War of the Worlds
When I was a freshman in high school, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to play matchmaker and set a guy from my biology class up with a girl from my church youth group. We all met at the movie theater, then she claimed to be sick and left after the previews. He took the subtle rejection pretty hard and wanted to leave as well. I convinced him to stay and let me buy him some ice cream afterward to soften the blow. As we walked to Coldstone, we passed by a Starbucks, where the girl from church was sitting on the patio with three other dudes, carrying-on flirtatiously and appearing to be 100% healthy.
I was livid with her for being so blatantly rude and devious. She was mad at me for bringing her a subpar boy (i.e., no Vans or emo eyeliner.) The guy from school was upset with me for orchestrating the whole ordeal, only for him to be humiliated. Twice. I tried to cheer him up by dating him for the next three years, but I really don’t think it helped.
At fifteen, I learned that it is often best, or even necessary, to keep the incongruent parts of one’s life segregated. Your old friends won’t always like your new friends, your parents won’t approve the guys you casually date in college, and the secretary at your office with three grandchildren, who says “God bless” as you walk out the door every day, probably doesn’t need an invite to your bachelorette party. Parceling the components of your life is not about being secretive or exclusive, it’s a means of self-preservation. You are whatever room you are in, and you should leave your excess baggage at the door.
There are sectors of my life that I fortify with stacked cinderblock and barbed wire, but there are also areas that have a low fence and cordial garden gate. Every new day is not an avenue to post a long, emotional, Facebook status about the plights of addiction. However, I do use the platform to lure curious people to my website and that softens the boundary between my personal life and a more public persona. As much as it seems like I reveal in my writing, I am keeping 99% of the details to myself; partly because anonymity is a major factor in addiction, but mostly because I am not in a place, mentally or emotionally, where I can handle the backlash that would come from expressing a difficult truth.
I have alluded to it I’m sure, but if I were to stress the fact that “there comes a point in addiction when drinking is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity,” somebody who has been betrayed repeatedly by an alcoholic will come for me; claws, fangs, and guns blazing. Neither one of us will be wrong. Neither one of us will be right. Nobody will be the victor. There will be wails of infuriation that seem to flow from mountains of hate… but that’s not how anger works. Harsh, defensive words come from canyons of profound hurt, and they cause continuous pain as they evanesce into bitter echoes.
Maybe someday, when more time has past and everyone around me, including myself, no longer feels the ache of what I’ve rankled, I can be bold in my assault on addiction and championing of rehabilitation. In the interim, I can be supportive of the people who have the guile and the influence to throw open the curtains and make addiction so evident that it can’t be disregarded.
The other day I got a text from the president of The Last Bottle Blog fan club: my Mommy. Every time (or almost every time) I see or speak to my #1 fan, she throws a new name at me of a famous person who was previously afflicted and is currently sober. No, I don’t get tired of it. There are a lot of unhelpful things that a non-addict can say to an addict, but “you are not alone” and “you’re comparable to Keith Richards” is always the right sentiment. Anyway, she tried to send me a link to an article she saw on The Huffington Post about Jessica Simpson, but it wouldn’t go through. I was in the middle of doing annotations, so I made a note to look it up later. I was aware that Simpson was in recovery and had read/seen/heard interviews where she addressed the issue, and I wasn’t sure there was much else she would say.
The next morning, during my very unhealthy routine of hitting snooze five times then perusing social media in bed, Jessica Simpson was everywhere. Not everywhere like when a Kardashian farts, but everywhere as in she was on every platform that I check. The draw wasn’t that she was admitting it for the first time or yelling about it any louder than before—she put a new lens in front of her life in active addiction. Simpson seemingly said to the public, “I told you that it happened, now let me tell you how bad it was.”
First, there was a picture. Two pictures, actually. A recent photo of her, dazzling, fit, and glowing. Next to it, she displayed an image of herself that any alcoholic would recognize; her, but defeated. Bloated. Sweaty. Crimson-faced. Unsteady. Vacillating. Fresh out of bed and already wearied.
In the “drunk” photo she was actually, momentarily, sober. She had woken up hungover and this was the buffer-area before she started drinking again at 7am. The picture was not a shame or revenge photo, her husband had taken it because it was Halloween morning, and she was sporting some cute pink flannel pajamas. If you are wondering why she would consent to such a picture, if its as unflattering as I say it is, I can tell you why. Even though the tableau reeks of familiar, incognito, suburban alcoholism, the why is what resonated with me the most.
If we are ballooned, red-faced, clammy, and miserable, why pose for a picture? Because we haven’t accepted that our life is at a standstill. We don’t know to be embarrassed. Booze in on the menu that day, and booze will erase every insecurity. We don’t realize that we are living in spite of the alcohol abuse, because alcohol is part of the living. In fact, the alcohol is the only thing that makes us feel alive. We are certainly not going to say, “don’t take a picture, I’m hungover.” Saying we’re hungover means admitting we drank too much the night before. We would never say that we drank too much the night before, because it was the same amount that we drink every night. That would imply that we have a problem. Problems beckon solutions. Alcoholics can’t wrap their brains around finding a solution for their current solution.
Simpson then revealed the details of that Halloween in a collage of what she could remember and what she had later been told had occurred. She started drinking again at 7am—hangover helped, humiliation dismissed. There was some preparation for the party they were throwing that night and she hyped her children up for trick-or-treating, but she didn’t last long enough for either event.
For the entire Halloween party, she was passed out upstairs. Somebody else took her children treat-or-treating. She doesn’t even know how they got into their costumes.
This. This is why addiction is so devastating, and this is why it takes guts to talk about it—guts I do not yet possess. My heart bleeds for this talented, wealthy, elite, beautiful blonde because she knows the unmistakable “thwack” of hitting rock bottom that only another alcoholic can recognize. The “guts” come into play when you put the truth out there, knowing that most people won’t have an ounce of comprehension, yet they’ll fight you as if they have a PhD on the subject.
“How dare you??” They say. “You are asking for sympathy and blaming alcohol for your mistakes! Look at what you’ve done to your children! You’re a monster! You should be ashamed of yourself!” -- These are direct quotes from comments on her post.
I’m not saying people are wrong, I’m saying they arrived late to the flogging. Spectators aren’t asking anything of us that we haven’t asked ourselves in the mirror. “How dare I? Am I seriously asking for sympathy and blaming alcohol for my mistakes? Look at what I’ve done to my family! I’m a monster! I am so Goddamned ashamed of myself…”
Commiserating with an alcoholic in recovery is not folie a deux. We shared a madness, but not with each other, not now. We split a madness with alcohol ante facto. Now we share an understanding. I won’t ask, “how could you do that to your children?!” No need. I already know the answer. I know she didn’t “pick alcohol over her family.”
A voice from her anxious, addicted brain said to her, straight-faced, “you need alcohol to be the best you.” Of course, she wanted her children to have the best. So, she drank. I know this because the same voice was screaming in my ear, “You’re a shitty friend. You’re a shitty daughter. You’re a shitty sister. You’re a shitty Aunt. You’re a shitty wife.” … until I had a drink. Then the voice mellowed and said, “You know what, Kara? You’re alright.”
People in the cocoon of addiction recovery get that. Everywhere else is a jungle.
My “worlds” at the moment are few. It gets lonely, but it keeps the juggling to a minimum. I would never lie about it, but I don’t see why my (victory in) battle with alcoholism would need to be announced in school or at the rescue. There are places where my experience could be helpful to the children of addicts, some who, statistically, will soon be addicts themselves, but that’s abstract. It’s part selfishness and part facilitation, but I would lose their respect and their eager minds for learning if I told them that I share a common thread with all the other adults who have hurt, disappointed, betrayed, beat, and abandoned them. My heart couldn’t take it.
As for academia, alcoholism will be an excellent flourish to my published memoirs one day, but for now, it’s my little secret. I’ve worked hard on having a reputation and a portfolio that the faculty in my department recognize. Scholars tend to be open-minded, but “recovering addict” isn’t an applicable trade and the “recovering” portion of that label often gets overlooked. Even when people are accepting, I worry that my association with addiction will become a toxin that debases their perception of me. So, I don’t bring it up.
There’s a setback to my ambiguity, though. While I’ve been running, hiding, and verbally evading my identity as a recovering alcoholic on campus, I’ve managed to poison myself. Against me. Despite existing in multiple worlds, school gets the lion’s share of my time and effort. If I can’t connect my hard work to the thing that I’m working so hard to get away from… then what is my identity?
My 18-month milestone of sobriety came and went the other day, and I didn’t even notice. I’ve done such a great job of evading the “addict” half of “recovering addict,” that I’ve forgotten the feat of “recovering.” The whole point of going back to school was to acquire the knowledge, skills, practice, and paperwork I need to make a decent life for myself. When I drop “recovering addict” and “sober alcoholic” from my resume in order hide addict/alcoholic, I lose my most valuable trade. Everybody and their mother has a bachelors in English and a graduate degree in literature, but do they have the resolve, and the dedication, and the resiliency, and the emotional capacity, and the bloodlust for survival that it takes to be a sober, recovering, addict/alcoholic? Doubt it.
I should have learned my lesson when I watched my alcoholic world dissolve my connection to all of my other worlds. The lesson being that I cannot be my best self if all of my other worlds don’t directly link to my recovery world. Jessica Simpson has a lot more to lose by being honest than I do, being a mother, wife, fashion mogul and popstar. She’s been a household name for so long that she’s now an icon; which means that having the approval of the masses is her bread and butter. That was put at great risk when she told the world that, four years ago, she was too drunk to dress her own children.
Eighteen months ago, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger in the effort of keeping myself alive. Today, I spent four hours in the library looking up slang terms added to the Merriam Webster Dictionary between 1915 and 1933 so I could compose a believable journal from the perspective of an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. Effort matters. I’ve been doing it so consistently for a year and a half now, I often overlook how much of my time and effort goes into recovery. Its good in way, sobriety should be second nature. But its not good to be so intent on separating addiction from the rest of my life that I forget that the rest of my life can’t happen without the vigilance of addiction recovery. It’s the ball of hot light that all of my worlds revolve around.
