I’m Slipping: On Addiction
Addicts are god’s chosen people. At least that’s what I choose to believe. Their cyclical tragedy — the needing of the thing that is your undoing — seems like a cruel joke. Imagine that you crave something, want something, and lust after it with a burning and frantic fever. But once you get it, the victory is shortlived and hollow, full of shame, regret, and worthlessness. This inspires more disease seeking behavior. Rinse, repeat.
I don’t usually like to write self-indulgent NF posts about my private life but I think this is something that’s both relatable for a lot of people right now and something I need to work out for myself. The world has changed so much in the past 6 months and yet it has remained the same. Things are straight-up weird right now. I find myself saying that I want things to go back to “feeling normal” as if that were a thing that ever existed in the first place. There’s a discomfort with being awake in the world, a wet sweater you can’t take off, that has warped things for me. And it has allowed some bad habits to form.
I’ve only ever been REAALLY addicted to one thing: cigarettes. Man, I fucking love a smoke. The way it feels in my fingers, the inhale, the puffs out. It feels so natural to me. I’m not sure why. Because I also fucking hate it. I hate the smell. I hate the dizzy, nauseous feeling I get. I hate how much it costs. I hate standing outside in the cold. I hate standing outside in the heat. I hate needing a light. I hate that smokers don’t think throwing their FLAMING HOT butts on the ground isn’t littering. But the thing I hate most about smoking is how much it draws other substances into the mix.
There are few things in life better than a cold beer and cigarette. There’s something about how the two mix that makes for a delightful pleasure. Go look outside any bar. The streets will be lined with smokers (or more likely vapers). It is also a well-studied fact that smokers tend to be drinkers and vice versa. They feed into each other. The more you drink, the more you smoke, on and on. This is a weakness for me.
I’ve quit smoking twice in my life, which is a funny thing to say because if I actually did it the first time, I wouldn’t have needed to do it twice. Both times I did it with patches. I didn’t follow the recommended schedule though. It was way too fast and I think in total I ended up wearing patches for months and months. Maybe even a year or two. But whatever. I didn’t smoke. The first time I was in my mid-20s. I’d been a smoker since my teens and it had started to get in the way of the active lifestyle I wanted to live. And by active, I mean being able to go up and down two flights of stairs without having to catch my breath. So I used the patches and after a few slips here and there, I was an ex-smoker. I lasted like that for almost a decade. But about 4-5 years ago I started up again. My life was really stressful for a variety of reasons and I was under a lot of pressure at work. Afterward, I spent most evenings having beers at a bar not far from the place I worked or hanging at a co-worker’s house. The temptation to smoke wasn’t there at the beginning. It grossed me out. I didn’t even really want to be around the smokers. And this is the tricky part about addiction: you’re never “over” it.
Addicts are never free. Never. You are either managing it or chasing it. There’s a fantastic line from an Elliott Smith song that sums it up:
My momma told me,
"Baby stay clean, there's no in-between."
Eventually, my addiction snuck up on me and swallowed me whole. I was a smoker again. And I was drinking too much to boot.
How did you learn to drink? Was it your parents? Your friends? Did you learn in college? Afterward? I think I was about 14 or 15 when I took my first real alcoholic drink. It was vodka, straight-up thank you, and it was about the worst thing I’d ever had. It burned and made my face hot. My parents are not heavy drinkers. They barely drank, in fact. At a cookout, they might have a pina colada or a few beers but I can count on two fingers the number of times I’ve ever seen them intoxicated. Drinking wasn’t something we did. My ma takes her wine with ice so she’s not a boozer by any means. In high school, my friends and I would sneak six packs down to a spot on a lake and have a few with a fire. Cigarettes too, of course. But we were underage and it was hard to come by so this didn’t happen often.
College was where I really learned to drink. During orientation, I went to a frat party and got wasted. I didn’t throw up or blackout or anything dramatic but the freedom of being able to make a bad decision and get away with it was wonderful. I’ll let you know what a dumbass I was at this time: I thought the frat was super cool and I loved the frat guys and wanted to pledge like yesterday. Holy shit was I a moron in my youth. Anyways, once I got to school full time I made friends with a group of, let’s say, partiers. Nothing crazy. It wasn’t the movie Blow or anything like that. But we drank and smoked and did the grass and some other stuff on occasion. It wasn’t unusual for us to go to the local bars once or twice a week, usually after we did a little pre-gaming beforehand. If you don’t know what pre-gaming is, first congratulations for being a well-adjusted human being. Second, it’s when you drink booze before going out to drink booze so you can both drink more booze but spend less $$$. Mostly we sat around each other’s rooms watching Phish videos or playing video/drinking games.
The point was to get fucked up. One night, me and two other friends drank 60 beers. We built a tower of the empties as a monument to our greatness. I (oh god am I really going to admit this in print?) COLLECTED BEER BOTTLES OF ALL THE BEERS I DRANK. I told you I was a douche. Yep, I had them all displayed inside our living room (once we moved off campus). We didn’t drink to “take the edge off” or “enjoy” it. We drank to get drunk. I mean, duh. What’s the point otherwise? How else could we make bad decisions and encourage others to do the same?
After college, that didn’t change much. I still hung out with people from school and when we’d get together we’d party like always had. It was just normal. We’d smoke and drink and whatever. Eventually, I moved and settled into another social group that was mostly artsy folks. Plenty of boozers, smokers, and otherwisers to choose from there. The patterns I established in college just kept going. I didn’t have kids or any serious responsibilities so getting drunk on weekends was fine. As long as it didn’t interfere with my job, who cares? Party on!
The years rolled on, the social group changes, some people have kids, some don’t. But again, the habits, the patterns, stay the same. There was never an impetus to change. I suppose I could have considered my long-term health, but lolz - what 20-something does that? At some point, I embraced a more healthy lifestyle, started exercising regularly (something I’d been missing since college), and stopped most of my bad habits. One remained: drinking. Since I was being really health-conscious I couldn’t drink that many calories. This meant drinking only once per week. And while well-intentioned, it ensured I would make THE MOST of that one night.
You can see the pattern by now, right? I never really learned to drink responsibly. All I know is binge-drinking. All I like, if we’re being honest, is binge-drinking. Now, my numbers are a lot smaller in my 30s than they were in my 20s. I can’t put them away like I used to. And since I am a baby and hate the taste of liquor, or anything stronger than light beer, I think I was spared some hardship. I really do. That isn’t to say my jeans are clean. I’ve been doing this for 15 years or so. It’s a hard pattern to change.
See, the thing with addicts is that we can’t sit still. In addition to never being free from our addictions, we are also never satisfied with them either! There is no joy on either side. When we are using, we feel awful. When we aren’t, we feel incomplete. An addiction becomes part of you and when you turn from it, there’s a great sense of loss and panic. Imagine if you cut off your own hand. Could you even do it? That’s why addiction is so brutal and cruel.
My therapist, Dr. Richard Nygard, recently turned me on to some radical therapies where people try to learn how to change their drinking habits. It seems interesting and something I would like to do. Kind of. Eh, I’ll get to it when I get to it. Really though, this is the struggle. In order to improve yourself and live a healthier life, you have to walk away from something that is comforting yet destructive. It seems an obvious choice.
Being couped up, living a Groundhog Day-like existence isn’t helping anything. Let me tell you that. Everyone is looking for a release. It’s no secret that retail alcohol sales have increased. Sometimes, I’m not sure what else we’re supposed to do with ourselves. I live in Minnesota. We’re used to hunkering down for long winters. Booze is helpful with that too. But what we have been experiencing so far in 2020 has been unlike anything seen before.
A few months ago I was hanging out with a friend. This was right before THE RONA hit. We were having a fire (winter fires are the best fires) and he took out a cigarette and offered me one. At this point, I hadn’t had one in 3-4 years. I turned it down. But later in the night, I took him up on his offer. And over the following weeks, I slowly started smoking more and more of them but only when I was drinking, a delusional compromise I made with myself. Addicts love to make insane compromises with ourselves. In the end, I was smoking without even drinking. And that’s where I am today.
It’s important to be so very gentle with an addict when they slip. A lot of the behavior is fueled by shame. Adding to that shame doesn’t make it better. It only gives the addict something to hold on to. Honesty is important too. Now that I’m older, I can sense when things are getting dicey. I’ll be honest. They MAD dicey right now.
I don’t know how or when this will end. I know I don’t want to be a smoker on the reg again. It’s gross and expensive. I also know that right now, I want a crutch, a blanky, to comfort me. I wish I had better self-soothing skills, it’s on the list, but right now things are scary. For a lot of reasons. Hang in there and be kind to yourself. It’s a fucked up situation and we’re all doing our best.