The One In Which She Talks About Addiction

The news about Matthew Perry’s death this weekend was dreadfully sad. The loss of a man who brought enormous joy to so many people and who could not access it for himself or accept it from others hits hard, even in these terrifying times. My social media was flooded with people sharing their love for his work and their sense of grief at the loss of his person. Quite a few people I know talked about how shocked they were.

For me it brought up a flood of emotions. None of them shock. If you have ever spent any time in the world of an addict, it is never shocking that they have died. It’s more shocking if they recover. The odds are low. Staggeringly low.

There was a time in my life when I inhabited this space, not as an addict, although I have the personality that means it could so easily have been me. My role was the plus one. There was something in me that was wildly attracted to broken, fragile, charming men, filled with a dangerous hunger for their drug of choice.

It wasn’t that I thought I could save them. To begin with I didn’t even know they needed saving. The only knowledge I had about what an addict looked like was a wino on a park bench or Zammo from Grange Hill looking a bit pasty from snacking on too much heroin. I knew you had to ‘just say no,’ but I had no real idea what I was saying no about or who I would need to say it to. Just like sexual predators do not look like the big bad wolf, addicts rarely (in the beginning) look like Renton from Trainspotting. There is no iSpy guide to help you tick them off.

In the beginning what a lot of addicts look like, is fun. Parties, raves, gigs, late nights that become early mornings are all things that mask addiction. Smoky bars in Montmartre that allow you to stay up drinking red wine and feeling sophisticated. Long weekends in New York where the city never sleeps and neither do you. The romance of taking the train to visit friends so you can have a drink, like a grown up. A drink before you go out so you can take the edge off awkward social interactions. Long Sundays in the pub, eating a roast, chatting shit with your friends, sinking pints until you realise the day is done and you have work tomorrow. It’s all so exciting. Everything happens in a blur, and that’s where the damage happens, in those smudgy, out of focus moments where you don’t realise you’ve hurt yourself until the bruises start to show the next day.

There was more than one addict for me. The first one wasn’t actually an addict himself. He was the product of a childhood ruined by addiction, which in turn ruined him. Pulled into his life, I surrendered completely, having no idea of quite what I was letting myself in for until it was almost too late. He had a lot of anger and a lot of ideas about how to channel that into his relationship with me. I’m not sure where it started to go wrong. It was incremental and subtle. The term gas-lighting wasn’t in common usage then, but that’s what happened. What had started out as a loving relationship with a charming man ended as a coercive relationship with a man who thought it was appropriate to punish me for everything that was wrong in his own life.

Towards the end he was less careful about hiding his true thoughts. One evening he talked about taking what he wanted from my family because we had always had enough and he didn’t. He said it was fair that they paid. He was talking about money at the time, but in hindsight I think it went far, far deeper than that.

There were a few things in that relationship that sealed my fate. The first was that he was right. I had come from a loving family who had enough of everything. Conceptually I could picture the life he gradually revealed to me, but I couldn’t truly understand the hunger that drove him, because I had never felt it. The second was that because I knew I was mad, I always believed him when he told me that I was misreading a bad situation because I was mental. It made it very difficult for me to refute his words. I only woke up to what he was doing when he raised his hand to me. I could take mental torture. I lived it every day. I absolutely would not accept being a punching bag.

I fell out of that relationship straight into the one with the main addict of my life. When I met him, my life had become drab and narrow, caged by anger and policed by a man who put himself between me and the outside world. What my addict offered was a way out. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was swapping a life with a man who lived entirely inside his head for a man who wanted to spend his life entirely out of his.

At the time I didn’t want to think either. I wanted to remember what it was like to have fun. And we did. We absolutely did. The first year we were together was an absolute riot. We had no ties and few responsibilities. There was no ambition for the future because now was all there was and it was splendid. He showed me how to take the things I wanted. He showed me how to be braver and do things I had only ever imagined. He gave me the courage to finish growing up.

The problem was that I did finish growing up and he didn’t. I am not an addict so I didn’t use drugs and alcohol to fuel my nights. I didn’t take a bump of coke in the morning before I went to work so that I didn’t fall asleep on the job. I didn’t roar through my nights on a wave of brandy, feeling no pain, and after a while I began to feel that pain in profound and unexpected ways. A bit like that time I used my first week’s wages to treat myself to a pound of foam bananas and ate them all on my way home on the bus, I began to realise that there is definitely a point where you can have too much of a good thing.

I began to hanker for nights at home eating cheese and Marmite on toast instead of a night at the latest, must visit restaurant. I wanted to go home after work and not via the pub until closing time. I still wanted to go out, but not all the time. Life was a treadmill of work and fun with no respite. Work got harder and fun also got harder. I began to go from being tired to being exhausted all the time. The happy blur of mild intoxication and good times started to become a fog that I was getting lost in. In the times I was able to catch sight of the addict, I could see that he was also getting lost. My answer was to stop. His answer was to go harder.

We got married. Writing this, it seems mad, but this is the thing people who don’t hang around with addicts don’t understand. Addicts are not cartoon villains. They are people. They are people like you and me. Their addiction isn’t who they are. Over time that changes and if left unchecked, it eats them up until all that’s left is the addiction, but that takes time. One thing that humans are guilty of, addicts or not, is believing they always have time, time to change, time to get better, time to leave. There is always time until there isn’t. People who love addicts always hope there is time for them to stop. People who are addicts always think there’s time for just one more.

Marriage required more growing up. That didn’t happen evenly and things broke down in stages, like ice calving from a glacier. Cracks appeared and there was a lot of noise and fear. Lost nights spent calling hospitals. Lost nights when he was there in person but so far away in every other respect. Lost trust. Everything eaten up by the hunger he couldn’t fill and neither could I.

It became apparent that we couldn’t help each other. All we could do was hurt each other and the gap between us widened and widened. The love was a bridge between us but we were drifting further away and it was threatening to break.

I was lucky that he hit rock bottom before our marriage did. He was one of the lucky ones. He found a recovery programme and got sober. He still is. I went into therapy to lay a few of my own ghosts to rest. It bought us a few more years and two, gorgeous daughters from a marriage that eventually succumbed to the strain. It takes two people to make a marriage and two people to break it. I hold my hand up to my part in it, it was not all him, but addiction played its part.

Here’s what I know. Whatever the addict picks up is not the problem, it’s the cure. The pain of the addict’s existence is made better by their drug/s of choice. Without it, the pain is still there and if they don’t find ways to heal, it grows until it becomes unbearable. At that point they either go back into addiction or they die. If they don’t choose to die, sometimes the things they choose to dull their pain makes that choice for them.

Addiction isolates people. It makes them believe that nobody understands them, nobody suffers like them, and nobody knows what will help them better than they do. Their relationship with their pain and hunger is primal and eventually all consuming. It becomes bigger than anything else in their life. It is their life. The further the addict travels down the path of addiction, the less people they take with them, the lonelier they get, the more they suffer, the more they hunger and the more they use. It is the only thing they can control, the only thing that helps and the only thing that doesn’t leave them. Except that one day, it does leave them because it stops helping and at that point they are entirely alone.

Recovery is not just about stopping using. It is about getting help to start again. It is about facing and moving through your pain. It is about understanding your hunger and finding healthier ways to fill yourself up. it is about rebuilding relationships with people who you have hurt. It is about relinquishing ego and building self worth. It is about admitting your fears and asking for help. It is about understanding that emotions will not stay put and that’s ok. It’s about accepting the ebb and flow of life and learning to move with it rather than trying to stop time, attempting to create a halcyon moment you experienced once and want again forever. It is about accepting your own flawed humanity and learning to love it. It is not easy, which is why so many good people fail. Recovery is something that requires you to commit to it over and over again for the rest of your life.

If you’ve ever wondered why people can’t just stop, it’s always enlightening to ask yourself what things in your life you use. There will be something, possibly more than one something. Life is hard. Suffering is excruciating and unavoidable and we all need a break from reality from time to time. How easy is it for you to ‘just lose that extra weight?’ How easy is it for you to ‘just stop biting your nails?’ Things that are easy for you are rarely down to willpower and almost always down to the fact that whatever it is, isn’t that important to you for one reason or another no matter what you say. Everyone has their Achilles heel. Many of us are lucky that our appetites are less destructive. There but for the grace of God go us.

I know this, because for a long time my addiction was addicts. I am in recovery myself. I self soothe with people pleasing and co-dependency and with money. I know how easy it is to lose yourself and how hard it is to find yourself again and keep finding yourself. I can see how tempting it would be to stop trying and surrender to oblivion. It’s not shocking at all.