Day 72: I grew the bones of a fighter while you were sleeping

It's embarrassing but I've been doing a lot of crying lately. I hope that, rather than this simply being self-pity and wallowing, it's a symptom of growing - the pain of forcing new paths through my synapses instead of turning to alcohol for reward, escape, motivation as I have done for years and years.

I'm also trying to be aware that not everything is about me + drink (or me + no drink). People like to create narratives for themselves, mark a turning point in the plot of their lives after which everything is different - whether that be quitting booze, dying your hair red (I watched six episodes of My So-Called Life last night), finding Jesus or being trapped in a freezer for 48 hours. I once visited my ex and he told me that he'd "barely eaten eggs since we broke up". I was glad that he was using the same unit of time as me.

[I know this song initially sounds really hateable but it turns out I love it]


INFINITE JEST: 795-808

Day 71: Bright lights / Cat fights / Leave me cold

In each meeting someone mentions something they used to do that I did too: trying to hide the sound of the ring pull while on the phone, forcing the drink down despite gagging, going to the off licence and buying two cans when it has never - on hundreds of occasions - been just two.

I'm sorry if the things I say on this blog are alarming. My mood is unstable but today - after going out last night to a cocktail bar and having an ok time - I'm bright and clear and happy to be sober (and not hungover).


INFINITE JEST: Pages 787-795
- The book's dead exciting at the moment and I've lots to say but my cyber cafe time limit will not allow just now.

Day 70: A couple of drunken nights rolling on the floor, is just the kind of mess I'm looking for

This is one of my Dad's favourite songs and I heard it a lot as a kid. On reflection, the lyrics might not have been the best influence...

Thirteen minutes left in the internet cafe...

I feel like I was a girl on a farm on an island and I've woken up and it's 12 years later and for some reason I'm sitting in AA meetings in London... sitting in Salvation Army centres and church halls with bunches of misfits, drinking tea from chipped mugs, listening to tales of people shitting the bed and laughing our heads off.

It didn't matter to me so much when I was drinking but now I am feeling the distance between me and my family. It would be nice to have somewhere safe to go and flop at the weekends - but my parents live 800 miles away. My brother's baby was due yesterday and I'm keeping my phone close. I am so excited about my first nephew and hope he never sees me drunk or is in any way affected by the fallout from my drinking.

Last night - Friday night - I was in my pyjamas at 9pm then suddenly felt restless and frustrated - playing bangin tunes and smoking tensely out of the window of my bedsit. Is this my life now?



INFINITE JEST: Pages 774-787
- heavy endnotes
- "The odd stunned quality of customarily crowded places at empty times".
- "low-risk trancendentalism".

Day 68: You're just a sinner I am told

There's a childlike felt-tip drawing on the wall by one of the previous clients, and I've only just realised that it is of a dog with its tail on fire.

Just Riding It Like A Soldier today.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 752-774
- ♥ Mario

Day 67: You see me on the bridge alot / But I never leapt over

Sometimes during the days of relentless therapy groups, I look around and think there's been a terrible mistake: That I've been put in the bottom class with the naughtiest boys and there's no way I can talk or spell my way out of it. But at other times, the things that happen in that circle of chairs move me so deeply, I think this is the best and most appropriate thing I have ever done.

We have weekly written work to hand in, and in the first three or four weeks had to write at least a paragraph (including ~feelings~) on thirty nine (39) examples from our past of the (mainly terrible) consequences of our drinking / drug use. Yesterday one of the guys - in his 50s, a former heroin user and dealer - was reading out his 'steps' and talked about his childhood love of sailing, fishing and "open seas"; and his once-tender relationship with the wife who divorced him in the 80s. Everyone in the circle, including the counsellors who must have seen so much, and men who have spent almost half their life in jail, were fighting back tears - at wasted lives and thrawted ambitions and broken hearts.

He said it was the first time he had thought about these things in years and was surprised to find emotions still there after decades of being avoided with drugs. Again, I felt glad that I have got here while I am still relatively young.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 725-752
- Wheelchair Assassin Marathe is in the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House! Two strands of the book coming together! Will we see more of this as I enter the final quarter of the book? Will it all start to make sense?

Day 65: I'm never gonna lose any of my old letters

My home broadband is still not working so it's another quick message from the cyber cafe. I just had to choose whether to spend my last pennies on food or internet...

So I don't really have time to tell you about our visit to the City Farm where the sight of a former crackhead sitting calmly on a rock coaxing three lambs to join him made us all smile, and where another of my addicts chums showed me how the fourth knuckle on his right fist is flattened from punching a cow.

Neither will I have time to tell you how I took some paracetamol for a headache today and remembered that, as I used to be constantly hungover, I was popping them every four hours all day. I used to feel that bad all the time.

Or the gossip I was told that, for several days before he got discharged, one of my peers was somehow passing off urine not his own in the twice-weekly piss test.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 679-725
- Drug dealing described as "operating a pharmaceutical company without a licence".
- Randy Lenz's cocaine paranoia of being followed by helicopters "that flew too high to see, hovering, the tiny chop of their rotors disguised as your own drumming heart".

Day 63: Lights

Yesterday I went to visit a couple of guys who have left the treatment programme (one finished the twelve weeks, one was asked to leave after eight), over in the 'supported housing' block where they live together with twenty or so other men with addiction problems. It was a strange place: the ensuite rooms, secure entry system and smell of stale smoke making it somewhere between a hotel, prison and student halls-of-residence.

Unexpectedly, a guy came into the communal kitchen who was discharged from the programme in my second week, following a relapse. The deterioration in his appearance was shocking. He had lost weight and teeth, and his hands and face were covered in sores which the others later told me were cigarette burns. He told me that, after leaving, he went on a bender culminating in a five-day stay in the psychiatric ward of Mile End Hospital.

He said he was back in AA meetings, trying to stay off the drink and feeling "better", but his wild eyes told a different story. It's a terrifying place back out there.

P.S. I was two months sober yesterday!



INFINITE JEST: Pages 666-679

Day 61: I've been getting away with it all my life

Spun out this afternoon. It's like the workings of the city and my mind have been exposed and it makes even less sense that when they were concealed. Layers of complexity multiply and I can't hang on. I cycle around the roundabout under Canary Wharf where there are trade entrances to glossy office blocks above and waiters from the Chinese restaurant smoke and I breathe in trapped traffic fumes and plastic bags. Through Hackney Wick, where on one side of the road a storage facility is packed with Rubiks Cubes of people's possessions and on the other side a newly built, empty apartment block is ready for them to move it all into.

I'm sometimes scared about what this treatment programme is turning me into. Endlessly self-absorbed and self-doubting, I'm shocked to find myself speaking platitudes that used to make my brain recoil. Is my moral compass wonky? We listen to people share about terrible behaviour and crimes they did under the influence, and praise them for being "honest". I hang out all day with jailbirds, junkies and crackheads and nod when one tells me proudly that his family is so well connected in Bangladesh that his brother literally got away with murder. I just lied when my landlord asked me if I had lost my job.

My thoughts won't stop today and I just want to escape myself. I want to eat my own teeth, crunched down with Coca Cola until I'm sick. I want to be put into a medically induced coma. I want the future now. I want to care for other people and not live on my own anymore. I want nothing more than to stay sober but I want a fucking drink.

But although I'm half-crazy right now some things are good. I found out yesterday that I neither had any of the Hepatitises nor any of the STDs. I hadn't thought I was worried about it until I burst into tears of relief when the nurse showed me the blood test results. This afternoon in the acupuncture session my ears kept spitting out the needles which made me laugh. And I love my bike.

My time's running out in the internet cafe. Bye x



INFINITE JEST: Pages 633-666

Day 59: Turn the page

I'm in a cafe because - disaster - my home internet is down, but I thought I'd quickly share some discoveries:

1. Mornings can be beautiful. I'll not go as far as to say that I'm a 'morning person' or to start eating breakfast but lately I have been at my calmest and happiest at the beginning of the day. The terror on waking - scanning my memory (/outbox) for the bad thing I did drunk the night before - is beginning to fade, and I have energy and optimism to face the day. Similarly, I've discovered it is possible for weekends to leave one rested rather than destroyed.

2. Steady progress can build to create a deeper satisfaction than dramatic rushes. Like many addicts, I have been used to instant gratification and I've also relied on bursts of hard work to get through. This is not the only way. Relationships are built on calm communication rather than drunk declarations.

3. I'm practically the Dalai Lama innit ^^^

4. I keep getting deja vu. Any theories on why?



INFINITE JEST: Pages 624-633, read in the Asda cafe with a view of the Asda carpark. remind me not to go in here again.

Day 58: These are just a couple of my cravings

I've given up putting on make-up in the morning. No matter how good the mood I am in, I end up crying it off by lunchtime. As I am still the only woman on the programme (and we've barely seen any tears from the guys, just some sniffs from time to time), there has been talk of me "expressing the feelings of the group". And let me tell you, being a conduit for the repressed emotions of seven raw and clucking addicts is no walk in the park. So I am exhausted, as usual.

As you can see, I've not written on here for a wee while. Blogger was down for a couple of days and then, on Saturday, it was my 30th birthday. I was a bit stressed about my birthday lunch - would anyone turn up, would me sober be unbearably awkward and boring etc - and on Friday morning, cycling into the rehab centre, I had a strong urge to throw everything in: quit the programme, cancel my friends and go away into some secret corner, alone with some bottles. I felt that the idea of me stopping drinking was laughable to impossible, and if I smiled and nodded to people on my birthday that I was happy and doing well I would be lying, because all I want to do is get pissed.

But I did not act on these thoughts and instead 'shared' them with my counsellor and in group therapy and - this is so amazing, truly incredible to me - I did not crave a drink all weekend. Despite my skepticism, it seems like something is working. I felt fairly relaxed with my friends on my birthday and so pleased that I was able to start a new decade sober, smiling, with no tears or drama. I've drank more than one person's quota in my life so far, and the second half of my twenties has been pretty miserable. I am looking forward with hope.

However, as I should have expected, the demons are not banished. Last night the drinking dreams - mixed up with pain, loneliness and insecurities from last few years - came again. To my horror, I am not perfectly cured quite yet.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 614-625
- I woke up at my friend's place on Sunday morning and felt something was missing - not my youth, but my copy of Infinite Jest (which I'd left at home). For the last two months I've carried it in my bag, kept it by my bed and am comforted by its weight and progressing bookmark. I was up early (no hangover!) and picked up a book (on the history of hip hop) from her shelf and was tearing though it before the others got up. Not only does it seem I've developed pretty serious a daily reading habit, but also other books feel easy to handle compared to DFW's elegant complexity. I think this is good.

Day 53: Lucky

For the past couple of months I have peed into one of these twice a week. Neat huh?
"Fully Integrated and sealed drug test cup with built in 5 panel drug test for Cannabis, Cocaine, Opiates, Amphetamine and Methamphetamine Each drug testing unit also incorporates a temperature strip(checks urine is "body temperature")"

I've also given regular breathalyser tests and, although I know I have not drank, I am always somehow relieved when the reading beeps up ZERO.

Perhaps I have been assimilated into AA's cult of 'gratitude' but I am feeling quite lucky to be where I am. I have the time and space for six more weeks to be selfish: to really find things out about myself and create a stable foundation for the future. I am not paying to be on this programme, and outside of myself I have few pressures and responsibilities. I intend to make the most of it.

And, apart the pain of giving up alcohol and examining all the horrible things it has done to me, I'm having some fun. I am lucky to be having a go at (/indulging in) 'treatment' and meeting all these new people. I would not have joined such a loopy and unpredictable group anywhere else. It is opening my eyes and making me reconfigure my priorities. For example, working with people who can barely read and write - but who often express themselves with eloquence that hurts my heart - makes my pedantic concerns over stuff like grammar seem petty and obscure. Hearing about life in prisons, in hospitals, in travelling communities, in large families, in Russia and in Stepney Green shows me spheres of experience orbiting far away from media-saturated graduates bitching on twitter.

I don't know. Something. I don't know. Nothing.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 580-614 (much read in the waiting room for the walk-in doctors surgery).
- Enjoyed the (typically) detailed account of the routine and bureaucracy of Don Gately's staff job at the Recovery House: "Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize."
- And Mario's view of adult life: "It's like some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy".
- And when Hal is sad: "This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important".
- This is great writing, I think; when DFW puts into words something I have often felt but never even known that I've felt, until I read it here and go crazy with the biro underlining. Wow.

Day 51: My mind is like a plastic bag

- On Saturday night, after an excellent afternoon with friends + kids on the other side of London, I spent two or three hours sitting in my room in a red party dress and red lipstick having an internal debate about whether to go to a big 30th birthday party (theme: "the decadent and the damned") in a club in Shoreditch. At 1am it started raining and made my decision for me, but I think I had got to the point of realising that turning up late, dramatically and alone was too much like my 'old behaviour' (what I'm trying to recognize and eliminate) - just minus the booze. I was exhausted anyway and didn't think the birthday girls would miss me. My re-entry to society should be more structured and sane.

- One of the peers turned up wearing a Jack Daniels Tshirt and was, predictably, told not to wear it again - v inappropriate. He hadn't realised. I told him (a recovering junkie) that I'd wear my heroin Tshirt tomorrow.

- A dream about a glass of red wine. It was so delicious and I thought I could get away with drinking it without anyone knowing. I woke guilty and relieved. My drinking is truly fucked.

- Another person was discharged today. Not for a relapse (as far as I know), but for not 'engaging' in the programme (eg. not talking in groups, turning up late etc). He had already been given a written warning and after staying silent in group therapy this morning, was shown the door. So, out of my original ten: two completed, one discharged, one left, five relapsed and ME (I am now the 'oldest' member of the group and still the only woman). Wish me luck.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 536-580
- Randy Lenz's hobby of 'demapping' rats and cats (ie killing, 'resolving')
- Endnotes with endnotes
- And on page 566, a sex scene (Orin Incandenza & one of his 'subjects'). At last! DFW, I didn't think you had it in you.

Day 47: Air á Danser

- My favourite didn't come back to the treatment centre today. He smoked some heroin at the weekend and discharged himself yesterday.

- On my way home I sat on a bench by the canal, reading Infinite Jest. Two lads with dreadlocks and long shorts were setting up a tightrope between two trees near the railway bridge. They called to me asking if I wanted a go, so I ran over and slipped off my shoes. "You could hold onto the tree or me, but the best thing to do is to use the power from your own push up to balance yourself," he told me. My legs quivered uncontrollably sending vibrations along rope and, as Central Line trains thundered above, I tried to keep my back straight and my eyes on the horizon. I fell almost immediately.

- I keep thinking about a Bloody Mary, a drink I rarely drunk. A Bloody Mary with plenty of vodka through a straw sitting outside a cafe by myself. But the thing is with cravings is that they pass: An hour later you wonder what that was all about.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 520-536
- More on the veil-wearing Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (a kind of AA parody): "U.H.I.D allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment... they teach you how to accept your nonacceptance."

Day 46: When will you silence your hounds?

We were given a talk on nutrition yesterday and I enjoyed it so much. It was refreshing to be looking at something practical rather than the relentless questioning about feelings: it pleased me to be learning stuff. It came at the right time too, because after six weeks of running on Coca Cola and cigarettes, I had just decided to cut down and get a bit of balance in my diet. The dietitian, however, told me not to stop the Coke immediately as I might go a bit bonkers - so I'm going to try to stick to just one or two small bottles a day rather than, er, two or three litres.

Obviously giving up booze/drugs is the best thing any of us in treatment could do for our health, and in the beginning that is really enough. But as I aim to be star rehab pupil* I want to go further. For years, I have claimed to have a ~mature palette~ in that I didn't have much of a sweet tooth. Only recently I realised that I had been getting all my sugar and more from the Skrumpy Jack (etc etc) - and this is partly what the Coca Cola is replacing.

She told us about neurotransmitters: how they are out of whack in addicts; how the sugar stimulates serotonin, and caffeine and cigarettes temporarily boost dopamine (feelings of energy and concentration - hence me puffing while typing this); that there are other ways to feel ok that are healthier than booze and marly lights... Just basic life stuff I know.

Another reason I liked the workshop is that it seemed more like science than all the 12-step/AA/therapy stuff that often sits difficultly with me. My education and career placed huge importance on facts and critical thinking: the opposite of the trust and intellectual/ego submission the 'programme' seems to require. A bit in Infinite Jest called it 'checking your head in at the door' or something, which I find incredibly hard to do. I mean, the other weekend I went to a lecture about propaganda in the mainstream media, encouraging us to practice skeptism when reading the broadsheets, let alone when attending vaguely cult-like spiritual fellowships. But I am desperate, and there is evidence in the people that I meet that somehow it seems to work...

* I am amused by the oxymoron of being a well-behaved, swotty addict/criminal - handing my written work in on time with no corrections needed. Like when I went to a three-day course for convicted drink drivers and was proud to finish, in half the time of the others, the exercise calculating how long it would take for xx units of alcohol to be metabolised by the body. Smoking on my bike, reading the Guardian in MacDonalds - I enjoy such contrasts.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 504-520. I keep underlining surprising, effective pairs of words: "whistly fricatives", "sexually credible", "godawful lurch", "fussy ennui", "howling fantods".

Day 45: Hey Ma, it's me

Back in the treatment centre after the long weekend and I think I've turned a corner - or I've gone soft in the head. I was full of 'gratitude' today. After struggling with cravings over the weekend, it's like the the blinkers have been lifted and my view is flooded with the light of hope and opportunity. Look! A heron! A couple having an amusing argument outside the cafe! Isn't the Isle of Dogs beautiful!

Sadly, not everyone has managed to push on through. Out of the ten of who were on the programme when I started, one has successfully 'graduated' after completing the full twelve weeks, one has left but continued to attend NA, and four have been discharged (ie. kicked out) following relapses.

This is the hardest and scariest part for me. I had grown close to some of these people and for the most part felt like they were doing well and putting the work in. The staff and others who have been around 'the system' for longer do not seem as surprised or upset as me. It's the territory: the thing that addicts and alcoholics are most likely to do is drink or take drugs.

Statistics vary, but I heard one estimate that the 'success' rate of rehabs (not quite sure what this means - maybe people who've still not used eg. a year later)* is around 8%. It is very low anyway. And my programme is supposed to be particularly effective in the longterm. But in the short term it has many casualties: Although it has the same zero tolerance / 100% abstinence policy as a residential centre, each night and weekend we are sent back into the real world.

And I know I know it's not like anyone has died. I am keeping in touch with some of the people who have left and are continuing to attempt sobriety.

But today another one of the peers didn't turn up and by the end of the day it became clear he had not phoned in with a legitimate excuse. We tried to call but he switched his phone off - not a good sign. He is probably my 'favourite' and I am hoping so hard that he's ok. It's really given a knock to my good mood.

- Two uniformed police officers turned up at the centre today and immediately most of the guys (I'm the only girl now) were sweating, reaching for their coats. Turns out they were just on a routine visit not about any individual - but this gave me a reminder of the kind of cats I'm hanging with these days.

- Just back from AA meeting where someone picked up his 30 year chip (he got sober in May 1981 - the month I was born), and another person - I could not figure out who - stank of alcohol.

*Research needed here



INFINITE JEST: Pages 489-504
- Mathematical 14-page description (including diagrams) of a traumatic childhood mattress moving incident. Funny and pleased my brain with its intricacy. "It occured to me that the movement of the knob perfectly schematized what it would be like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This is how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation*."

* 'The act or process of forming rings'. Other new words in this section: 'metastisate'

Day 44: Telling strangers personal things

In the morning my sheets have come completely off the bed and are twisted into ropes, my skin is salty with sweat. I don't remember my dreams.

May is my powerful season, my manic month, my birthday. Three years ago on May Day Boris Johnson became mayor of London and my boyfriend moved out of the little flat we shared on Hackney Road. I threw an apple onto the floor and it lay there smashed and rotting for a week until a friend came round and cleared it up. Later that month I lost my job and had nowhere to live. Later that summer, within a fortnight, I was on both side of the law: first arrested as a drink driver and second rescued from a stranger who violently attacked and tried to rape me. It's taken me a long time to unpick everything that happened that year. And everything that happened that year was caused though or drowned in or soothed by alcohol.

I've found this four-day weekend difficult, hiding in my cell reading and sleeping. No one has visited this bedsit to see my circumstances so reduced. But something is happening: forces are at work in the night, helping me to work though and let go. Some kind of 'process'.

I lost my phone - left it on a bus - and my family were unable to get in touch with me. Mum emailed to say she was worried - she thought I'd "had a blip". I was so pleased to Skype her today and say no, I have not had a drink. It was a close one, though, and I realise how near it - the other side - is and how edgy and concerned other people still are for me. I have lived every day of these six weeks, excruciatingly conscious, but it is still not a very long time.

But I've made it though and some things are making me smile: ducking under branches as I cycle quickly along the path by the canal, the way a guy in the rehab keeps a massive can of deodorant in the waist band of his tracky bottoms like a gun, seeing old friends at a Royal Wedding barbecue on Friday, hearing in an AA meeting yesterday morning how glad people were to not have bank holiday hangovers.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 450-489.
- Another seriously gruesome death. I'm getting quite sick of this, DFW.
- Love Don Gately
- Computer-generated fatal pleasure
- Tennis tactics applicable to life in general: "Not 'adjust to conditions'. Make this second world within the world: here there are no conditions."