Back in my apartment, doors locked, blinds twisted shut, I sunk onto my creaky bed, breathing fast, and listened. A lot was going on downstairs. I heard whispered conversations about calling the police, and, when those died down, a full rebroadcast of the past year’s Tony Awards, starring Neil Patrick Harris, complete with costumes, dance numbers, and songs. I heard tiptoe footfalls on the steps outside my apartment, and I heard the old ladies talking to a police officer in the parking lot as they pointed toward my building. Later, as the morning grew light, I heard my landlord approach my neighbors as they sat on the stairs outside my door and promise them he would “get her out of there” as soon as possible. I say I heard all this, but I saw it, too, from my spot on the bed—clear through the walls, through the floors, into the parking lot below my bedroom window and the courtyard on the other side of the building. I saw it all, acknowledged it, and failed to register it as a hallucination. I knew everything that I saw had happened, because if it hadn’t, then I was crazy, and I wasn’t crazy.
And then I got up and went to work.
Twenty-six
The Rez
That morning, things fell apart at fast-forward speed. I made my usual rounds—the trip to Safeway, the walk to the garden, the sweating, heaving bus ride downtown—and showed up half an hour late for an editorial meeting I had forgotten was happening. Everyone was laughing at something that James, the magazine’s new editor, had just said. I must have looked a mess. Josh eyed me from inside the glass-walled conference room and shot me his “don’t you dare come in here” look, so I slunk back to my desk, sweat soaked and gasping for air.
I couldn’t seem to get any air in my lungs. I felt a dull, insistent pressure I had never experienced before—like a giant was sitting on my chest. I thought back to all the articles I’d read about women and heart attacks—how they’re often misdiagnosed because the symptoms are so subtle. I got up and started waving frantically at Josh, hoping that, somehow, no one else would notice. He glared at me in exasperation. Finally, he came out.
“What is it?”
“I think I’m having a heart attack.”
Josh rolled his eyes. “I have to get back into this meeting. You should go home.”
“I’m serious. I’m having chest pain. I can’t breathe. My heart is pounding. Feel it.”
We drove to the hospital. On the way—windows down, pleasant Seattle summer breeze rustling my unwashed hair—I started to feel better. But I couldn’t tell Josh it was a false alarm. I went in. Heard the familiar swoosh of the big hospital sliding doors that separate the healthy world outside from the sick world within. Lay back on the familiar gurney, let them hook me to the familiar IV, and listened as the social worker told me I needed to get to rehab, stat. And not long after that, I was standing in a daze in front of a treatment center in the suburbs, clutching a dirty duffel bag and wondering how I got there.
That’s how it plays in my memory, anyway—one day I was watching imaginary dogs walk through my living room, the next I was at Residence XII, a small, private treatment center for women in a leafy suburb east of Seattle. Memory is weird that way. Some memories, like the spidery filaments that occupied every blank space in the months that led up to my first stint in rehab, are so vivid I can conjure them back to life just by closing my eyes. Others are blank spaces.
Here’s what I remember: I asked James for a month off, which is the maximum amount of treatment most insurance companies cover. (Before the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, health insurers didn’t have to cover rehab at all.) The publisher, Melissa—a single mom who’d been sober for years—offered to give me some of her vacation time, so I wouldn’t have to go unpaid. I came up with a cover story for people who would notice my absent byline—“personal medical condition; had to take some time off”—but ultimately, I let Josh post on Twitter that I was taking some time off to address my alcoholism. I knew, dimly, that people would mock and misread this public declaration. I didn’t care. I watched him hit “tweet” and felt nothing, not even dread.
But who convinced me? How long did I go on drinking between the ER and the treatment center? What was I like for those first few days, when my body was still so toxic I could barely speak or lift my head, much less, as the counselors put it, “participate in my own recovery”? Blank as the last two-thirds of that year’s diary.
I remember sitting in the big circular foyer at Rez XII, shaking with fear and withdrawal and contemplating the fact that once I signed the papers I wouldn’t see this room again for another month. I remember clutching Kevin’s hand in my sweaty palm. And I remember sitting through what felt like a three-hour interrogation—how much did I drink each day; had my work suffered; what was my motivation for coming to treatment—before the treatment director looked me over, sighed, and drove me to a nearby hospital to get the booze out of my system.
Most treatment centers want you to show up stone-cold sober, which is another way of saying that most treatment centers don’t want to bear the cost and liability that comes with on-site detox. I showed up at Residence XII with a blood-alcohol level that would put plenty of normal people in a coma, thinking I might be able to fool them—heavy, chronic drinkers who drink like I did can register blood-alcohol levels in the usually dangerous or “fatal” range without appearing more than moderately drunk. I wasn’t alone: Many of the women at Rez XII were still detoxing from something, and some of them spent most of their twenty-eight days in withdrawal. Heroin detox takes weeks, which is one reason heroin addicts tend to do even worse in conventional twenty-eight-day rehab than alcoholics; by the time their brains are capable of processing new information, they’re out the door. I spent the night in rapid detox, hooked up to a banana bag and on a heavy dose of Librium, before returning to treatment the following morning. For the first time, I felt a twinge of relief. For four weeks, at least, it would be impossible to drink.
From the moment I laid my hot pink-and-white duffel bag on my floral bedspread and read the mass-produced welcome card—“Erica, Welcome to Residence XII. We are so happy to have you join us to start a new life in sobriety”—I hated the place. I hated sleeping in a room with strangers (two to a room, four to a suite), and I hated being so disconnected from the outside world. I hated that we weren’t allowed to “engage in our professions,” meaning that I wasn’t supposed to even think about all the stories I needed to work on the minute I got out. I hated the industrial-strength soap solution they provided in the showers, which made my skin peel off in sheets, and I hated the showers themselves, which required you to punch a knob every fifteen seconds to keep the water running. I hated the fact that I couldn’t read The New Yorker or books or anything other than AA literature, which was supposed to help me “focus on my recovery.” And I hated the fact that I was gaining weight from the rich food in the dining hall, which I couldn’t resist after months of subsisting on half-eaten sandwiches, pizza from the Little Caesars next to the liquor store, and whatever nutrients there are in wine.
Most of all, though, I hated the other patients. Until I entered Rez XII, I never understood what women meant when they said they “just didn’t get along with other women”; once I lived with fifteen of them, I got it.
Everyone acted like they were the only ones who had ever had problems. Janet, a suburban mom with chunky highlights, spent her mornings doing her makeup and the rest of the day picking fights with the other women. Jenny, who talked about her bipolar diagnosis to anyone who would listen, treated group therapy like open-mic night. Monica, my sixtysomething roommate, wouldn’t stop crying about her husband, who had said he would leave her if she didn’t stop popping pills.
The problem wasn’t me, it was that I couldn’t relate to any of these women. I wasn’t bipolar or worried about looking camera ready by 6:00 A.M. I didn’t do hard drugs. I didn’t have a husband to take care of me. Sure, I still had Kevin, but only on the thinnest of technicalities—we hadn’t had sex
in months, and I got the feeling that he was only sticking around because of some ground-in, fundamental Oklahoman decency. Quit whining, lady, I thought as I listened to Monica complain. At least you aren’t going home to an empty apartment.
I hated the ridiculous, make-work assignments, too: vision boards illustrating what our life was like before we got to rehab (shitty) and what we hoped it would be like sober (awesome!); rosters of our “losses” and “yets” (things we had lost due to our addiction and things we might lose); letters to God (“Dear God: Even though you don’t exist, I’m mad at you for letting this happen to me”); letters from God (“Dear Erica: Sometimes shit happens and there’s no real reason, but you have to deal with it anyway”); and the “assertion script,” a framework for asserting and acknowledging each other’s feelings and wants.
What I wanted was for the counselors to tell me how to live without drinking, or give me honest information about my odds of staying sober. (From my notebook: “If there are no stats on relapse rate in intensive outpatient vs. nonintensive outpatient, how can you say it’s ‘statistically proven’ that IOP prevents relapse better than non-IOP?”) As a journalist, I’d been trained to scrutinize every claim, to never stop asking questions. What they were asking me to do was shut up, accept that they knew what they were doing, and follow instructions. It was almost as if questioning certain aspects of treatment—Why do we have to make our beds and vacuum the hallways every morning? Why do you let people smoke but ban caffeine and sugar when all three are stimulants?—would unleash a curse that had the power to make treatment fail. My treatment file is full of notes from counselors criticizing me for “intellectualizing” their suggestions by “asking for facts and statistics,” and refusing to follow some of those recommendations. For instance, I refused to sign a letter to my doctors stating that I should never be given any kind of narcotic drug, such as painkillers, because I didn’t want to make such a major decision one week after checking in to treatment. “It is a concern of this writer that patient continues to dictate her own treatment. Prognosis is guarded,” my counselor wrote.
I never thought of leaving. I was determined to prove I could make it through the program, and the more I suffered, the more it would show I was serious about my recovery. So I scowled and pouted through morning “angel meditation,” when we’d pick “angel cards” out of a box to inspire us throughout our day; and I gamely grimaced through lectures about my Addict and my Wise Woman, the two forces that were—per Rez XII dogma—battling for supremacy in my addicted mind.
Mostly, though, I sat and stared out the picture windows of the living area—a huge room stuffed with couches and chairs that had seen better decades—at the Douglas firs and bigleaf maples sheathed in fog and wondered whether all this nonsense about angels and wise women might be building to a larger point. Or if treatment would just be twenty-eight days of chirpy counselors telling us to rely on mythical creatures to carry us through hard times.
It wasn’t all wise women and angels. One afternoon, instead of our usual lecture or group role-playing session, the counselors gathered all the women in the basement meeting room for a confrontation. This practice, which is now falling out of favor, originated at Hazelden, the famous treatment center outside Minneapolis whose “Minnesota method” is now used at most US treatment centers. Hazelden called the exercise the “hot seat,” but I came to think of it as the “shame circle.” Here’s how it worked: One woman would sit in the middle of the room while everyone gathered around her in a circle. Then, one by one, the women would tell on the woman in the circle for things they’d witnessed her doing wrong. Pretty much anything was fair game, from drinking caffeinated coffee at outside meetings, to talking on the phone for more than the allotted ten minutes, to taking a nap during “homework” hour. “Character defects,” a phrase ripped from the pages of the Big Book, were also on the table—flaws identified by our fellow patients, like selfishness, self-absorption, dishonesty, and a lack of “willingness” to give ourselves to the program.
When my turn came around, my “sisters in recovery” didn’t hold back. “You think you’re better than everyone else!” “You take up more than your share of time on the phone!” “You think you don’t need to be here!” “You talk about people behind their back!” “You’re self-willed!” By the time they got to the obligatory compliments, I was crying too hard to listen. After it was over, I ran to my room and threw myself down on my bed, wondering whether there was any point in getting sober if I was as big a piece of shit as all these women seemed to think.
Old-school treatment programs often subscribe to the notion that addicts need to be “broken down” before they can be “built back up,” but there’s no scientific evidence to suggest that making addicts feel worse about themselves has any therapeutic benefit. For me, it had the opposite effect: My own confidence shattered, I became a close observer of my fellow-patients, hoarding every infraction and personality defect for future use as tactical weapons against their self-esteem. We all did this, and it’s obvious why: With no ability to make independent decisions about when we woke up, what we ate, or the people with whom we spent all our time, the hot seat became opportunity to unleash our stored resentments.
Not everything about treatment sucked. In the daytime, we were allowed to walk outside under supervision, although power walking was discouraged and running was forbidden for reasons that had something to do with avoiding endorphins. At night, outside volunteers would show up to lead meetings—AA, NA, and Cocaine Anonymous—and regale us with stories of their own rock bottoms, the times when they stole from the till at work, or showed up for an important meeting on the tail end of an all-night coke binge. One woman even said that when she didn’t have any booze in the house, she had briefly considered drinking hair spray. For some reason, this made us laugh. Drink hair spray? Who thinks like that? I enjoyed the meetings, which gave me an opportunity to sit back and listen to other people’s stories for a change, instead of participating in some activity or talking about myself. I also got into art therapy and “sober fun”—an infantilizing catchall term for everything from sugar-free ice cream socials to Pictionary—because these were the only times we got to (therapeutically) goof around. One week, we each chose a rock from a pile and painted them with our sobriety dates, sealing them with shellac to represent the fact that they would last forever. “I bet there’s a whole river near here that’s full of these things,” I muttered to my rehab buddy Michelle, a laconic postal worker, as we painted the final coat of Modge Podge onto our rocks. Mine, which reads “August 24, 2014” in red letters on a lavender background with little yellow flowers on the border, still sits on a shelf in my bedroom.
Between all those activities, there were lectures, writing assignments, and homework—worksheets to fill out, letters to write to our Addict and our Higher Power, collages to construct.
And the biggest homework assignment of all was our first step.
If you know anything about AA at all, it’s probably the first step (“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable”), often shortened in pop culture to “The first step is admitting you have a problem.” This step has some basis in evidence—according to the Handbook of Medical Psychiatry, “denial is ubiquitous in alcoholism,” so admitting to yourself that you have a problem is literally the first step to recovery. At Rez XII, taking the first step meant writing out our whole life stories, with an emphasis on how drinking or drugs made our lives fall apart, then reading it out loud to a small group and listening to their feedback.
Within days, I had written two five-page longhand drafts (there were no computers, ostensibly because writing longhand was a more “genuine” experience), making notes in the margins and on the backs of pages until I got it right. Chapter 1: A shy, sheltered only child is ripped from her idyllic Mississippi childhood and brought to the big city by her dad and a mean new stepmom she barely knows. Chapter 2: B
ored at school and dying to fit in, she turns to drinking, and eventually gets in too deep to stop. Chapter 3: Trapped in an alcoholic hell, our heroine loses nearly everything. Chapter 4: Rock bottom—detox, the liquor store, the weekend binge. Chapter 5: “I woke up the morning after that binge feeling lonely, scared, tired, sick, guilty, humiliated, embarrassed, broken—and done.”
I finished reading to the women who made up Small Group.
“I was done. And that’s how I ended up here.”
Silence fell over the room. Finally, one of the women spoke. “That was so well-written!” she said. “Wow—you really put it all out there,” another gushed. “Great work. You really nailed it.” That last one was my counselor. My heart grew two sizes with pride. Finally, some recognition from these people that I wasn’t just a condescending brat—I could write! I was good for something! I floated down the hall on a pink cloud of acceptance. Maybe things were going to be okay.
I spent my thirty-seventh birthday in treatment, but I still had a party of sorts—my mom, who had spent years picking up my drunken Sunday-afternoon calls and locking the liquor cabinet when I came to town, flew out to visit. It was the third time she’d been to Seattle in the thirteen years I’d lived there, and the first time without my dad, whose absence was, frankly, a relief. Since high school, I had never disclosed to him anything more serious than my chronic lack of money, and I wasn’t about to start now. In twenty-three years since Jennie died, neither of us had said “I love you” to the other again, and even hugging was an awkward, sideways affair. Telling him, “Dad, I’m an alcoholic and I need your help” was unthinkable. Mom and I, on the other hand, had never lost touch, even when I was avoiding her calls and telling her everything but the truth. So she was the one who made the trip.
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