On It (Part 3)
Townes wrote that a man once said to him “I want to be helped, but not at the cost of compulsory association with others seeking help. I know that to be thrown into unavoidable contact with those worse than myself would hopelessly degrade me. I should not be willing to risk that, no matter how much good the treatment might do me.”
As I started to take my addiction seriously, I joined multiple online support groups, attended a few in person, read the proverbial “quit lit.” Another brother, Brian, died when he was hit by a car, in 2002.
The sufferers, I concluded, didn’t want support, we wanted one of three things: someone to see us, a platform for our solipsism, and someone to fix us. Behind every heavy sigh in whatever flavor of group I signed up for there was an addiction to not doing the work, staying stuck. This took the form of either the male comedian, or the man who likes to tell stories about the worst thing they did while drunk, dominating the meeting with their war stories as other men puffed up their chests in solidarity.
Or, the women sat idly by and watched the show, unless they could find a women-only group. “Self-care” is the thru line there, and for those who can afford the higher end of these groups still get the same messaging, just packaged differently. Take care of yourself, set boundaries, keep coming back to this site, buy this book and if you need more support that will be extra. As of late, many doctors have got on board and partnered with these pop-up sites to prescribe Antabuse, Naltrexone, and the other opioid antagonists with little oversight. But if you don’t have access to what you really need, to be seen, understood, you’ll just stop taking the antagonists and keep drinking. Dennis Lehane writes in Shutter Island “…someday, we’ll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.”
The most helpful thing I ever learned would come years later when someone just simply said to me “you are the master of your own ship.” It flipped a switch for me.
But I drank for decades more. My last brother, David, died by hanging in 2019.
I always thought it would be my breasts that would defect first, but it was my heart. After days of abuse, my mouth would open as a hollow, and my heart, fierce but helpless, pumped like a fist against a locked door.
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
…
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
Louise Glück, from the poem “The Wild Iris”
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