of dislocation & graceful unravelling

rgr-pop:

I would hate to be insensitive to people with addictions. I know what it’s like to feel like your body and your head and all of your time has been invaded by something and you can’t control it. I understand what it’s like to have a chronically underestimated mental illness, I know what it’s like to be looked at like you’re just not trying hard enough.

I also know what it’s like to have to live with other people’s addictions, and you live with it forever. While men in my life were drinking themselves literally to death and back to life again, women in my life were calling an ambulance while forcing themselves to think which would be worse. Is it worse to bury him now or have to do this again every day for the rest of my life. And then even when he got better, tiptoeing for another thirty years, losing all your friends, apologizing for him, blaming everything on how it was before he stopped drinking. A process, a process. And even though he hadn’t touched it in twenty years we still all had to watch his heart and lungs rot from all the drinking he did and we all still lost him. His family had to lose him so many times and no one could ever forget addiction.

I never met my maternal grandfather, but I know that he worked in some shops in Pontiac, fought in some wars in the Eastern Hemisphere, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon until all his blood vessels were so weak they burst open and he died but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Sometimes I say “my mother left school because her dad died” but really what I mean is “my mother left school because she had an alcoholic abusive father.” He would say things like, well, we only get Coke a few times a year and you drank the last Coke which means I have to drink beer again and it’s all your fault and she never had shoes or lunch money. I never met him but I lived with him my whole life: in the way my mother lived like everything was impermanent, would work secret shifts in middles of nights so that she could buy me shoes, in the way she would smack me in the face if I talked too white trash ghetto because she was never going back there. My mother never drank, her sisters never drank. My mother never married an alcoholic but both of her sisters did, and she’d come to learn that most men were addicts and that no addicts could be trusted. There were almost no men in my life when I was growing up.

I had two maternal uncles. After their mother died but before their father died, my uncle Jimmy fought in Vietnam. I don’t know what he drank, but I know that he drank it until he shot himself in the head and my other uncle, who was eleven, found him in their garage. Some people argue that addiction and trauma are hereditary. But anyone who has lived in houses of addiction and trauma knows that addiction and trauma are contagious. And my younger uncle still carries his brother’s addiction and trauma.

Addiction is an illness, and we should be compassionate and we should try to help each other heal. But sometimes I think that we only allow the addicted to heal from addiction, that once “sobriety” is claimed, everyone around the addict has to pretend like they’ve never been hurt or abused. Once an addict is healed, we are expected to erase anything from the era of “pre-sobriety.” Only the addict is allowed to talk about their healing process: the people they raped or tried to kill or manipulated or abused or neglected are expected to respectfully keep their mouths shut.

This is how addiction-oriented abuse is perpetuated, all of the weight of trauma is shifted onto the shoulders of the people around an addict, and they aren’t allowed to do anything about it. It’s not always committed with intention on the act of the addict (or the once-addict, or the recovering alcoholic), but sometimes it is. When an addict tries to kill their girlfriend, it is abuse. When an recovering addict says the attempted murder of his girlfriend is irrelevant and she (or anyone) shouldn’t bring it up because he’s “sober now,” it is another act of abuse.

*only if the addict is a man. if the addict is a woman, we don’t very well forgive her, do we?