My friends,
I work in drug and alcohol treatment. It's a given that I see some seriously funny shit, and I see some seriously fucked-up shit. And what gets to me every time is the razor-thin paradox of the sober alcoholic: on the one hand, we joke around about life-and-death matters; we joke a lot, and those jokes would sound offensive, to say nothing of unfunny, in their ribald or iconoclastic nature. On the other hand, recovery from this disease is deadly serious, and the smart addicts never lose sight of that. It's a tough line to walk, being able to joke about your DUI or your child support payments or whatever, take it fairly lightly, but be absolutely serious when it comes to recovery and remember the stakes at all times. I'll be the first to acknowledge that sometimes, those of us who've managed to keep the balance for a little while must make it look easier than it really is - there is, at times, a very real and very heated internal battle being waged over the decision to remain abstinent, and to continue working a solid program of recovery.
But there are times - and this, as you might glean from the fact that I'm posting this here and now, is one of those times - that I get fed up by all the fucking around people in treatment do, both literally and figuratively.
Recently, two people died of prescription medication overdose in the treatment facility I attended. Inpatient. Within two days of each other. It's rare, but it happens. This is a facility run by the country's leading addiction expert. Two people died, less than a month ago. One of them was a man I'd known fairly well, through his numerous attempts to achieve lasting sobriety. He was a gay marine - which I say in order to highlight both the strength and courage he must have had, and just one of the central characterological conflicts that kept him struggling for sobriety and led him to this (some say intentional) overdose. He was, to many of his "trudging buddies" (friends in recovery with around the same amount of sober time), a hero. He is dead. And today I watched a girl overdose on the same medication. She's alive, so far as I know, but as they loaded her gurney onto the ambulance, she blew us an irreverent kiss goodbye.
This girl, and a few of her friends, had been playing around for weeks, before and after these deaths. They looked like they were having a good time, and I only ever saw them outside of their groups, so I hung around, shot the shit, had a good time with them. But the longer I stuck around, the more I realized it was all play, no work for these kids. And this is where I go for my recovery - it's not my job (yet) to shepherd these kids through early sobriety; I have my own internship, on the other side of Pasadena, for that.
So all I did was gently hint, even jokingly, that they might want to spend some time thinking about the fact that they had landed themselves in an acute psychiatric care facility. Then this happens. Shortly before the ambulance arrived, a girl I spoke to had deemed her rehab experience "relaxing". My response - "If rehab is relaxing, you're doing it wrong."
Relaxation is, to be sure, an essential component of treatment for any biopsychosocial disorder, especially if you expect the patient to participate in their own cognitive-behavioral treatment. But relaxing isn't the first thing that should come to mind. We make you work for your relaxation. Rehab is frightening, intensely emotional, frustrating, scary, clarifying, edifying, rewarding and terrifying. And amidst all that, as we beg you to change everything in your life that led you to us in the first place, we ask you to relax. To look inside and find some of the peace - sober - that you were seeking, knowingly or unknowingly, through poisons. (However awesome the poison was.)
The things we did when we didn't know any better may be incredibly funny (like getting my ass kicked at night basketball by Kelly Dupuis and using the "race card" to get us all out of consequences for that night's mischief). Most of them are, with a little perspective. But once we take responsibility for our actions, past and present, we have to laugh with a conscience. We have to be aware that what's funny, in the end, is that we survived the shit we did, that we're free enough from consequences that we're in rehab, drawing breath, with our full wits about us. (Eventually - the wits, in general, come back later, and slowly.)
This girl could have died today, and I watched her fellow "inmates" joking, smirking, playing around even as the gurney was being wheeled away. That scares me. I have lost more than one friend to this disease, because the seriousness of their peril escaped them completely.
I also have friends that are further along in their recovery. One of them, if not further along in recovery than me, certainly has more time abstinent than I do. And I watch them play in their clique, talking shit about each other behind each other's backs, placing more importance on sex than true friendship and mutual support. It's silly, it's high-school bullshit melodrama, but as long as they're sober it's no big deal, right? Uh-uh. Some of these kids are going to get so wrapped up in each other, in themselves and their psychodrama, that a drink, a joint, or a pill is nowhere near as dangerous to them (in their minds) as being around "him", "her", "them", or "that place". Even after the brief span of sobriety I've managed, I've seen it happen so often that the new funny, for me, is kids (as old as 60-something, but kids nonetheless) coming in, thinking "I'm going to be different; I've got this thing licked already, and there's too much fun to be had to worry about piddly things"...like the consequences of your choices....
It's lethal, kids. That's what I want to say, but in order to maintain the credibility I need in order to convince them of more easily-grasped concepts (like, "drugs are bad for you"), I can't lay that on them. They won't trust me, and right now they do. Trust is the core prerequisite for a successful therapeutic alliance. I only wish I could spare them the pain they will almost certainly experience learning their lessons the way I learned many of mine - the hard way. (I still haven't met a metaphorical brick wall I didn't want my forehead to get up close and personal with...)
I'm going to lose more friends to this particular symptom of this disease. It's a statistical inevitability. As my mentor would say,
"Oh well."Aren't you glad you're not an addict?
But what do you think?
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