The Fundimental Unfairness of Addiction

God, this is awful. Horrible that this exists. Some of the logic I just can't grasp or totally endorse. But so beautifully and painfully written. As the adult child of an alcoholic/substance abuser, I find my empathy strained. I have been hurt. I have been neglected and abused so that my father could use, so that he could serve the unholy twin gods of whiskey and cocaine. I have my challenges in life, but I have never been reduced to helplessness, and for that I am grateful. Truthfully, I want someone to blame.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/09/russell-brand-life-without-drugs

Some artists have to contend with this unending misery in order to create. And then some get swallowed by it. My own brother went down the rabbit hole of drinking too much and I watched helplessly from a far distance as he went missing and turned up dead on the floor of his own apartment. I had said that he was burning too intensely to carry on for long, and rightly predicted that we would have to contend with putting him in the ground. The circumstances surrounding his death are clouded partially in mystery, but it is well documented by the Navy that he was having a major drinking problem before he died. He was 25.

I want to blame my father, or his father who schooled him in the ways of the bottle and emotional abandonment. I want to rage at the loss of my brother, my college fund, at my hopes for family normalcy. I want to show him how he made me feel worthless. I want to level these things at my dad. But then I look at him, and I see a frail, sickly, and finally sober shell of what my mom says swept her off her feet in hopeless romance. I don't see the man who wrote her drippy romantic, soulful poetry. I don't see the young man who pushed me on the swing as a very small child.  I see someone who, if faced by the full measure of my experience, would crumple like burnt tissue. He's there, burnt already, and holding his shape by sheer force of will. A whisper would scatter him.

Really, that dynamic, romantic artist is gone. Like the angelic boy soprano he was, when he hit puberty he did not mellow into a mature tenor. He cracked and was no more. He couldn't ever after carry a tune any more than he could carry responsibility or joy. He couldn't deal. He was a lead pencil in a broadband world. His capacity was reduced to nil.

I hear from him every few months now. I see that he is trying to be somewhat present in my life. He calls after months of forgotten or failed attempts to remember I am a part of his family. I hear his remorse. If I wanted to reconcile with my father, he is still here on this planet. I see his desire for my forgiveness. I blankly and without much feeling absolve him, my hands in a nonmagic gesture of benediction. I tell him I need nothing from him, not so much because it is true, but because I know I will never truly get what I need, not from him anyway. I am letting him off the hook. I have given what I can to him. I have thrown years of love down a dark hole to him, but he never took my lifeline. He only memorably told me that he wished I was born male so he could punch me in the face. No amount of telling me feebly that he loves me now will erase that. That takes bigger, more fearless and transcendent love that he just cannot produce or hold in his heart. I am left to work on it within myself. Despite being told I am worthless, I have to believe in my worth, love myself, and somehow forgive a man who probably was too wasted to remember saying that to me and shattering me into fragments.

Maybe only other addicts can really understand him, really help him. I am from the other world, with all my judgements and moral superiority for having never fallen prey to the bottle or the freshly chopped line. The hole in me mirrors the hole in him. I fill it with minor peccadilloes, perhaps. I am no saint. But somehow my need to consume Chex Mix doesn't seem to interfere with my ability to love others, although perhaps parts of myself. I am sometimes driven by the desire to be perfect, even though that conceit is the worst form of self-loathing.

But, lacking perfection, how am I to offer myself to the world? How do I consider myself worthy of the love I want in my life? I can bake a killer cake, save the life of a sick person, and even comfort the dying. But what if people knew that I couldn't save my brother? I couldn't heal my father? I couldn't be enough to stop the gnawing monster of addiction from greedily devouring the people I cared most about? Does it matter how kind or good I am? I will bet it does, to people with the capacity. But some people lack that. You can call down to them forever, and ultimately have to rise up from the chasm's edge and step back, lest you fall in yourself.

I am not an addict. I know I can go to Al-Anon for support if I wanted to. I just don't want my father's failings to define me.

I am trying to resonate with kindness and compassion in my life. This lesson is a hard one. It is going to take a lot more work. But I am alive today. I am aware today. I am grateful for that. The frustrated tears I shed over this are just part of the landscape. I don't have to be perfect. I just have to be trying to be good. That is enough. That is a lot more than others may have. Just by virtue of looking at this and attempting to unravel the Gordian Knot , I am better than I was on days when I merely felt sorry for myself. One day I will claim my destiny and cut the knot with one stroke and be done with it. Alexandrian solutions are not lost on me. In the meantime I hope I can at least see it for what it is: a yoke bound to an ox-cart. Just a symbol of what could be. Can I combine my conqueror's heart with the will toward compassion? I can try.

The Wayback Machine

Dang it Sherman, what the hell do you think you are doing? In that old cartoon, wasn't it Professor Peabody that was traveling back in time? He did it on purpose, but hijinks certainly ensued.

I think there is some kind of collective nostalgia going on in my peer group. Don't get me wrong, I think it is wonderful. I have had the chance to reconnect with people I haven't seen hide nor hair of since the 1980's and early 1990's. I love having old friends, and I keep as many as I can. I'm lucky that they put up with me.

They seem to pop in out of nowhere, either by chance or because they deliberately sought me out in a case or two. Maybe they are all watching that show "My Name is Earl" and figure we have some as yet unresolved karma. Maybe I am just in a vortex of people that should never have been separated and cosmic forces are conspiring to bring us back together. Maybe we should be forming some kind of super group?

We are all older and wiser(?) and fatter and balder and sassier. Some of us are more confident and sexier and more accomplished than our previous party hound selves. I like the new us a great deal, because I always liked the old us, and it is such a good feeling when you can pick up the ball and run with it without missing a beat.

Besides being self-conscious about the width of my heinie and my general lack of a giant pile of cash to bed down in, I worry about some of the people who have NOT showed up yet, as if the ones that DO show up are harbingers of the ones I would rather just stayed away.

A few of my old lovers have popped in on me in the last few years, and it gives me the willies. I did end up having a heartfelt exchange with one high school boyfriend with whom I had a particularly acrimonious falling out. We actually exchanged a volley of emails that, while initially uncomfortable, ended up yielding to a far deeper understanding between us. It was healing in the deepest sense of the word. After 22 years, we are finally friends again.

Taking heart in that reunion, I went looking for one of my most beloved high school friends with whom I had fallen out of touch. It didn't go nearly so well. I found her to be hostile to me in a way I really didn't expect. It seems that in the intervening 20 or so years, she had decided that I, for lack of a better word, suck. She even lit into me ruthlessly for dating a boy she herself had an unrequited crush on. She was actually still REALLY mad about it. The whole encounter left me shell shocked and deeply saddened. Now when I think of her, all those happy, warm memories of our friendship is end-punctuated with "But now she thinks I'm an ass."

Luckily for me, I am still friends with that boy. He helped me have a laugh about it.

There are only a few people left that might accompany the sound of the other shoe dropping. Shall I name names, in hopes of warding them off? I think it might be cathartic, at least.

1. Paul: Good god, Paul and I had a hideous breakup. I was SOOOOOO young and naive. I am still mortally embarrassed at the way I behaved when he unceremoniously dumped me, and how self-destructive I was for a while after that. We still have a lot of friends in common. I'm pretty sure they are my friends in my own right by now, but it is one awkward subject that we don't broach too often: that they met me when I was dating their friend. I got some damn fine friends out of that relationship, so he was at least that useful. My dog didn't like him. I should have listened.

2. Marc: He cheated on me when we were supposedly thinking of getting married. I still owe him a kick in the stones, although I lack the verve to seek him out to deliver it. It just seems so pointless, since I thank my lucky stars that I married Tony instead of him. (Not that the choice was laid out that way at the time). Oh man did I dodge a bullet, there.

3. Mark F. He would never seek me out. He was my mom's boyfriend and we lived with him for a few years. He was a bad, bad man. Abusive and petty. I googled him a couple of years ago and found he had gotten into some trouble for corporate malfeasance and had been censured by the IEC. Bastard. He could get a whole blog post of his own if he weren't so worthless. He uttered the most hurtful thing I have ever heard in my life when I was about 12, and I am still living with the feelings that produced. No amount of therapy has been able to erase what said in a fit of pique and probably never thought of again. That and he abused my mother. Nobody messes with my mother, yo. Don't mess.

There, now that is nice and gloomy, isn't it? I'm just going to make the sign to ward off the evil eye and enjoy the rest of my day. Lucky for me, the people who have showed up are people who want to talk to me because they actually LIKE me!

I love my friends. They are what makes me wealthy, sure enough.