Photo of me taken at age 14. I finished reading
Middlesex yesterday (I highly recommend it), picked up
DRY by Augusten Burroughs and read it in less than 24 hours. Now I have always been an incredibly fast reader, so fast that my uncle once sat and timed me with a stopwatch and bragged to everyone later that day about my speed. Later I found that I could read through three novels in a day with ease and I thought that it was going to guarantee me success in school, in life. It was something that I could do very well. Of course becoming a drug addict/alcoholic and dropping out of high school did not mean that through my amazing reading skills people in business suits knocked on my door with six figure job offers for me. It meant that I learned how to live on $3.35 an hour and still stay drunk or high every waking hour.
Now that I have a husband and two kids and a Mom to look after my reading time has slowed to a halt, except when it comes to memoirs by former addicts and/or alcoholics. For some strange reason I can’t get enough of these books. When I picked up Dry I thought that it was going to be his take on getting sober, albeit a funny one. While there were funny moments I ended up getting teary eyed or straight up crying more times than laughing, mostly because I could relate. I have thought some time of writing a memoir on the time I spent getting sober; but it would come down to two words “Got Pregnant”. Of course I am overly simplifying things; the process was a long one and one I don’t like to admit I still struggle with to this day.As an observant exboyfriend once remarked to me long distance on the phone when I told him I’d gotten sober because I got pregnant with Nate, and then Polly ,he correctly answered, “Tam, you can’t stay pregnant the rest of your life.”I went through a period of time after I had Nate and the panic attacks began when I was afraid of all meds, prescription meds, OTC meds, everything. My then shrink worked with me long and hard to convince me that taking Xanax or Klonopin coupled with an antidepressant did not mean I could no longer hold my sobriety proudly on my chest for all to see. It took months and I decided to try the pills, because the alternative, hiding in my apartment with my baby while my husband looked at me and wondered where I had gone to, and the panic never ended, it just went up and down but never away, was not a life I could live. I kept biding my time, telling myself, when Nate stops breastfeeding you can commit suicide. Or then, when Nate starts school you can commit suicide. The pills made me feel better, so much so that we decided to have another baby .Then I had to go off them for the safety of the fetus and I rebounded, worse than before. My new mantra, one that I’ve never repeated to anyone before, became, when this baby is born I can commit suicide. It took a team of three doctors, my shrink, my OB/GYN and my general practitioner to get me through that pregnancy and the months that followed, as well as my Mom, my sister, and my husband. But I made it.
And then I was proud again. On medication, but proud. Happy even. After a few years I convinced myself that I could have an occasional drink, and I didn’t freak out when my doctor prescribed Vicodin one time for a massive ear infection. My doctor kept saying to me over and over, “If you had diabetes and you needed insulin you wouldn’t think twice about taking meds for it” Or, “if I thought you had a problem with the Klonopin, I wouldn’t be prescribing them, now would I?” It was true. I didn’t have a problem with the Paxil or the Klonopin. I could have one glass of wine at Christmas dinner and not want to crawl inside the bottle and lick every last drop from it.
I had tried AA and NA before, but sitting around listening to people talk about how much they wanted to drink or use never did it for me. Sitting around watching people talk about how they had beat addiction while they chain smoked and drank cup after cup of coffee made me want to laugh and jump up and say, “Don’t you see?”
Plus, I couldn’t do the higher power thing. An atheist, what was my higher power? Did it come in powder form or liquid form or was it those tight green buds with the red hairs on them that I packed into my bong and smoked?
I didn’t believe that what they said was true, about once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. AA was like a religion. I despise organized religion. I didn’t want to say, “Hi, my name is Tammy and I am an alcoholic and a drug addict” and listen to my name come back, “Hi Tammy.”
I listened to a Native American man who actually smelled drunk talking of his 9 months of sobriety and how he had taken the carburetor out of his car and waited for six months for his higher power to put it back in. I listened to the woman tell the story of dropping her three kids off at some hotel on the Oregon coast and then going off drinking, from bar to bar, only to realize when she was finished that she couldn’t remember where she had left them, so she spent hours driving up and down the coast looking for them in every hotel. She sobbed as she told this story, and I cried too, thinking of those little kids alone in that room, wondering where their Mom was. I couldn’t do AA or NA anymore, but I believed that I’d gotten some good book material from it. As sick as it sounds, I really thought that. I watched people leave the AA meetings , head for the nearest 7-11 and buy beer. I believed myself cured, without help. I had done it alone, I proudly told myself, the other voice inside telling me I was full of shit.
Years went by until, stop, three or so years ago. I hurt my back at work and had to go to the doctor. They did X-rays and MRIs and told me that the discs in my back were disintegrating. They were wearing away. One doctor put it, “You have the back of a woman in her nineties.” and I thought “See, I’ve accomplished something with my life. I have the back of a 90+ year old woman and I am only 30!” My primary care physician put it differently. Find something else to do for a living or you will be permanently disabled within five years. The tears began to roll down my face and she thought I was crying because I could no longer do my job, baking. She put her hand on my arm and gave me a little smile. Truth, I was crying because I didn’t believe that I could do anything else. So I can read, big fucking deal. I think I am supposed to know how to read at 33. It might have been amazing when I was 4, now it means jack shit. I tend to break everything involving technology I touch. That is part of why my marriage has worked for so long. I break things, then I give them to my husband and he fixes them. We are a team. Sometimes he sighs but he never complains.
Meanwhile I am being doped up with percocet and muscle relaxers and I stumble around the bakery, doing my job. I can still bake; I convince myself, slinging 100 lbs. of flour like the men do. I start to keep the pills in my pocket, because I never have time to take my breaks and I have learned to dry swallow them. One holds Percoset, the other Flexeril and I slip my tiny metal pill holder filled with Klonopin into my bra, just in case. But I never panic anymore. I’m high. I don’t want to admit it, but I am getting high again, only this time my drug dealer wears a white lab coat and tells me this is the only way. It is easy, too easy. I make the unmistakable sound of pills hitting together and against the sides of their little orange bottles while I speedily walk around the bakery. I can feel myself slipping away within minutes of taking a pill and it is easy to smile, to do an inhumane amount of work in less than 8 hours, or stand next to the oven loading and unloading in 100 something degrees for 21 hours straight because it is Christmas time and that is what the job entails. I believe that I am the best baker in the world.
I finally go back to my doctor and tell her that I want to try something different. She suggests methadone treatment for long-term pain management. For a second I pause, remembering the few times I shot heroin as a teen and the feeling of “oh my God, this is what has been missing my entire life” The feeling of love, comfort, inner peace and calm all in a single shot of head nodding beauty. I imagine going to get my methadone every morning and no longer feeling any pain. I imagine not even needing any antidepressants because I feel so fucking good. I dismiss it. I ask for physical therapy, or occupational therapy. She gives me a referral. I buy an over priced back brace. I go to therapy even though I am starting to think that PT stands for physical torture. I start feeling things again. I admit to my husband that I have been having some problems with addiction to pain pills. He already knew. He is not surprised. I move on with my life, no longer feeling like laughing at those who state that once you are an alcoholic you are always an alcoholic. I understand now. I am not above anyone.
I plan on staring college soon and learning a skill that won’t cause me further back pain. Nothing comes to mind. I know I want to write it all down. I have this idea that someone might be helped by something I write. Even if just for one second, they feel less alone. But we are all alone, filling that empty space inside with something. Or is it just me?
