cared how badly she had to be hurting to reach for that pipe in the first place.  She used.  She lost the game.  She’s a no longer considered a human.  You (society) told her that, she heard you, now she believes it.  You told her that all she cared about was getting high.  She started to believe that too.  Go ahead, take her kids.  She doesn’t think they should be with a crack-mother either.  She doesn’t deserve them.  She doesn’t deserve to live.  She’d kill herself, but there is this brief moment right after she lights up when she feels good.  She thinks that she can take on the world.  Crack makes her feel so good about life that she thinks there’s still a chance she can stop doing crack and have an actual life.  Then that feeling wears off and she’s back to feeling like, and thusly living, like garbage.

I understand.  She shouldn’t have turned to drugs in the first place.  I will never claim that any less than 99% of accountability in addiction belongs to the addict.  However, like I said before, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, then you have no idea how dire the situation in your own head has to get for drugs/drinking to become a viable option for relief.  Over and over again.  Once it becomes a habit, we stay in a constant crossroads of, “this can’t get any worse” and “eh.  There’s room for it to get a little worse.”  To that end, living with addiction is like living on a fault line- “rock bottom” is being constantly readjusted.  And again, its different for every person.  That’s why we, as addicts, don’t compare or judge.  It’s a matter of perspective from a people who have all, at some point, omitted their own reality for the sake of survival.  We know better than to hold unwell people to the same standards as a functional, rational human.  It’s not leniency, its logic.  If an addict could be fixed, other addicts would be able to fix them- we have the tools and the know-how.  We also know that our situation could always have been worse than what it was.  That’s not a nod to privilege, that’s an acknowledgement of how out-of-control we were and how equally lucky we got.  For a period, we were either drunk all day and all night, or we were panicked and confused all day and blacked-out all night.  Either way, we were not thinking rationally.  Ever.  Addiction does not allow for rationale. 

I make a lot of blanket statements and I know that.  Some addicts are just terrible people who also happen to be addicts.  Google “Hitler’s crystal meth fueled death squad.”  I mean, don’t look it up if you want to sleep tonight, but do look it up if you want to rebut my “addicts aren’t all bad” theory.  I’m an addict, so I’m obviously biased, but mostly I’m just incredibly hurt.  That hurt acts as a spring of empathy for other addicts.  A lot of addicts don’t deserve empathy, but I would hate to skip over the one whose only defense against getting high tonight is one person giving a shit about them and their struggle.  I’ll be that person.  Those of us who are desperate to come back from rock bottom have to stand together against the careless addicts who hit rock bottom and say, “fuck it.  Get me another beer and a jack hammer, we’re going down a level.”  I’m tired of being held to that low, low standard of human being.  That’s not the status quo of an addict- the status quo of an addict is one that says the serenity prayer, shows up for court, behaves for supervised custody visits to earn unsupervised visits, and reaches out with both hands to other addicts and says, “its ok.  I understand.  You aren’t your rock bottom.”