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."