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Archives from 2002-2006

I have a counselor who is a tiny woman with the most unnerving gaze I’ve ever encountered. I don’t mean she’s aggressive, I mean she can outstare a cat. I’m not sure if she actually has eyelids. Maybe it’s a common technique in therapy, to simply hold eye contact at certain points in the conversation, but if the intended result is to prompt me to involuntarily fill the air with words as I scootch around in discomfort, boy, it works like a damn charm.

It’s not particularly enjoyable, but she definitely helps me to go deeper into the murk, flashlight in hand.

One of my biggest stumbling blocks in recovery is that when I am sober, I turn to food. It’s happened time and time again. Food becomes yet another mood-altering substance for me to abuse. I binge on sugary, salty, nutritionally bankrupt foods. I eat to feel better or to cope with stress or to reward myself, but mostly to feel mindlessly lost in the act of eating. I try to get back on track, I download apps, I restrict and obsess, and then I lose all control. Over and over.

As a result of the bingeing, I gain weight. The bigger I get, the more self-loathing I feel. I feel bad about the way I look, so I turn to food, which makes me feel worse about myself, and on it goes. The cycle becomes more and more consuming. Soon it’s like I’ve pried myself out of one trap, only to have stepped directly into yet another set of steel jaws.

I gained at least 25 pounds after inpatient. None of my clothes fit, I was depressed and struggling, and eventually I started romanticizing the drug I’d just worked so hard to break free from. I can even pinpoint the strongest trigger: I started getting photos and social media posts from my Timehop app that were captured a year prior, when I’d first started using and was still in the euphoric state. I seemed so happy, I weighed so much less. I remember thinking that it seemed worth anything to feel like that again. Anything.

I knew how to make all my food problems disappear. I could end the cycle and have the body I wanted. The pesky reality of how my use had escalated until the whole house of cards came crashing down around me … well, I just wouldn’t use as much, this time. It would be different!

And it was, but not in the way I’d hoped. I got the weight loss and the relief from food obsessions, but I never got those good feelings back. I just got an express ride back into full-blown addiction, back to the dependency and the lies and the guilt and the inability to think about anything but how much I had and when I’d get more and how I’d hide it.

So I tell my counselor about all of this, saying that I want to work on coping skills I can turn to instead of food. I tell her I’ve gained six pounds in the last couple weeks, I’m scared it won’t stop, and it feels like I’m doomed to either hate myself for being out of control and using, or hate myself for being out of control and fat.

She asks me what it means for me to gain weight. We go back and forth on this for a bit, I’m thinking I’m not sure what she’s getting at, doesn’t everyone hate gaining weight? and then she does the Silent Eye Thing and I suddenly find myself blurting,

It would mean I would have a larger presence in the world, and I don’t deserve to take up space.

Let’s start by working on that, she says gently.

I’m mostly out of the woods detox-wise and it’s scary how the more I come back to myself, the harder it is to connect to how bad it was. I’m already having a hard time describing what it was like, those days/weeks leading up to stopping. Well, that’s not true exactly, I can find the words, but they’re not as raw. The feeling of it is fading away so quickly.

This is the slippery heartbreak of memory, at least in my experience. Most of the things I want to hold so tightly seem to get filed away in boxes wrapped in packing tape and plastered with descriptive labels. They’re there, inside, but muffled, almost like something I could have read about. Like how an amazing vacation begins to leak sensory data as soon as I step on the plane. I can tell you where we went and what we did, but I can’t smell the salt of the ocean or feel the heat of the sand or hear the laughter of my children.

It probably doesn’t make much sense that I wish I had the power to fully tap into the ugliness of my active use — re-living last year’s trip to Hawaii would be a far more pleasant experience — but as things get less vivid, it takes more and more work to hold onto the full story. You can start remembering a partial version. Then you start thinking that if you just do XYZ, you could control it this time. You wrap more tape around the very worst moments and rewrite the label. You begin to romanticize the exact thing that was destroying your life.

Meanwhile, addiction is a patient, calculating, lying motherfucker. Something goes wrong, some hurt or frustration or sorrow descends, and a solution looms into sight. It’s a vision packed with false promises that shouldn’t have a shot in hell of being convincing: you know better, after all. But it keeps expanding. It’s so goddamned hard to look away.

Sometimes it’s like a Polaroid that takes days or weeks or months to fully develop. Sometimes it’s as terrifying as an out-of-nowhere desire to turn down the wrong aisle in the grocery store.

I never again want to forget how things were. But how to stay close to that reality, without drowning in the self-loathing that comes from scrabbling to keep a death grip on every painful choice I’ve made?

I’m not sure if there can be a one-size-fits-all answer to that, but I finally understand, at least more than I did before, why there is so much talk of gratitude in recovery. I used to think the gratitude stuff was about forcing positivity — all those cheesy slogans! — but I think the real magic is that gratitude gives you acceptance without the damnation.

I am so grateful for the peace of living in honesty, for instance, is a completely different way of thinking than Jesus, I was such a lying piece of shit. It’s about focusing on the light instead of dwelling on the dark … while still acknowledging the darkness. Gratitude keeps my past in focus while simultaneously reminding me how much better the present is. It is both tool and reward, and it’s rooted in the now instead of relying on scenes in the rearview.

I’ve spent so long trying to escape life instead of celebrating it, gratitude does not yet come naturally to me. It takes practice, a deliberate intent. But oh, when I can be grateful, I know a truth stronger than addiction’s lies. I can see what’s really around me, the countless reasons I have to stay.

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