On my belly on the floor, back arched, arms stretched out behind with fingers locked, trying my hardest to hold my breath. Maybe attempting put us in touch with our primal selves, she said, "you were born to to this". And that was it, my pose collapsed in laughter along with everyone else.
All my life has been leading up to this. Doing Kundalini Yoga with a bunch of pissheads and junkies in various states of physical disrepair and mental anguish on an institutional carpet.
A particularly difficult move had to be repeated thirty times but the teacher promised "by the end you'll be flying". So, addicts all, we chased that high. It's one of the weirdest afternoons I've had in a while.
Three days in, I'm getting some of the jokes. While some people genuinely mispronounce words, others pretend to, certain phrases have been give verbal versions of my sarcastic quotes. In intensive communities like this all sorts of language and in-jokes develop, as a way of bonding, and also just of getting though. All is not what it seems.
The group includes older Cockneys who genuinely use rhyming slang, Muslim rude boys with patois I don't understand ("raggle fraggle"?). But all it not what it seems. I'd noticed a little plaster on someone's inner ear - and today they explained that it was from last week's acupuncture session. All week I'd thought it was some sort of 'gang thing'.
[Also, this morning in 'community meeting' there was an amnesty - where we could admit if we've been 'using' without getting thrown out. After a long long silence, someone admitted he had been smuggling in coffee.]
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 93-109. Passages on both the Enfield Tennis Academy and The Wheelchair Assassins of Southern Quebec. Tribes with their own ways like the one I am becoming part of.
"It turns out Lemon Pledge, when it's applied in pre-play stasis and allowed to dry to a thin crust, is a phenomenal sunscreen, UV rating like 40+, and the only stuff anywhere that can survive a three-set sweat."
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Day 11: Shackles
Wednesdays are our day off the from the treatment centre (we attend Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 9:30 - 4:30). The day we are expected to have doctors appointments, sort out benefits, see probation officers, and otherwise do things to unpick the messes that addicts tend to have created around themselves. As part of the programme, we also have to attend three AA or NA (it's worth pointing out that, as far as I can see so far, out of our group of ten only me and one other are there 'simply' for alcohol - the rest are also addicted to cocaine, heroin and probably a whole pile of other things I haven't heard of) meetings a week - outside of the centre.
But I haven't been to a meeting today, just spent my time Dealing With It. Crossing things off my list and seeing one of my oldest friends who has helped out with some practical things I was worrying about. I'm realising that I've spent a lot of the last few years 'isolating' myself and handling everything alone: free (to drink, mainly). But real friends will be there for you and just make life more fun. Other people do unexpected things. By myself I just go round and round the same patterns thinking it's the best and only way to be.
People thinking about having a baby say they suddenly start noticing pregnant women and prams everywhere. In the same way, references to bloody rehab and alcoholics are cropping up all over the shop. Today I pressed play on my favourite podcast This American Life, hoping to be drawn into one of the tales ordinary people in exceptional circumstance that they do so well, but the first story of the episode was flipping well about a teenage girl sent to a drug treatment. YAWN. I didn't leave it playing for long enough to find out much more. I need to escape from this some of the time. (I'll listen to it later, I'm sure it's brilliant as ever).
One of the other ways we are expected to fill out days off (and evenings, weekends etc) is doing the 'work' we are set. My first task, due in next week, is to write... 'my LIFE STORY'. WHAT. "We expect about three or four pages of A4", the councellor said, looking at me sympathetically like she knew this was a lot to ask. (Another thing worth noting here is that, out of the ten of us, two don't have English as a first language and and three or four seem to have have pretty big problems with reading and writing).
Now, I thought, I have written journals obsessively for more than twenty years and have a degree in English (which included a dissertation of the diaries of literary women that got a first), have sheaves of rubbish semi-autobiographical short stories, caches of abandoned blogs, shoeboxes of letters and inboxes of emails: where do I start? Should I hand in a 60,000 word multi-perspectival Nabakov pastiche with an unreliable narrator? Or perhaps I should play around with the structure - write from the viewpoint of my unborn great-great-grandaughter in 2100 who, having retreated to a post-nuclear island, has found remnants of my Livejournal and is tracing back the reasons why she, too, is an alcoholic? Or should I just drop this box in the middle of the group therapy circle and say analyse this?
What I will no doubt do, however, is write five or six standard pages with just the right amount of subtle mentions of my father's mental illness or my own 'lack of self worth' to make them think they can really get somewhere with me, or that I can get somewhere with myself.
Does anyone get the feeling that my arrogance might be a 'block' to my 'recovery' (as well as my tendency to place any 'treatment' language in sarcastic quotation marks)?
OK, despite this facetiousness, I've had a pretty good day and am enthusiastic about the programme and think that it will work for me. Maybe it's the Campral, or maybe it's the amount of coca cola I've been drinking (a fucktonne) but I've certainly not wanted booze as much today.
I'm finding that the times of the day that used to be the worst for me: first thing in the morning (panic-waking at 5.30am, checking my phone and outbox to find out what the hell I did the night before, then later - throbbing hungover and guilty - trying to get to work, act straight) and late in the evening (when the solo drinking would tip over from liberating to desperately lonely) are now actually the best times. I am happy to wake fairly fresh and clean, remembering what I did; and in the evenings am almost proud to have got through the day without it. I know it's really really early days but there have been - fleeting - genuine moments of joy each day.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 78-93: The introduction of some highly confusing double/triple agents in some kind of international espionage (including I think a transvestite), "the screeming meemies" (a weaker version of the howling fantods) and a good description of a herd of stampeding feral hamsters ("tornadic, locomotival").
But I haven't been to a meeting today, just spent my time Dealing With It. Crossing things off my list and seeing one of my oldest friends who has helped out with some practical things I was worrying about. I'm realising that I've spent a lot of the last few years 'isolating' myself and handling everything alone: free (to drink, mainly). But real friends will be there for you and just make life more fun. Other people do unexpected things. By myself I just go round and round the same patterns thinking it's the best and only way to be.
People thinking about having a baby say they suddenly start noticing pregnant women and prams everywhere. In the same way, references to bloody rehab and alcoholics are cropping up all over the shop. Today I pressed play on my favourite podcast This American Life, hoping to be drawn into one of the tales ordinary people in exceptional circumstance that they do so well, but the first story of the episode was flipping well about a teenage girl sent to a drug treatment. YAWN. I didn't leave it playing for long enough to find out much more. I need to escape from this some of the time. (I'll listen to it later, I'm sure it's brilliant as ever).
One of the other ways we are expected to fill out days off (and evenings, weekends etc) is doing the 'work' we are set. My first task, due in next week, is to write... 'my LIFE STORY'. WHAT. "We expect about three or four pages of A4", the councellor said, looking at me sympathetically like she knew this was a lot to ask. (Another thing worth noting here is that, out of the ten of us, two don't have English as a first language and and three or four seem to have have pretty big problems with reading and writing).
Now, I thought, I have written journals obsessively for more than twenty years and have a degree in English (which included a dissertation of the diaries of literary women that got a first), have sheaves of rubbish semi-autobiographical short stories, caches of abandoned blogs, shoeboxes of letters and inboxes of emails: where do I start? Should I hand in a 60,000 word multi-perspectival Nabakov pastiche with an unreliable narrator? Or perhaps I should play around with the structure - write from the viewpoint of my unborn great-great-grandaughter in 2100 who, having retreated to a post-nuclear island, has found remnants of my Livejournal and is tracing back the reasons why she, too, is an alcoholic? Or should I just drop this box in the middle of the group therapy circle and say analyse this?
What I will no doubt do, however, is write five or six standard pages with just the right amount of subtle mentions of my father's mental illness or my own 'lack of self worth' to make them think they can really get somewhere with me, or that I can get somewhere with myself.Does anyone get the feeling that my arrogance might be a 'block' to my 'recovery' (as well as my tendency to place any 'treatment' language in sarcastic quotation marks)?
OK, despite this facetiousness, I've had a pretty good day and am enthusiastic about the programme and think that it will work for me. Maybe it's the Campral, or maybe it's the amount of coca cola I've been drinking (a fucktonne) but I've certainly not wanted booze as much today.
I'm finding that the times of the day that used to be the worst for me: first thing in the morning (panic-waking at 5.30am, checking my phone and outbox to find out what the hell I did the night before, then later - throbbing hungover and guilty - trying to get to work, act straight) and late in the evening (when the solo drinking would tip over from liberating to desperately lonely) are now actually the best times. I am happy to wake fairly fresh and clean, remembering what I did; and in the evenings am almost proud to have got through the day without it. I know it's really really early days but there have been - fleeting - genuine moments of joy each day.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 78-93: The introduction of some highly confusing double/triple agents in some kind of international espionage (including I think a transvestite), "the screeming meemies" (a weaker version of the howling fantods) and a good description of a herd of stampeding feral hamsters ("tornadic, locomotival").
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Day 10: You're Just An Empty Cage Girl
In the encyclopedia of my hangovers it was in no way spectacular but one day a few weeks ago I decided to accept whatever help was on offer to deal once and for all with the old dipsomania. Doctors' appointments and referrals, week of detox, treatment centre, AA meetings, phonecalls, texts, meetings with HR, leaving my job with the goodwill of my colleagues, financial plans. So when another drug, to "help with cravings" was mentioned, I asked have it prescribed. Three times a day, starting this morning, I am swallowing Acamprosate, also known as Campral.
"It is not completely understood exactly how Campral works in the brain to help people maintain alcohol abstinence, but it is believed to restore a chemical balance in the brain that is disrupted by long-term or chronic alcohol abuse. In other words, it helps the brain begin working normally again."
But, when I talked about this to a wise (well, she knows a lot about drugs, having spent much of her life conducting scientific experiments with them in her own bloodstream) woman outside an AA meeting she pointed out - something I really already knew - that no medication is going to eradicate the thirst. My problem is not physical. And even if I did get rid of the cravings (and this is my most immediate and dearest wish), I am still left with the question of why I had that need in the first place - and what on earth will now fill the void. "You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird", said Tori, a good friend in my teenage years whose words keep coming back to me lately.
The essential paradox of AA/NA, and the treatment centre, is of course that the thing we are trying to eradicate from our lives - the thing we used to obsessively seek out and consume - is the very thing we spend all day discussing, analysing, reminiscing about. Many would say that it is simply replacing one way of being fixated with it for another. Sometimes, like at points today, I get the feeling that the highest achievement in the rehab centre would be to 'graduate' and have learnt enough about the treatment process to come back and lead meetings there in the future; telling the newcomers repeatedly about what you took, what it made you do, and how you kicked it; or even - best of all - to become an addiction councellor yourself.
When I'm in a spiky mood like this I fear it will be impossible to ever leave the world of addiction, that I'll be defined by alcohol - or, more accurately, defined by its absence - forever. But I want to do other things. Like I'm thinking of re-starting my teenage business of selling homemade greetings cards, getting into small-time illegal surgery, or re-populating some of the abandoned Scottish islands with hares. I want to blog about something else.
Before I even went to my first AA meeting - back in 2007 - I spent a long time reading everything on the internet that criticised the organisation. Things like Moderation Management (MM) or articles on atheist forums.
While I have so much more I could say here and my thoughts are extremely conflicted (for example, I would definitely still call myself an atheist), as I said above, I am taking help wherever I can find it and some of this stuff seems to be working right now (ten days!). These subjects and my problems with some of the 12-step ideology - which leads to the whole dubious area of ~spirituality~ - are something I will no doubt come back to later. Right now I'm just not having a drink one day - one hour, one minute - at a time.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 66-78. Contained (a critic/reviewer's fave, this one) a sentence which could be used to describe the novel itself: (about a tennis nightmare) "The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge."
Also, I'm coming to think that IJ is similar to the Bible (or the AA Big Book, for that matter) in that you could be inclined to believe that your 'reading' for the day just happens to be cosmically apposite for whatever is going on in your life. I suppose it helps that this passage was about a girl addicted to pot (surprisingly, though, one drug I've always disliked). Re: suicide (attempt): "Do you understand? It's not wanting to hurt myself it's wanting to not hurt."
"It is not completely understood exactly how Campral works in the brain to help people maintain alcohol abstinence, but it is believed to restore a chemical balance in the brain that is disrupted by long-term or chronic alcohol abuse. In other words, it helps the brain begin working normally again."
But, when I talked about this to a wise (well, she knows a lot about drugs, having spent much of her life conducting scientific experiments with them in her own bloodstream) woman outside an AA meeting she pointed out - something I really already knew - that no medication is going to eradicate the thirst. My problem is not physical. And even if I did get rid of the cravings (and this is my most immediate and dearest wish), I am still left with the question of why I had that need in the first place - and what on earth will now fill the void. "You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird", said Tori, a good friend in my teenage years whose words keep coming back to me lately.
The essential paradox of AA/NA, and the treatment centre, is of course that the thing we are trying to eradicate from our lives - the thing we used to obsessively seek out and consume - is the very thing we spend all day discussing, analysing, reminiscing about. Many would say that it is simply replacing one way of being fixated with it for another. Sometimes, like at points today, I get the feeling that the highest achievement in the rehab centre would be to 'graduate' and have learnt enough about the treatment process to come back and lead meetings there in the future; telling the newcomers repeatedly about what you took, what it made you do, and how you kicked it; or even - best of all - to become an addiction councellor yourself.
When I'm in a spiky mood like this I fear it will be impossible to ever leave the world of addiction, that I'll be defined by alcohol - or, more accurately, defined by its absence - forever. But I want to do other things. Like I'm thinking of re-starting my teenage business of selling homemade greetings cards, getting into small-time illegal surgery, or re-populating some of the abandoned Scottish islands with hares. I want to blog about something else.
Before I even went to my first AA meeting - back in 2007 - I spent a long time reading everything on the internet that criticised the organisation. Things like Moderation Management (MM) or articles on atheist forums.
While I have so much more I could say here and my thoughts are extremely conflicted (for example, I would definitely still call myself an atheist), as I said above, I am taking help wherever I can find it and some of this stuff seems to be working right now (ten days!). These subjects and my problems with some of the 12-step ideology - which leads to the whole dubious area of ~spirituality~ - are something I will no doubt come back to later. Right now I'm just not having a drink one day - one hour, one minute - at a time.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 66-78. Contained (a critic/reviewer's fave, this one) a sentence which could be used to describe the novel itself: (about a tennis nightmare) "The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge."
Also, I'm coming to think that IJ is similar to the Bible (or the AA Big Book, for that matter) in that you could be inclined to believe that your 'reading' for the day just happens to be cosmically apposite for whatever is going on in your life. I suppose it helps that this passage was about a girl addicted to pot (surprisingly, though, one drug I've always disliked). Re: suicide (attempt): "Do you understand? It's not wanting to hurt myself it's wanting to not hurt."
Monday, 28 March 2011
Day 9: First day in rehab
What a day. Too physically and emotionally exhausted (I've laughed and cried a lot) to write much apart from to say that the treatment centre and the group are amazing and diverse and hilarious. I'm surprised there has never been a sit-com about a rehab group, and if not I'm pitching one right now.
1. First thing I had to give a urine test with the toilet door open (I guess to prevent Withnail-type trickery) and was just unable to 'go' - had to keep going back into the waiting room and drinking more water and trying to undo my perfectly reasonable human pee-shy conditioning.
2. There is no coffee allowed in the centre and - although I go home alone every night and cycle in every morning - for the first two weeks, I have to be accompanied at lunchtimes if I leave the building - in case I decide the group therapy and hand-holding is just too much and nip off to the pub / Costa.
3. Yes. Handholding. In a circle, at least four times a day, reciting the serenity prayer. It's actually pretty awesome.
4. In the afternoon we had a session with this brilliant 'non-religious'(?) nun in her 70s, who has worked with addicts and in prisons for years. At one point she lost her red marker pen even though it was right in front of her and one of the 'old timers' (he's been there about six weeks) whispered to me "she's pissed". This is obv the oldest joke in the recovery book, but it made me giggle and giggle.
5. I'll probably go back tomorrow.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 65-66 (Don't scoff - there are reading groups in Ireland who meet to discuss Finnegans Wake one page a week - this would take approx 13 years). I should probably be ploughing through the AA Big Book instead but, after a day of (watered-down) 12 Step Stuff, I prefer some more esoteric, morally-ambivalent literature. That or Snog, Marry, Avoid.
1. First thing I had to give a urine test with the toilet door open (I guess to prevent Withnail-type trickery) and was just unable to 'go' - had to keep going back into the waiting room and drinking more water and trying to undo my perfectly reasonable human pee-shy conditioning.
2. There is no coffee allowed in the centre and - although I go home alone every night and cycle in every morning - for the first two weeks, I have to be accompanied at lunchtimes if I leave the building - in case I decide the group therapy and hand-holding is just too much and nip off to the pub / Costa.
3. Yes. Handholding. In a circle, at least four times a day, reciting the serenity prayer. It's actually pretty awesome.
4. In the afternoon we had a session with this brilliant 'non-religious'(?) nun in her 70s, who has worked with addicts and in prisons for years. At one point she lost her red marker pen even though it was right in front of her and one of the 'old timers' (he's been there about six weeks) whispered to me "she's pissed". This is obv the oldest joke in the recovery book, but it made me giggle and giggle.
5. I'll probably go back tomorrow.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 65-66 (Don't scoff - there are reading groups in Ireland who meet to discuss Finnegans Wake one page a week - this would take approx 13 years). I should probably be ploughing through the AA Big Book instead but, after a day of (watered-down) 12 Step Stuff, I prefer some more esoteric, morally-ambivalent literature. That or Snog, Marry, Avoid.
Sunday, 27 March 2011
Day 8: Always Crashing in the Same Car
Now that I'm off the sedatives, the drinking dreams have started: Last night I dropped a bottle of wine on kitchen tiles and was scooping it up in a bucket and lapping the drink, like a dog, along with dirt from the floor and broken glass.
And there's this recurring memory of once driving on The Island, so drunk that I had to close one eye to see the line in the middle of the road, when I swerved and jolted onto the grass verge. I managed regain control of the car and carried on driving but this muscle memory - of literally going off the rails - keeps jolting though my mind and body. Dropping off to sleep JOLT I'm awake again. Freewheeling on my bike in the sun JOLT I could have crashed.
I want to delete the memories of moments like this, to erase all the mistakes and addictions and hurts, so I am a fresh page. I've tried to do this - mainly with (clever, this one) more booze - but I now know this isn't possible and I'm going to have to find ways to manage the past. To Deal With It.
Despite all this, I've had a good day today. I'm drinking litres of coke, smoking fistfuls of cigarettes and thinking about drinking - but I'm fairly happy and clear-minded. After an encouraging AA meeting - where someone told me about the possibility of a flat (I'm facing the reality that I have to move house urgently) and I identified a woman who could be a potential sponsor, I went for a swim in the outdoor lido. Twenty lengths (one kilometre), clean and pure, of breast-stroke and backstroke (looking up through blue-tinted goggles at an even bluer sky). A week off the booze, that toxic taste is beginning to leave my skin and I'm sure all the baths and swimming are helping. I have always loved to be submerged.
Someone told me, I'm not sure if it's medically true, that it takes ten days for the last of the alcohol to leave your system. Perhaps next weekend I'll go for a sauna just to make sure the residue of that particular poison is gone? I'm going to have to make sure I have ways to fill the hours in the coming weeks when I'm not in the treatment centre.
So, rehab proper starts tomorrow and I'm weirdly excited about the people I will meet, the things we will do and how I will change. I don't want to be jolting along forever.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 60-65 read in the park in the sun. This is not a lot but included an eight-page (in tiny print) endnote (I was wrong yesterday to call them footnotes) that I considered skipping but was glad I didn't cuz it's the funniest maddest bit yet: The fictional and increasingly-psychotic filmography of James O. Incandenza, contains film synopsis such as "Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict and a deaf-mute convict together in 'solitary confinement' and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other."
Also, with reference to my dreams above, a nightmare sequence describes "the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake, it's just been... overlooked."
Plus more tennis.
And there's this recurring memory of once driving on The Island, so drunk that I had to close one eye to see the line in the middle of the road, when I swerved and jolted onto the grass verge. I managed regain control of the car and carried on driving but this muscle memory - of literally going off the rails - keeps jolting though my mind and body. Dropping off to sleep JOLT I'm awake again. Freewheeling on my bike in the sun JOLT I could have crashed.
I want to delete the memories of moments like this, to erase all the mistakes and addictions and hurts, so I am a fresh page. I've tried to do this - mainly with (clever, this one) more booze - but I now know this isn't possible and I'm going to have to find ways to manage the past. To Deal With It.
Despite all this, I've had a good day today. I'm drinking litres of coke, smoking fistfuls of cigarettes and thinking about drinking - but I'm fairly happy and clear-minded. After an encouraging AA meeting - where someone told me about the possibility of a flat (I'm facing the reality that I have to move house urgently) and I identified a woman who could be a potential sponsor, I went for a swim in the outdoor lido. Twenty lengths (one kilometre), clean and pure, of breast-stroke and backstroke (looking up through blue-tinted goggles at an even bluer sky). A week off the booze, that toxic taste is beginning to leave my skin and I'm sure all the baths and swimming are helping. I have always loved to be submerged.
Someone told me, I'm not sure if it's medically true, that it takes ten days for the last of the alcohol to leave your system. Perhaps next weekend I'll go for a sauna just to make sure the residue of that particular poison is gone? I'm going to have to make sure I have ways to fill the hours in the coming weeks when I'm not in the treatment centre.So, rehab proper starts tomorrow and I'm weirdly excited about the people I will meet, the things we will do and how I will change. I don't want to be jolting along forever.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 60-65 read in the park in the sun. This is not a lot but included an eight-page (in tiny print) endnote (I was wrong yesterday to call them footnotes) that I considered skipping but was glad I didn't cuz it's the funniest maddest bit yet: The fictional and increasingly-psychotic filmography of James O. Incandenza, contains film synopsis such as "Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict and a deaf-mute convict together in 'solitary confinement' and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other."
Also, with reference to my dreams above, a nightmare sequence describes "the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake, it's just been... overlooked."
Plus more tennis.
Saturday, 26 March 2011
Day 7: The first weekend
I mentioned the other day that it has taken me a long time to get here. One of the things I have done over that time, perhaps subconsciously, is to obsessively read and watch books and films about alcoholics, and in particular those who have gone through 'treatment' (and especially those who have come out the other side to become fabulously successful). Of course I've read Bukowski and Hemingway and all those unreformed geniuses but that is not helpful right now.
Maybe next to the 'Painful Lives' section in WH Smiths (this exists) there could be a shelf for 'Rehab Memoirs'. Oh God.
So, I've consumed Chick Lit:
I was won-over by this (Marian Keyes being the most acceptable chick lit author to Guardian readers). I particularly respected the fact that she allowed Rachel to have a 'relapse' after she came out of treatment, admitting that it's not one simple narrative of recovery.
Hollywood (28 Days with Sandra Bullock):
I hated this, partly because of Bullock's over-acting (see above) but mainly because the crucial, redemptive act in the film is for Sandra - after coming out of rehab - to dump her 'bad-influence' boyfriend who is MCNULTY FROM THE WIRE. NO! This is not what I want to see!
Moralising American Memoirs:
Blah. (I know I shouldn't judge but this reminded me of that bit in the West Wing when one of the characters (not Leo McGary) admits to President Bartlett that he's in AA and Barlett's like "So what, you drunk a few beers in college?")
British Journalist Memoirs:
I kind of had problems with this as I did not feel the author had significant alcohol problems until she started going out with a cocaine dealer - and all the chaos that entailed. Also, it was hard to shake the feeling that the book was written as much to further her journalistic career as for any genuine literary value (ahem). I dunno though.
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey:
This book affected me emotionally more than anything I have ever read and after I closed the last page, sometime last year, a few days into my last significant attempt to quit (I lasted a few weeks), I just sobbed and sobbed. A book written completely in first-person, present tense - which very hard to sustain. The quote below does not correspond to the ideas of AA, but nevertheless I love it:
"Addiction is a decision. An individual wants something, whatever that something is, and makes a decision to get it. Once they have it, they make a decision to take it. If they take it too often, that process of decision making gets out of control, and if it gets far out of control, it becomes an addiction. At that point the decision is a difficult one to make, but it is still a decision."
My Booky Wook by Russell Brand:
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Ol' Russ but I have been thoroughly charmed and captivated by him since I interviewed him six or seven years ago (although, to my regret, he did not try to womanize me). Below is one of the most eloquent descriptions of addiction I have ever heard:
"All of us, I think, have a vague idea that we're missing something. Some say that thing is God; that all the longing we feel - be it for a lover, or a football team, or a drug - is merely an inappropriate substitute for the longing we're supposed to feel for God, for oneness, for truth. And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need."
And of course Infinite Jest, which while being partly about addiction and featuring a treatment centre, is about so much more.
[The one, key, text about all this that I have not read is the Alcoholics Anonymous 'Big Book', although it has been sitting beside my bed with its blue heft for months now. I think it reminds me too much of a bible.]
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: I sat in a Brick Lane coffee shop and read pages 49-60 feeling like a dickhead (slow progress but this book demands close reading). More about Hal Incandenza and the Enfield Tennis Academy, smoking pot ("Hal likes to get high in secret but the bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high"), some howling fantods and a forensically graphic description of a death following a bungled drugs robbery.
Oh and the beginning of the footnotes: You have to read this with two bookmarks - one to follow the main novel and one to keep track of the elaborate expositions at the back. Onwards.
Maybe next to the 'Painful Lives' section in WH Smiths (this exists) there could be a shelf for 'Rehab Memoirs'. Oh God.
So, I've consumed Chick Lit:
I was won-over by this (Marian Keyes being the most acceptable chick lit author to Guardian readers). I particularly respected the fact that she allowed Rachel to have a 'relapse' after she came out of treatment, admitting that it's not one simple narrative of recovery.Hollywood (28 Days with Sandra Bullock):
I hated this, partly because of Bullock's over-acting (see above) but mainly because the crucial, redemptive act in the film is for Sandra - after coming out of rehab - to dump her 'bad-influence' boyfriend who is MCNULTY FROM THE WIRE. NO! This is not what I want to see!
Moralising American Memoirs:
Blah. (I know I shouldn't judge but this reminded me of that bit in the West Wing when one of the characters (not Leo McGary) admits to President Bartlett that he's in AA and Barlett's like "So what, you drunk a few beers in college?")British Journalist Memoirs:
I kind of had problems with this as I did not feel the author had significant alcohol problems until she started going out with a cocaine dealer - and all the chaos that entailed. Also, it was hard to shake the feeling that the book was written as much to further her journalistic career as for any genuine literary value (ahem). I dunno though.A Million Little Pieces by James Frey:
This book affected me emotionally more than anything I have ever read and after I closed the last page, sometime last year, a few days into my last significant attempt to quit (I lasted a few weeks), I just sobbed and sobbed. A book written completely in first-person, present tense - which very hard to sustain. The quote below does not correspond to the ideas of AA, but nevertheless I love it:"Addiction is a decision. An individual wants something, whatever that something is, and makes a decision to get it. Once they have it, they make a decision to take it. If they take it too often, that process of decision making gets out of control, and if it gets far out of control, it becomes an addiction. At that point the decision is a difficult one to make, but it is still a decision."
My Booky Wook by Russell Brand:
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Ol' Russ but I have been thoroughly charmed and captivated by him since I interviewed him six or seven years ago (although, to my regret, he did not try to womanize me). Below is one of the most eloquent descriptions of addiction I have ever heard:"All of us, I think, have a vague idea that we're missing something. Some say that thing is God; that all the longing we feel - be it for a lover, or a football team, or a drug - is merely an inappropriate substitute for the longing we're supposed to feel for God, for oneness, for truth. And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need."
And of course Infinite Jest, which while being partly about addiction and featuring a treatment centre, is about so much more.
[The one, key, text about all this that I have not read is the Alcoholics Anonymous 'Big Book', although it has been sitting beside my bed with its blue heft for months now. I think it reminds me too much of a bible.]
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: I sat in a Brick Lane coffee shop and read pages 49-60 feeling like a dickhead (slow progress but this book demands close reading). More about Hal Incandenza and the Enfield Tennis Academy, smoking pot ("Hal likes to get high in secret but the bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high"), some howling fantods and a forensically graphic description of a death following a bungled drugs robbery.
Oh and the beginning of the footnotes: You have to read this with two bookmarks - one to follow the main novel and one to keep track of the elaborate expositions at the back. Onwards.
Friday, 25 March 2011
Last day of detox
Each morning this week when I've gone for my appointment (breathalyser test and drug administration) with the nurse, I have felt well-rested and buoyant. I am definitely not going to cry today, I think, before the tears start welling then flowing when I talk about how frustratingly, baffingly tempting it is to drink each sunny afternoon; about the relief that things are finally out in the open - with work, friends, family; about my shame at being in this situation in the first place; and of my hope for the future.
Alongside the Regents Canal where I am going to be cycling every day for the next three months, an immense building is being constructed - probably 'luxury canal-side apartments', or maybe halls of residence for Queen Mary University. I plan to observe this everyday and try to figure out just how buildings are built - the materials bought on barges, the cranes, the concrete structure followed by scaffolding and glass. Try and use my brain to observe and learn something rather than the flitting-on-the-surface way it usually functions, white-knuckling, from drink to hangover to drink (do brains have knuckles?). By June, when I hope to 'graduate' from the programme, the building should be complete.
It is spring now and there's so much going on in this boisterous part of London and I want to get stimulation from little things outside myself: the women in hijabs leaning on the park fence stretching their calf muscles after a run, the Dad on a racer bike dragging his joyous little son on a scooter, the confused and lonely heron in the drained boating lake.
This afternoon I went for my preliminary meeting at the treatment centre I will be attending full-time for the next twelve weeks. Waiting in reception, someone asked me if I was one of the counsellors, I guess due to my relatively smart attire and freshish face, or maybe my university non-accent. No, I said, I'm just here.
I chatted with some of the inmates smoking outside (from afar, you can identify a group of recovering addicts by the plume of smoke) - men with faces that have seen as much pain as cocaine - and they told me about the sandwich van that comes daily (I intend to take pack-lunches of superfoods, I thought), the bus pass they give you (I'm a cyclist) and the free weekly acupuncture sessions (now that I could be down with). They were in tracksuits and T-shirts and I began to worry about what I'm going to wear. My wardrobe consists of corporate office wear, vintage dresses and slinky nightclub outfits from American Apparel. Maybe I'll buy some jogging bottoms? But at the same time - while I want to stop job drinking - I don't want to change who I am completely (some work to do here, I feel).
There are many things I am scared of getting into this but near the top of the list is losing my edge. I don't want to become someone sanctimonious who tuts at teenagers drinking alcopops, neither do I want to acquire evangelical eyes and talk in therapy platitudes.
But the truth is, my edge was blunted some time ago. Like, I'll hear a great song or new band and think 'this'll sound fantastic in a club or live - with other people' but by the time I get there (if indeed I get there at all after having too many over-excited sharpeners at home), I'll be too trolleyed to take in, let alone enjoy or remember the music or conversation.
Where was my edge when I was physically ejected from a nightclub in front of loads of people I know - kicking and screaming against bouncers - for reasons I don't remember and have been too embarrassed to find out? Was it cool to be crying at parties to anyone who would listen about how my boyfriend left me because of my drinking while swigging from a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass of wine in the other? Was it cool to ruin my friend's poetry reading with coked-up incomprehensible heckles? Was it cool to be lying on the floor of a pub toilet, with people too weary to do anything to move me? It was some years ago I began to get the inkling I was no longer being invited to the hippest parties due to my increasingly embarrassing and burdensome behaviour.
But it was not just the parties, or my ex, or the diminishing spurious edge that got me to this point. It was, to borrow another AA phrase (they are often, annoying, perfect), that I was sick and tired. Sick and tired of being sick and tired.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 27-49. Not quite sure what's going on, but there's more tennis, a futuristic medical attache to a middle eastern king, dates named after corporate products, repression, mental illness and at least one virtuoso image or analogy per page:(on a father's death)"Remember... there are two ways to lower a flag to half mast... one way is just to lower the flag... you can also just raise the pole."
Note: First use in the book of the title of this blog: "Roaches give him the howling fantods". Hooray!
(I heard you had a Spotify playlist of all the bands mentioned in Losing My Edge)
Alongside the Regents Canal where I am going to be cycling every day for the next three months, an immense building is being constructed - probably 'luxury canal-side apartments', or maybe halls of residence for Queen Mary University. I plan to observe this everyday and try to figure out just how buildings are built - the materials bought on barges, the cranes, the concrete structure followed by scaffolding and glass. Try and use my brain to observe and learn something rather than the flitting-on-the-surface way it usually functions, white-knuckling, from drink to hangover to drink (do brains have knuckles?). By June, when I hope to 'graduate' from the programme, the building should be complete.
It is spring now and there's so much going on in this boisterous part of London and I want to get stimulation from little things outside myself: the women in hijabs leaning on the park fence stretching their calf muscles after a run, the Dad on a racer bike dragging his joyous little son on a scooter, the confused and lonely heron in the drained boating lake.
This afternoon I went for my preliminary meeting at the treatment centre I will be attending full-time for the next twelve weeks. Waiting in reception, someone asked me if I was one of the counsellors, I guess due to my relatively smart attire and freshish face, or maybe my university non-accent. No, I said, I'm just here.
I chatted with some of the inmates smoking outside (from afar, you can identify a group of recovering addicts by the plume of smoke) - men with faces that have seen as much pain as cocaine - and they told me about the sandwich van that comes daily (I intend to take pack-lunches of superfoods, I thought), the bus pass they give you (I'm a cyclist) and the free weekly acupuncture sessions (now that I could be down with). They were in tracksuits and T-shirts and I began to worry about what I'm going to wear. My wardrobe consists of corporate office wear, vintage dresses and slinky nightclub outfits from American Apparel. Maybe I'll buy some jogging bottoms? But at the same time - while I want to stop job drinking - I don't want to change who I am completely (some work to do here, I feel).
There are many things I am scared of getting into this but near the top of the list is losing my edge. I don't want to become someone sanctimonious who tuts at teenagers drinking alcopops, neither do I want to acquire evangelical eyes and talk in therapy platitudes.
But the truth is, my edge was blunted some time ago. Like, I'll hear a great song or new band and think 'this'll sound fantastic in a club or live - with other people' but by the time I get there (if indeed I get there at all after having too many over-excited sharpeners at home), I'll be too trolleyed to take in, let alone enjoy or remember the music or conversation.
Where was my edge when I was physically ejected from a nightclub in front of loads of people I know - kicking and screaming against bouncers - for reasons I don't remember and have been too embarrassed to find out? Was it cool to be crying at parties to anyone who would listen about how my boyfriend left me because of my drinking while swigging from a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass of wine in the other? Was it cool to ruin my friend's poetry reading with coked-up incomprehensible heckles? Was it cool to be lying on the floor of a pub toilet, with people too weary to do anything to move me? It was some years ago I began to get the inkling I was no longer being invited to the hippest parties due to my increasingly embarrassing and burdensome behaviour.
But it was not just the parties, or my ex, or the diminishing spurious edge that got me to this point. It was, to borrow another AA phrase (they are often, annoying, perfect), that I was sick and tired. Sick and tired of being sick and tired.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 27-49. Not quite sure what's going on, but there's more tennis, a futuristic medical attache to a middle eastern king, dates named after corporate products, repression, mental illness and at least one virtuoso image or analogy per page:(on a father's death)"Remember... there are two ways to lower a flag to half mast... one way is just to lower the flag... you can also just raise the pole."
Note: First use in the book of the title of this blog: "Roaches give him the howling fantods". Hooray!
(I heard you had a Spotify playlist of all the bands mentioned in Losing My Edge)
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Detox day four
One of the best things about this week so far is that I've some decent sleep (thanks sedatives!). For a long time now I've either been hungover or - after nights when I haven't drunk - a little sleep deprived. BUT I'm still feeling a bit frazzled today so, being a multimedia sort of cat, I thought I would give a visual representation of my day (which involved a long cycle ride round to Stratford and the Olympic Park site) and my new healthy lifestyle.
But since every camera or decent phone I've owned has been lost or stolen on drunken nights, or drowned with beer - all I have are my new felt tips, so I have to take 'Ink Polaroids' like Belle and Sebastian used to (before they went all Goddy). I am an awesome drawerer, as you can see:
Going to have a bath now and to try to relax (too much fags and coke), then off to a happening AA meeting.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: I read pages 17-27 (not much I know, but these closely-typed, intense pages contained only four paragraphs). It's getting onto my fave stuff now - about a dude's obsessive, 'rapacious' (word I learnt in this section) addiction to bad drugs. So much I could quote, talk about here - not least that DFW knows - but I'll go with: "He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before" and "He began to grow disgusted with himself for waiting so anxiously for the promised arrival of something that had stopped being fun anyway. He didn't even know why he liked it anymore... and had long ago forbidden himself to smoke dope around anyone else."
Another note: I think it's kind of set in the future because although it uses terms semi-familiar to us - like 'modem', 'e-note', 'teleputer', calling her number and 'using just audio' - the book was published in 1997. Also, DFW has cleverly predicts the attention spans and mindsets of many C21st internet/media users/addicts like me:
"He was unable to stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds. The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense."
OK. Tomorrow's my last day of the medical detox so maybe more of my own words and less rubbish drawings.
But since every camera or decent phone I've owned has been lost or stolen on drunken nights, or drowned with beer - all I have are my new felt tips, so I have to take 'Ink Polaroids' like Belle and Sebastian used to (before they went all Goddy). I am an awesome drawerer, as you can see:
Going to have a bath now and to try to relax (too much fags and coke), then off to a happening AA meeting.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: I read pages 17-27 (not much I know, but these closely-typed, intense pages contained only four paragraphs). It's getting onto my fave stuff now - about a dude's obsessive, 'rapacious' (word I learnt in this section) addiction to bad drugs. So much I could quote, talk about here - not least that DFW knows - but I'll go with: "He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before" and "He began to grow disgusted with himself for waiting so anxiously for the promised arrival of something that had stopped being fun anyway. He didn't even know why he liked it anymore... and had long ago forbidden himself to smoke dope around anyone else."
Another note: I think it's kind of set in the future because although it uses terms semi-familiar to us - like 'modem', 'e-note', 'teleputer', calling her number and 'using just audio' - the book was published in 1997. Also, DFW has cleverly predicts the attention spans and mindsets of many C21st internet/media users/addicts like me:
"He was unable to stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds. The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense."
OK. Tomorrow's my last day of the medical detox so maybe more of my own words and less rubbish drawings.
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Detoxification Day Three
In a strangely landscaped park in the middle of Canary Wharf, under the shadow of the Citigroup or whatever building, I sit on a bench swallowing the menu of pills I have been given: Thiamine (deficiency of which can be a factor in alcohol-induced brain-damage), Vitamin B (most alcoholics need more of this) and Chlordiazepoxide (as explained below), washed down with an overpriced latte from Carluccios. I bought it feeling entitled as just two weeks ago, I wore smart clothes and was let into corporate headquarters - interviewing people at investment banks with titles like Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, or attending job interviews at the newspaper group on the 9th floor of Number One Canada Square.
But now I feel removed from it all. Security passes round their necks, men in suits and women in wrap dresses and ridiculous heels talk on phones, smoke and drink coffee from sucky cups. I am in an ill-fitting, garish dress with messy hair, a bit shaky and keep almost crying.
I gave it up voluntarily and I'm glad I did but I am sure there will be points in the next few months when I will wonder what the hell I've done: In an NHS centre with people just released from prison, or who have never had a job. People going through the same thing as me.
I think about drinking all the time. It's there at the back of my mind like tinnitus. I would almost go so far as to call it evil - this repeating urge to go into that off licence and buy a packet of fags and a bottle of rum - the thing would make it all go away for an hour or two but potentially, eventually, destroy me. It is terrifying but I am trying to not even entertain the idea. Self actualisation: I am now a non-drinker. Not drinking is what I do.
It's taken a long time to get here. To accept that this is my story. Of course, when I was 18 or 19, it was not my plan to be in rehab when I was 29 and it's only in the last few months I've come to realise - a banal observation probably to most people - that life does not turn out how you expected or wanted. I guess I've been lucky up til now.
Although I'm not at work, I am finding things hard to manage. The plumbing in our house is broken and all the sink water - noddles and grease and brown stuff - is filling up the bath. I am waiting for the plumber to arrive. I have to sort out finding a new flat and going onto (incapacity?) benefits: phonecalls and forms and emails. I've got a friend coming round to stay tonight but I can't wash the bed sheets as the washing machine's not working. It all seems too much - but I have to remember that I'm medically sedated right now, so no wonder I'm overwhelmed.
An AA saying, particularly for the early days, is "Keep it Simple" - but that's hard when things just don't stop. And without getting pissed to break life up, the days and hours and seconds are even more relentless.
FOOTNOTE: Infinite Jest update. I woke up early after another dreamless night of drugged sleep and read (densely-written) pages 1-16 ('Year of Gold') which I have forced myself through at least twice before yet remember little of. So far it seems to be mainly about tennis and contained words I was unsure of including 'lapidary', 'fourier', 'mimetic', 'tertiary' and 'gurneyside'. However, I liked the simile of a nervous chest that "bumps like a dryer with shoes in it". More literary criticism tomorrow!
But now I feel removed from it all. Security passes round their necks, men in suits and women in wrap dresses and ridiculous heels talk on phones, smoke and drink coffee from sucky cups. I am in an ill-fitting, garish dress with messy hair, a bit shaky and keep almost crying.
I gave it up voluntarily and I'm glad I did but I am sure there will be points in the next few months when I will wonder what the hell I've done: In an NHS centre with people just released from prison, or who have never had a job. People going through the same thing as me.
I think about drinking all the time. It's there at the back of my mind like tinnitus. I would almost go so far as to call it evil - this repeating urge to go into that off licence and buy a packet of fags and a bottle of rum - the thing would make it all go away for an hour or two but potentially, eventually, destroy me. It is terrifying but I am trying to not even entertain the idea. Self actualisation: I am now a non-drinker. Not drinking is what I do.
It's taken a long time to get here. To accept that this is my story. Of course, when I was 18 or 19, it was not my plan to be in rehab when I was 29 and it's only in the last few months I've come to realise - a banal observation probably to most people - that life does not turn out how you expected or wanted. I guess I've been lucky up til now.
Although I'm not at work, I am finding things hard to manage. The plumbing in our house is broken and all the sink water - noddles and grease and brown stuff - is filling up the bath. I am waiting for the plumber to arrive. I have to sort out finding a new flat and going onto (incapacity?) benefits: phonecalls and forms and emails. I've got a friend coming round to stay tonight but I can't wash the bed sheets as the washing machine's not working. It all seems too much - but I have to remember that I'm medically sedated right now, so no wonder I'm overwhelmed.
An AA saying, particularly for the early days, is "Keep it Simple" - but that's hard when things just don't stop. And without getting pissed to break life up, the days and hours and seconds are even more relentless.
FOOTNOTE: Infinite Jest update. I woke up early after another dreamless night of drugged sleep and read (densely-written) pages 1-16 ('Year of Gold') which I have forced myself through at least twice before yet remember little of. So far it seems to be mainly about tennis and contained words I was unsure of including 'lapidary', 'fourier', 'mimetic', 'tertiary' and 'gurneyside'. However, I liked the simile of a nervous chest that "bumps like a dryer with shoes in it". More literary criticism tomorrow!
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Detox day two
Two and a half days sober is about the right time to be making big plans for the future, I think. On my cycle into the treatment centre this morning I was drawing up long reading lists of hefty non-fiction, exercise regimes, and plans for charming gifts and letters to delight my friends and family. In short: I am probably going to become the best person - morally, intellectually and physically - there has ever been.
In the clinic, the nurse asked me how I was feeling. 'Surprisingly relaxed and I managed to get a good night's sleep last night' (each time in the past I have tried to stop drinking, sleep tends to escape me til 3,4,5am). Yes, she said, unsurprised, that would be the large quantity of sedative drugs we have been giving you.
Aaah.
So I'm feeling pretty great right now - in a kind of cocoon - and see no reason why I cannot remain on these drugs forever. Replace one substance for another in a heroin/methadone style. However, my dose of Chlordiazepoxide will now be reduced throughout the week to reduce the possibility of addiction - one that people like me have a particular skill at aquiring.
But while I was being grandiose this morning, I know that there are little things I can do each day to build up my life - rather than repeatedly smashing it down like I have done for years. For instance, each day I will read 20 - 30 pages of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, the novel that gave this blog (set up when I was pissed) its title but I've always failed to finish. I think I'm also going to start answering my phone when it rings. I heard people do that.
In the clinic, the nurse asked me how I was feeling. 'Surprisingly relaxed and I managed to get a good night's sleep last night' (each time in the past I have tried to stop drinking, sleep tends to escape me til 3,4,5am). Yes, she said, unsurprised, that would be the large quantity of sedative drugs we have been giving you.
Aaah.
So I'm feeling pretty great right now - in a kind of cocoon - and see no reason why I cannot remain on these drugs forever. Replace one substance for another in a heroin/methadone style. However, my dose of Chlordiazepoxide will now be reduced throughout the week to reduce the possibility of addiction - one that people like me have a particular skill at aquiring.
But while I was being grandiose this morning, I know that there are little things I can do each day to build up my life - rather than repeatedly smashing it down like I have done for years. For instance, each day I will read 20 - 30 pages of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, the novel that gave this blog (set up when I was pissed) its title but I've always failed to finish. I think I'm also going to start answering my phone when it rings. I heard people do that.
Monday, 21 March 2011
First day of detox
According to the internet, Chlordiazepoxide (sometimes called Librium), is a sedative/hypnotic drug and benzodiazepine derivative. The drug has amnestic, anxiolytic, hypnotic and skeletal muscle relaxant properties.
Chlordiazepoxide is used in the treatment of alcoholism for its sedating and anxiety-relieving effects, which help relieve the symptoms of acute alcohol withdrawal.
I'm treating this like my new job. I cycled down Regents Canal to the clinic in the morning; had my blood pressure, temperature and state-of-mind monitored (the latter through a tick-box form) and gave a breathalyser test (it has to be zero each morning for me to continue). I was then administered 20mg of Chlordiazepoxide, with 80mg more to take over the next 24 hours. This is to continue for five days and I am to take it easy, eat good food, plenty of liquids and not operate heavy machinery.
But cycling back - in a good, hopeful mood - the spring sunshine glinting off the water, I passed the pub where I often used to stop for a quick, lone drink on my way home from work to my (ex) boyfriend. And the idea flashed through me that the best way to celebrate this fresh start would be with a drink. WHAT WHAT WHAT?
I remember, the morning after I had been violently attacked - partly due to my extreme drunkeness - having a cigarette outside of the hospital, seeing a pub across the road and thinking a pint would go down well. It's madness, a kind of insanity I know.
Despite everything. Despite the fact that I have given up my job to undergo this programme and sort out my alcohol problem, despite all the pain the my drinking has caused me, all that I have lost and all that I stand to gain through quitting - the thought of and desire for a drink still comes through me regularly regularly like an electric shock: When I hear a good song, or the sun comes out, or I feel angry, or I want to phone someone and tell them something nice - or when I feel like writing. Alcohol is so intertwined in nearly every area of my life and this is why it will take some time to untangle, to be re-programmed.
It is not going to be easy and I don't know if I will ever be free of that impulse. If I ever could be, that would be a truly amazing day. I've had so many messages of good luck from friends over the last couple of days, I am a bit overwhelmed. So many people are willing me to get though this and I am hoping with all my heart that I can.
Chlordiazepoxide is used in the treatment of alcoholism for its sedating and anxiety-relieving effects, which help relieve the symptoms of acute alcohol withdrawal.
I'm treating this like my new job. I cycled down Regents Canal to the clinic in the morning; had my blood pressure, temperature and state-of-mind monitored (the latter through a tick-box form) and gave a breathalyser test (it has to be zero each morning for me to continue). I was then administered 20mg of Chlordiazepoxide, with 80mg more to take over the next 24 hours. This is to continue for five days and I am to take it easy, eat good food, plenty of liquids and not operate heavy machinery.
But cycling back - in a good, hopeful mood - the spring sunshine glinting off the water, I passed the pub where I often used to stop for a quick, lone drink on my way home from work to my (ex) boyfriend. And the idea flashed through me that the best way to celebrate this fresh start would be with a drink. WHAT WHAT WHAT?
I remember, the morning after I had been violently attacked - partly due to my extreme drunkeness - having a cigarette outside of the hospital, seeing a pub across the road and thinking a pint would go down well. It's madness, a kind of insanity I know.
Despite everything. Despite the fact that I have given up my job to undergo this programme and sort out my alcohol problem, despite all the pain the my drinking has caused me, all that I have lost and all that I stand to gain through quitting - the thought of and desire for a drink still comes through me regularly regularly like an electric shock: When I hear a good song, or the sun comes out, or I feel angry, or I want to phone someone and tell them something nice - or when I feel like writing. Alcohol is so intertwined in nearly every area of my life and this is why it will take some time to untangle, to be re-programmed.
It is not going to be easy and I don't know if I will ever be free of that impulse. If I ever could be, that would be a truly amazing day. I've had so many messages of good luck from friends over the last couple of days, I am a bit overwhelmed. So many people are willing me to get though this and I am hoping with all my heart that I can.
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Older posts
Deadline
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
I know I said I've only lived in London for seven years (not forty) but - when I lived in Zone 4 in the first year and used to go out to nightclubs I'd read about - I definitely, while knocking back 'bus juice' (plastic water bottles of vodka and lemonade), smoked on the tube sometimes. Swear down. Maybe I was just confident enough to style it out?
Going to make my brother lock me up in Manchester for the rest of the week, so tonight I'm very tempted to get the Central Line into Soho and revisit some of those places.
Monday, 14 March 2011
Beauty is in the street
I've lived in London for seven years now, almost to the day. I heard it takes seven years for your body to completely renew itself: for each cell of skin or bone or the-ends-of-your-hair to be freshly created, and the old ones flushed away. So, when people divorce after seven years saying "you are not the man/woman I knew", they are technically accurate.
There's this super-funny, super-harsh messageboard I used to frequent. They were the kind of clever, seen-it-all bitches I wanted to be friends with when I first arrived - with a back pack and a one way ticket - in this unforgiving city. But things didn't go as stellar for me as I wanted or expected and some of the jibes from the other on there hurt me. I was too thin-skinned, so left.
But I still check back in there occasionally and one day last summer someone mentioned my name. "She's a sad, lonely drunk these days" another replied before listing - some accurate, some exaggerated - my frantic efforts to avoid being alone over the last couple of years. I suddenly had that feeling - which maybe you internet heads might know - a sickening drop in my stomach and a speed of pulse. It's all catching up on me. They know.
I was under-employed at the time, so I bought a day bus pass and just got buses all day; stary, upset and hungover. Just got on one bus after another until I reached an unknown terminal somewhere in zone six before doing it again. I did this for five or six hours, stopping once to buy a disgusting margarine sandwich somewhere under some railway tunnel near Brixton, with a side order of sexual harassment.
Always on the top deck, level with the shop signs of the betting shops and chicken houses and corner stores and Tesco Metros and Queens Heads and Tanning Special Offer Sunshine and empty shops with sofas and kettles again and again. London is massive.
And I've done this again today, in my strange purgatory between leaving my job and starting my medical detox. I got on my bike, without any real route or plan apart from intending to stay outside all day (I believe the situationists and the psychogeographers have some philosophy behind this 'drift' or 'derive' - but I would not claim such meaning).
I went along Regents Canal past the place where I fell in (with my bike) once, alone at 3am, after a night of booze and drugs. I sat in the spot in Trafalgar Square where I left a bag full of new clothes and make-up after a shopping trip turned into a solitary pub crawl. Through Soho and familiar doorways to clubs and all-night bars. Down Brick Lane where, each year, a new influx of 22-year-old girls walk dressed up in groups of three. There have been many fun times but, over the seven years, they have been gradually outweighed by the lonely, embarrassing and awful. I am coming to see that alcoholism is progressive, almost exponentially so.
What did I discover today? That spring is, relentlessly, on its way. That, despite the huge volume of tears I have shed over the last few years, I have never cried when I'm on my bike. That the booze I am desperately trying to throw down my gullet before my deadline (which an editor of mine used to call a "life line") is actually being rejected by my body in convulsions which I fight.
It is time. I am a different person than I was seven years ago. I think.
Sunday, 13 March 2011
We scream in cathedrals
When I used to take drugs - when a friend of ours experimented on us with "2cis and 2cbs" and American "mood stabilizers" off of the internet - I would swallow something then wait nervously. Like standing in line for a rollercoaster. I know I have agreed to do this, but just how amazing or terrible is is going to be?
And that is kind of how I feel now again, after agreeing to this medical detox and 12-week treatment programme. The logical, intellectual, long-term-thinking part of me know it is the right thing to do. But the part of me that controls my immediate needs and desires is freaking the fuck out. Jolting and bucking against my 'true path' like an out-of-control horse.
I've already sobbed with grief, knowing I have to leave my best friend booze. Now I just want her to die.
I'm frustrated at the wonderful NHS. I had been meant to start my detox programme on Monday and had been preparing myself in my head for it. Spent that last week thinking of the Last Day (meant to be today) and the Last Drink: the glass (bottle) of champagne (cava) that I would drink alone; straight-backed and clear-headed overlooking the Thames in some nice bar (park bench).
But due to bureaucratic confusion about what borough I live in (moved house from Hackney to just inside the Tower Hamlets border a couple of months ago), it looks like it's going to be delayed for one more week. I've already left my job and have neither the funds nor the muscle for a week of sparkling wine by the river. I need to be locked up for a week, because - now - I do not have it within myself to stop drinking until I am forced.
In AA, there is a pattern on speech which I noticed and hated immediately, but - after XX months keep finding myself falling into. It's basically "I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn't" - and it's all based on that fucking AA thing of submission and denial of self. "I thought I knew what sobriety was, until SIX YEARS after I stopped drinking when I realised it was something else", "I was trying to do the right thing, but it was the WRONG thing". Never show any confidence in your own thoughts or behaviour, turn your will over to the programme or some sort of god.
I find it hard to submit, although that's perhaps what I will have to do. I cannot decide whether agreeing to do this is taking control or letting go of control. It is something, anyway.
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
SHOCK ME SANE
A text from my flatmate this afternoon: "Can we all have a chat this evening?"
Not this again.
I quit my job yesterday. And now I am being thrown out of (/asked to leave) my house. I don't know if I can take this again. (And X blocked me on Twitter and Facebook).
When I first got the triple whammy of unemployed/homeless/heartbroken in 2008, I just about the strength and optimism to handle it - although I think I'm still recovering from the shock of those few awful months (which included losing weight and spending time on both sides of the law - as a convicted drink driver and as the victim of violent attempted rape).
I'm not sure I can do this again. The suicidal feelings are increasing in both frequency and strength. I've let people down once too often, and can't bear to tell them I've fucked up again. For the last week, I had this 'day treatment' programme in my head as my last chance - but now that's been taken away and I don't know what's next.
When I told Dad I was probably maybe doing this for three months, his response was "I've spent three years of my life in psychiatric care, I hope it's less for you" (he's doing ok now). I was not unexpected.
Very self-pitying and boring I know. Bye. x
Monday, 7 March 2011
Sour abbatoir
It wasn't the out-of-the-way location, the tatty waiting room seats or the blank bureaucratic dealings that made me sob while I was waiting for the appointment: it was the smell.
It was the same sour odour that Dad noticed in the tiny caravan bedroom where I'd spent 48 hours hiding out after I got sacked from my job on the local paper, almost two years ago. He is a farmer and equated it to the smell from an ill sheep you are going to have to spray with a 'Red X' and send to the abattoir. A horrible all-too-corporeal smell that can can mean no good.
Not the same as simply the smell of booze, it's a sickly sweet or sour fragrance omitted from the pours of those of us whose internal organs - our livers and kidneys - are no longer able to process it all, so push the poison out though skin and fingernails and eyeballs. And although I rated myself "17/20" for physical health (and 4/20 for emotional and psychological health) in the dumb dumb forms I've had to fill in, that whiff - which I've known in bedrooms of ex-council flats and in "chilled out*" houseshares - will never not give me me the Howling Fantods.
So, while I usually only have to deal wth just me, by wilingly admitting myself, I will have to gag on the consequences of others. This is probably what I deserve.
*On gumtree flatshare ads, always thought this was code for what drugs they took. "Chilled out" = weed "Up For It" = pills, "Creative" = coke
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Assessment
While it's over-dramatic if I say that I'm trying to get myself "committed", I have been asking to have myself "referred into residential treatment" AKA rehabilition AKA rehab. And I remember discovering, at 16 or so, the slogan "rehab is for quitters" scratched into a Primal Scream 7' and thinking it was the coolest stance ever.
But things at work, at home and inside of my mixed-up my head have become intolerable. (Or "unmanageable" as they say in AA meetings - aproximately 70 of which I have attended over the last three or four years, while trying to hold down various short-lived jobs.)
I went to be assessed. All afternoon I'd been reading a book written by a smug comedian, so it was hard not to adopt his smartarse, analytic tone when the nurse asked me questions at Tower Hamlets Drugs and Alcohol Advisory Service (logo: A representation of Tower Bridge with the towers replaced by wine glasses. Sweet).
The questions including "Why do you drink?" and "Do you have any cultural or spiritual needs?" had a two-inch grey box for answers.
I don't really understand the question or what you expect me to answer here. While I find these concepts - in particular that of the "spiritual" - difficult to define, I think that everyone has some needs in these areas: nebulous and vast and stupid. But, in particular, those of us seeking help for chronic and disastrous alcohol and drug problems obviously have some kind of "needs" - but our inability to fulfill them, or to capture and destroy the reasons why we drink is the very reason why we are here.
At this point the nurse looked at me straight, blinking, and handed the form over to me to fill in myself (I'd already told her I was a "journalist" and she kept referring to my "lovely job" and my "learnedness" although I had, crying/pale/broken, described things as neither). In swift, slanted handwiriting, overflowing the grey box and ending by saying "I am desperate".
An awareness that the above question were facile doesn't meant that I need to be here any less that any of the other white-knuckled, tense-jawed 'cases'. I am not doing this lightly. This is my last chance.
But, on refection, the question about cultural/spiritual needs (which I knew at the time was about if I need a prayer room but chose to take literally), is aptly apt. The need or "lack" that I have within me is most immediately answered by my regular terrible compulsion to drink loads of booze which gives me temporary relief followed by trouble.
However, I recognize this same feeling in the way I can smoke a cigarette - inhaling like a motherfucker - in 30 seconds, or how I fixate on a new friend and want to obliterate my personality with theirs, or how I crave my regular outdoor swim, to be submerged in cool water where I can't breathe, or - by extension - drowning.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Gales
I grew up beside cliffs, on an island famous for its high winds. I have never been afraid of heights. A physically brave child, I climbed onto shed roofs or threw my sturdy body from high walls onto hay below.
Always seeking sensation, raging against those who warned me away from the edge: My life was rough and windy and tangled.
Once, on a night of gales, our puppy sheep dog, chasing rabbits, was lost over the cliff. Once, when my Dad was high, he killed another dog, although when I've asked him about it lately he does not remember.
When I was about 16 a teacher showed us a video about Leah Betts. "This is biased propagnada," I said (I was an annoying precocious teen), "when I leave this small-minded island, I intened to try all the drugs I can - in an educated and inquisitive way - I'll never die."
I stand-by my teenage myself which is why I find it so hard to face up to where I am now: a 29-year-old woman about to admit myself into residential rehabilitation for a longterm chronic alcohol problem. What happened?
Lately, I've been reading some old diaries. In September 1999, just before I left home for university, I wrote a hilariously arrogant list of all the things I wanted to achieve after I escaped 'the rock', including, 'be top of the class', 'join the newspaper and modelling agencies', 'read and collect everything', 'take drugs', 'flirt with the best looking boys (and girls[!!]). I was so full of potential and hope.
However, I also, perceptively, write: "this world of art/fashion/literature/rock and roll that so attracts me - could be my downfall".
So, 12 years later here I am with a lot of stories but also an alcohol problem and a whole heap of dissatisfaction and loneliness.
In three months time I will turn 30 and I do not know where I will be.
When I was about 11, my Dad was so ill that he went round the farmhouse smashing all the windows one-by-one. It was October and the northerly/westerly winds flew through the farmhouse, whisking my adolescent papers from my desk. But when the doctors with sedatives and ambulances arrive I still shouted at them to go away. He loved me. He'd been taken by something beyond his control.
As the sedatives kicked in, I crouched with my Dad in a corner of my bedroom, sharing a banana. "You are my girl," he said. I wholly agreed even as he was sectioned and flown to the mental ward In Aberdeen - the same as the day I was born (but that's another story). And you ask where sense of drama come from?
And there's that, underlooked, Sylvia Plath poem about the gales in Yorkshire: "and the wind pours by like destiny, bending everything in one direction".
The north west winds have left me diagonal. No right angle to follow.
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
I know I said I've only lived in London for seven years (not forty) but - when I lived in Zone 4 in the first year and used to go out to nightclubs I'd read about - I definitely, while knocking back 'bus juice' (plastic water bottles of vodka and lemonade), smoked on the tube sometimes. Swear down. Maybe I was just confident enough to style it out?
Going to make my brother lock me up in Manchester for the rest of the week, so tonight I'm very tempted to get the Central Line into Soho and revisit some of those places.
Monday, 14 March 2011
Beauty is in the street
I've lived in London for seven years now, almost to the day. I heard it takes seven years for your body to completely renew itself: for each cell of skin or bone or the-ends-of-your-hair to be freshly created, and the old ones flushed away. So, when people divorce after seven years saying "you are not the man/woman I knew", they are technically accurate.
There's this super-funny, super-harsh messageboard I used to frequent. They were the kind of clever, seen-it-all bitches I wanted to be friends with when I first arrived - with a back pack and a one way ticket - in this unforgiving city. But things didn't go as stellar for me as I wanted or expected and some of the jibes from the other on there hurt me. I was too thin-skinned, so left.
But I still check back in there occasionally and one day last summer someone mentioned my name. "She's a sad, lonely drunk these days" another replied before listing - some accurate, some exaggerated - my frantic efforts to avoid being alone over the last couple of years. I suddenly had that feeling - which maybe you internet heads might know - a sickening drop in my stomach and a speed of pulse. It's all catching up on me. They know.
I was under-employed at the time, so I bought a day bus pass and just got buses all day; stary, upset and hungover. Just got on one bus after another until I reached an unknown terminal somewhere in zone six before doing it again. I did this for five or six hours, stopping once to buy a disgusting margarine sandwich somewhere under some railway tunnel near Brixton, with a side order of sexual harassment.
Always on the top deck, level with the shop signs of the betting shops and chicken houses and corner stores and Tesco Metros and Queens Heads and Tanning Special Offer Sunshine and empty shops with sofas and kettles again and again. London is massive.
And I've done this again today, in my strange purgatory between leaving my job and starting my medical detox. I got on my bike, without any real route or plan apart from intending to stay outside all day (I believe the situationists and the psychogeographers have some philosophy behind this 'drift' or 'derive' - but I would not claim such meaning).
I went along Regents Canal past the place where I fell in (with my bike) once, alone at 3am, after a night of booze and drugs. I sat in the spot in Trafalgar Square where I left a bag full of new clothes and make-up after a shopping trip turned into a solitary pub crawl. Through Soho and familiar doorways to clubs and all-night bars. Down Brick Lane where, each year, a new influx of 22-year-old girls walk dressed up in groups of three. There have been many fun times but, over the seven years, they have been gradually outweighed by the lonely, embarrassing and awful. I am coming to see that alcoholism is progressive, almost exponentially so.
What did I discover today? That spring is, relentlessly, on its way. That, despite the huge volume of tears I have shed over the last few years, I have never cried when I'm on my bike. That the booze I am desperately trying to throw down my gullet before my deadline (which an editor of mine used to call a "life line") is actually being rejected by my body in convulsions which I fight.
It is time. I am a different person than I was seven years ago. I think.
Sunday, 13 March 2011
We scream in cathedrals
When I used to take drugs - when a friend of ours experimented on us with "2cis and 2cbs" and American "mood stabilizers" off of the internet - I would swallow something then wait nervously. Like standing in line for a rollercoaster. I know I have agreed to do this, but just how amazing or terrible is is going to be?
And that is kind of how I feel now again, after agreeing to this medical detox and 12-week treatment programme. The logical, intellectual, long-term-thinking part of me know it is the right thing to do. But the part of me that controls my immediate needs and desires is freaking the fuck out. Jolting and bucking against my 'true path' like an out-of-control horse.
I've already sobbed with grief, knowing I have to leave my best friend booze. Now I just want her to die.
I'm frustrated at the wonderful NHS. I had been meant to start my detox programme on Monday and had been preparing myself in my head for it. Spent that last week thinking of the Last Day (meant to be today) and the Last Drink: the glass (bottle) of champagne (cava) that I would drink alone; straight-backed and clear-headed overlooking the Thames in some nice bar (park bench).
But due to bureaucratic confusion about what borough I live in (moved house from Hackney to just inside the Tower Hamlets border a couple of months ago), it looks like it's going to be delayed for one more week. I've already left my job and have neither the funds nor the muscle for a week of sparkling wine by the river. I need to be locked up for a week, because - now - I do not have it within myself to stop drinking until I am forced.
In AA, there is a pattern on speech which I noticed and hated immediately, but - after XX months keep finding myself falling into. It's basically "I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn't" - and it's all based on that fucking AA thing of submission and denial of self. "I thought I knew what sobriety was, until SIX YEARS after I stopped drinking when I realised it was something else", "I was trying to do the right thing, but it was the WRONG thing". Never show any confidence in your own thoughts or behaviour, turn your will over to the programme or some sort of god.
I find it hard to submit, although that's perhaps what I will have to do. I cannot decide whether agreeing to do this is taking control or letting go of control. It is something, anyway.
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
SHOCK ME SANE
A text from my flatmate this afternoon: "Can we all have a chat this evening?"
Not this again.
I quit my job yesterday. And now I am being thrown out of (/asked to leave) my house. I don't know if I can take this again. (And X blocked me on Twitter and Facebook).
When I first got the triple whammy of unemployed/homeless/heartbroken in 2008, I just about the strength and optimism to handle it - although I think I'm still recovering from the shock of those few awful months (which included losing weight and spending time on both sides of the law - as a convicted drink driver and as the victim of violent attempted rape).
I'm not sure I can do this again. The suicidal feelings are increasing in both frequency and strength. I've let people down once too often, and can't bear to tell them I've fucked up again. For the last week, I had this 'day treatment' programme in my head as my last chance - but now that's been taken away and I don't know what's next.
When I told Dad I was probably maybe doing this for three months, his response was "I've spent three years of my life in psychiatric care, I hope it's less for you" (he's doing ok now). I was not unexpected.
Very self-pitying and boring I know. Bye. x
Monday, 7 March 2011
Sour abbatoir
It wasn't the out-of-the-way location, the tatty waiting room seats or the blank bureaucratic dealings that made me sob while I was waiting for the appointment: it was the smell.
It was the same sour odour that Dad noticed in the tiny caravan bedroom where I'd spent 48 hours hiding out after I got sacked from my job on the local paper, almost two years ago. He is a farmer and equated it to the smell from an ill sheep you are going to have to spray with a 'Red X' and send to the abattoir. A horrible all-too-corporeal smell that can can mean no good.
Not the same as simply the smell of booze, it's a sickly sweet or sour fragrance omitted from the pours of those of us whose internal organs - our livers and kidneys - are no longer able to process it all, so push the poison out though skin and fingernails and eyeballs. And although I rated myself "17/20" for physical health (and 4/20 for emotional and psychological health) in the dumb dumb forms I've had to fill in, that whiff - which I've known in bedrooms of ex-council flats and in "chilled out*" houseshares - will never not give me me the Howling Fantods.
So, while I usually only have to deal wth just me, by wilingly admitting myself, I will have to gag on the consequences of others. This is probably what I deserve.
*On gumtree flatshare ads, always thought this was code for what drugs they took. "Chilled out" = weed "Up For It" = pills, "Creative" = coke
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Assessment
While it's over-dramatic if I say that I'm trying to get myself "committed", I have been asking to have myself "referred into residential treatment" AKA rehabilition AKA rehab. And I remember discovering, at 16 or so, the slogan "rehab is for quitters" scratched into a Primal Scream 7' and thinking it was the coolest stance ever.
But things at work, at home and inside of my mixed-up my head have become intolerable. (Or "unmanageable" as they say in AA meetings - aproximately 70 of which I have attended over the last three or four years, while trying to hold down various short-lived jobs.)
I went to be assessed. All afternoon I'd been reading a book written by a smug comedian, so it was hard not to adopt his smartarse, analytic tone when the nurse asked me questions at Tower Hamlets Drugs and Alcohol Advisory Service (logo: A representation of Tower Bridge with the towers replaced by wine glasses. Sweet).
The questions including "Why do you drink?" and "Do you have any cultural or spiritual needs?" had a two-inch grey box for answers.
I don't really understand the question or what you expect me to answer here. While I find these concepts - in particular that of the "spiritual" - difficult to define, I think that everyone has some needs in these areas: nebulous and vast and stupid. But, in particular, those of us seeking help for chronic and disastrous alcohol and drug problems obviously have some kind of "needs" - but our inability to fulfill them, or to capture and destroy the reasons why we drink is the very reason why we are here.
At this point the nurse looked at me straight, blinking, and handed the form over to me to fill in myself (I'd already told her I was a "journalist" and she kept referring to my "lovely job" and my "learnedness" although I had, crying/pale/broken, described things as neither). In swift, slanted handwiriting, overflowing the grey box and ending by saying "I am desperate".
An awareness that the above question were facile doesn't meant that I need to be here any less that any of the other white-knuckled, tense-jawed 'cases'. I am not doing this lightly. This is my last chance.
But, on refection, the question about cultural/spiritual needs (which I knew at the time was about if I need a prayer room but chose to take literally), is aptly apt. The need or "lack" that I have within me is most immediately answered by my regular terrible compulsion to drink loads of booze which gives me temporary relief followed by trouble.
However, I recognize this same feeling in the way I can smoke a cigarette - inhaling like a motherfucker - in 30 seconds, or how I fixate on a new friend and want to obliterate my personality with theirs, or how I crave my regular outdoor swim, to be submerged in cool water where I can't breathe, or - by extension - drowning.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Gales
I grew up beside cliffs, on an island famous for its high winds. I have never been afraid of heights. A physically brave child, I climbed onto shed roofs or threw my sturdy body from high walls onto hay below.
Always seeking sensation, raging against those who warned me away from the edge: My life was rough and windy and tangled.
Once, on a night of gales, our puppy sheep dog, chasing rabbits, was lost over the cliff. Once, when my Dad was high, he killed another dog, although when I've asked him about it lately he does not remember.
When I was about 16 a teacher showed us a video about Leah Betts. "This is biased propagnada," I said (I was an annoying precocious teen), "when I leave this small-minded island, I intened to try all the drugs I can - in an educated and inquisitive way - I'll never die."
I stand-by my teenage myself which is why I find it so hard to face up to where I am now: a 29-year-old woman about to admit myself into residential rehabilitation for a longterm chronic alcohol problem. What happened?
Lately, I've been reading some old diaries. In September 1999, just before I left home for university, I wrote a hilariously arrogant list of all the things I wanted to achieve after I escaped 'the rock', including, 'be top of the class', 'join the newspaper and modelling agencies', 'read and collect everything', 'take drugs', 'flirt with the best looking boys (and girls[!!]). I was so full of potential and hope.
However, I also, perceptively, write: "this world of art/fashion/literature/rock and roll that so attracts me - could be my downfall".
So, 12 years later here I am with a lot of stories but also an alcohol problem and a whole heap of dissatisfaction and loneliness.
In three months time I will turn 30 and I do not know where I will be.
When I was about 11, my Dad was so ill that he went round the farmhouse smashing all the windows one-by-one. It was October and the northerly/westerly winds flew through the farmhouse, whisking my adolescent papers from my desk. But when the doctors with sedatives and ambulances arrive I still shouted at them to go away. He loved me. He'd been taken by something beyond his control.
As the sedatives kicked in, I crouched with my Dad in a corner of my bedroom, sharing a banana. "You are my girl," he said. I wholly agreed even as he was sectioned and flown to the mental ward In Aberdeen - the same as the day I was born (but that's another story). And you ask where sense of drama come from?
And there's that, underlooked, Sylvia Plath poem about the gales in Yorkshire: "and the wind pours by like destiny, bending everything in one direction".
The north west winds have left me diagonal. No right angle to follow.
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