The Big Fix

by Tracey Helton Mitchell

  I rarely went to memorial services. At this early stage in my recovery, death was too painful. Throughout my addiction and early recovery, I had known many people who died. My best friend had died from AIDS-related complications when I’d been in jail a few years earlier. I’d found out when a letter I sent to him was returned to me. It was stamped “Deceased.” That was it—no explanation, just a declaration that my friend Mark was gone. I wasn’t able to be there for his service, but I made up my mind: I would go to Jake’s. Cat agreed to give me a ride. As we approached the site of his memorial, it felt surreal. It was held at the same place I’d seen him that last night. The club was brighter and open without music-goers packed inside. I sat on one of the soiled couches. They were covered in graffiti. Jake had felt at home here. I felt so uncomfortable. I looked around the room. I wondered who had been the one to tell him he wasn’t clean. Was it more than one person? Were they crying because they felt guilty, or were they clueless in righteous justification? Is being “clean” more important than being alive? I wanted to implicate them all in his death. Maybe I had been just as guilty somewhere along the way. I had also thought at one point that twelve-step was the only “true” recovery. Now I was converted. There must be alternatives, I thought, and I needed to find them. On the way back, Cat handed me a few of Jake’s belongings. They had been divided among his friends.

  Cat and I only saw each other a few times after that evening. She had school, I had school. Life was a constant series of people moving in and out of my life. Recovery works like that sometimes. Because I had a clear mind, I appreciated the gift of having a few special moments with a person.

  I made a choice for myself as a direct result of Jake’s death. I wanted to find a way to work in harm reduction in a more in-depth way. I wanted to advocate for people to be treated with respect and dignity as they made their own personal choices about their substance use. For the first time since I had quit drugs in 1998, I was beginning to see that twelve-step could actually be harmful for some people. I began to realize that advice is not the same thing as facts. I wanted to know more facts. Opinions create advice and advice causes people to think they are experts.

  Whether it was personal or professional, everyone with a little bit of clean time seemed to think of themselves as experts. When I started my first counseling, I was very vocal about practicing an abstinence-based program. I thought I was an expert as well. We were told that if we had six months clean, we had something to offer the person who had six days. So I naturally assumed I was in a position to pass along “facts” hidden in advice based on what had helped me. At the time, I was counseling sexual abuse survivors with substance abuse issues at the outpatient program. I had nine months clean, and I was thrown into the deep end of the pool with people who had been suffering multiple kinds of trauma. My days were full of tales of rape, prostitution, child molestation, and other assorted horror stories. It made it difficult to sleep at night. But I wanted to make a difference in the world. I thought, naïvely, If I can only get these clients off drugs, everything will be great! Abstinence, I thought, must be the only way that worked. It worked for me; it must work for you. I really thought I was helping people by preaching the gospel I was taught in twelve-step.

  But it was just that: my personal experience. It did not make me an “expert,” just another person with an opinion. Before I had any professional training, I fell into another pitfall of the peer counseling world. I thought my job was an extension of my recovery. That made me heavy on the advice and short on the listening. I had an idea of what I wanted for the clients. They might have wanted something completely different. I was completely unaware of all the complexities of their situations because I was so focused on the outcome I wanted for them. For some people, drugs are their protection. Drugs are their only coping mechanism. Drugs are what keep them alive. To completely abandon their self-medication means dealing with realities they might not be able to handle. After a few people I knew had gotten clean only to commit suicide, I began to question my own motives. I sought out more training, more supervision, and began to listen more. I learned to practice compassionate detachment. I was there to witness the pain of others, not to make decisions for them. I learned the “what worked for me” model could detract from the healing process. These were not my wounds I needed to heal. I needed my own process of recovery; they needed theirs. I chose to learn from Jake’s death, and it made me a better counselor.

  In the first few years, my personal recovery was rigid. I came home after a long day of work. The work was draining me. I needed to go to a meeting. Or did I, I wondered. I lay on my bed one night, my mind spinning. What if I was wrong about twelve-step? What if I was investing all my time and energy in some cultish bullshit? Was I like Jake, the person who could never use again, or was I like the person who can have a little drinkie poo every now and then? Here I was with clean time, living below my means in a piss-in-the-sink hotel in a shitty section of town in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Maybe I was making a mistake. What if I just finished school, got my own place, put my past completely behind me? I could go hang out with people after work. I could get some drinks, smoke some weed. I could be “normal” again.

  These thoughts continue to scare the shit out of me, even now from time to time. I start to let myself daydream about my new life. I imagine myself going out for a drink with my new “normal” friends. Then reality sets in. How does this scenario play out? I have two drinks, then four, then I lose count. Then I wander down the street and get some heroin. I sneak off to some enclave. No one will know, and I deserve this one time. The night ends with me in an ambulance or the coroner’s office. Because—that is the way my using goes. It is simply how I am. Jake taught me that. There are people who can do “just one more.” Then there are people like us.

  When I feel slightly bitter about the fact that I may never have a drink again, I think about how blessed I really am. A drink seems pretty insignificant in comparison to the life I have now. Why take the risk? I have evidence that some people can return to appropriate alcohol use after they quit heroin. I just don’t believe I am one of those people. I never drank for the taste. When I see someone out at dinner nursing what he or she must be thinking is delicious beer for thirty minutes, I think to myself, For fuck’s sake—are you going to finish that? And to see someone walk away and leave some in a glass is almost unbearable. I have a long history of seeking that instant gratification. When I would read a book, I’d flip to the ending. When I went on a diet, I liked to starve myself into losing ten pounds in a month. When I would meet a person I liked, I skipped the courtship and went straight to sex. I don’t bother with dinner if I can get away with eating a whole cake. I am a person of extremes. I enjoy the quick fix. I want joys without sorrow. I want love without the questions. Whatever I was using, I just wanted results.

  I eventually learned that I can be flexible without crossing the complete abstinence bar I set for myself. I can learn, I can change, I can evolve. I need to stay connected to my past to learn from it. I accepted that I would not shy away from my history. Instead, I would use it to become more accepting of others. There are many roads to the same destination. I needed to be accepting of my own path. Recovery is not what other people expect from me. It is about the choices I make for myself. I only had to give up one thing—drugs—and in return I got a chance at everything.

  Chapter 6

  A NEW SENSE OF SELF

  When I first got into rehab they told me there was only one thing I needed to change: everything. I resented this idea that there was nothing about me that could be salvaged in my new life. I felt like deep down inside I was a good person. My behavior did not always reflect my beliefs, but that was the result of being chained to substances that overpowered my best intentions. Was there nothing that made me lovable? Was it me who made those decisions, or was it the heroin whispering in my ear? Learning to trust myself and my motives was a long uphill climb. I could lotion up
my track marks, get some new clothes, and experiment with makeup. But none of that changed the way I felt about the person inside the wounded body. In rehab, they told me I was sick—that I had a disease. I wondered if I was broken. Why else would I have lied, cheated, and compromised myself for drugs? I needed much more than a few months in a controlled environment to believe I was a good person. I needed to work on myself on a daily basis, chipping away at the barriers to my new sense of self.

  Self-loathing was nothing new to me. The drugs served a purpose. They silenced that voice inside my mind that told me I was worthless. It didn’t take much for that ex-boyfriend to convince me that that was true; I had long believed in my worthlessness. Much of this feeling had focused on my weight issues. Besides stuffing myself to drown my problems, before I found drugs I had made the rounds of other kinds of self-destructive behaviors. There were the eating disorders, there was the cutting. In my late teens, I tried puking, laxatives, enemas, and blood pressure medicine to lose weight. When I was on drugs, I was validated for being skinny. For the first and only time in my life, I could try on a bikini and it fit. True, the only place I ever got to wear it was one time next to my shopping cart, but in my warped thinking that didn’t matter—I could fit into a bikini. When I got back out into the free world after jail, putting on weight, no longer feeling numb, hearing those voices again drove me into a deep depression. I needed to find other outlets besides trying to control my appearance.

  The real work on myself started at the residential facility. It was as if the clock started ticking on my adulthood when I got through those doors. I was transferred from jail—I was brought in wearing handcuffs. At least they left the leg shackles off. When the sheriff handed me off to the facility, they made it clear that I was still the property of the county until I completed my sentence—that I wouldn’t “escape” until I was released from rehab. So much for the idea of a heartwarming pep talk about how I was going to make it.

  Within a few days of entering rehab, I would start getting a few privileges. In a little over a month, with good behavior, I would be expected to find a job. Unlike many of the residents, I had done some “programming” during my jail stay. I was familiar with groups and the lingo. I was fully detoxed off drugs. I had a few months of living clean under my belt. It was not unusual to get roommates who were fresh from the street and detoxing on their bunks. The doors only locked from the outside, so you could leave any time of the day or night—you just couldn’t get back in. Once that door closes, they’d remind us, you will be on your own. Many residents would disappear without notice, leaving the staff to pack up their belongings in case they or their families ever returned to collect what had been left behind.

  I had very little when I arrived at the door. I was discharged from jail in the same pajamas I had worn the night I was arrested. Now they were extra tight, since I’d gained fifty pounds while in jail. Luckily, the program provided me with a few clothing items to get me started—some flannel shirts, T-shirts, and Levi’s were all I needed to try to blend into the background. I also had a few dollars, my rings, and a stack of letters from my mother. She had written me two or three times a week while I was inside.

  When I go back in my memory, though, the work on myself really started with a phone call a few months after I’d arrived. “Did I get a call today?” I asked the woman at the front window one day. I was waiting for a call back about an application for a job. We were allowed to use a special phone line that did not scream “REHAB” when potential employers called for us.

  She smiled at me as she handed me a slip of paper. “Yes,” she said, “here you go, Tracey.”

  The staff here were a combination of jailer and therapist. I found it humiliating to have to piss in a cup in front of them every week for random drug tests, then have to socialize with the same person an hour later. But the tests had their merit. I had heard other residents say how they had decided not to use during their passes home because they were so concerned about getting tested when they got back. A dirty test would have sent me back to jail for six months. I tried to remember that when I handed over my cup. The woman at the desk was tall, an imposing size, and doubled as a counselor to the women. There were so few of us there that we were not even entitled to a full-time staff person. She was a lesbian, a proud one at that. For whatever reason, this made me feel better about her. I felt like she would not judge me about my own sexual experiences with women. There was another counselor who was super-Jesus-churchy. I would never have told her my personal details. Religion may work for some folk, but the only times I ever came close to praying were when I was in jail, or I was broke and needed a fix. Please God, help me find this vein. Those four years at Catholic school did nothing but make me more jaded. My parents sent me there hoping they would keep me off drugs. Instead, I learned about drugs for the first time from my classmates.

  I opened up the piece of paper the staff person had handed me. It wasn’t what I was expecting. “Call me. Mom.”

  I was waiting for a call back from Goodwill for a job I had applied for a few weeks before. I should have heard something by then. I figured they were just not going to call me. The fucking GOODWILL was not going to call me! This would have been a blow to my fragile ego if I didn’t find it so hilarious. I had two and a half years of college. I couldn’t get a call back to stock fucking racks at a job training program? I shook my head. I would have laughed, except I really needed money. I had my job at the market research place, but I was hoping this might pay a little more.

  I slipped down the hallway in the women’s living area to the pay phone. It only took my mother two rings to pick up. She must have had her cordless phone next to her. She had started sleeping in the living room when my father started drinking heavily. I was twelve years old at the time. It was strange to watch TV in my room because my mother was sleeping out in the common area. Eventually, the abnormal became normal to me. I wasn’t isolating upstairs—I was just giving her space. I didn’t need to interact with anyone. Now, despite having three empty bedrooms after her children moved out, she was still sleeping in the living room. I freely admitted to anyone willing to listen that I didn’t understand my parents’ relationship. I assumed they had some bond I couldn’t see. Why else would she have hung on all these years? My mother had her ways of coping with pain, and I had mine. She still watched her Lifetime movies at night, fell asleep with the phone next to her, and waited on phone calls from her children.

  “Hey Mom,” I said, leaning into the wall next to the pay phone. “What’s up?”

  I could hear the fatigue in her voice. My mother was often weary from the weight of the world.

  “Hey, I was just dozing here,” she said. “What time is it there?”

  It was six o’clock in San Francisco, meaning she was tucked in before nine o’clock Ohio time. The burden of a lifetime of dealing with addiction and mental illness in her family had worn her down. My mother had been wedged between our vices and imperfections. Sometimes it seemed that she was the only normal one. Her big personality was, in some ways, a facade. Like other women of her generation, she knew how to put on a happy face. She was simply better at hiding her anxieties and phobias than much of the rest of the world. She was afraid of so many random things: riding in cars, traveling into big cities, and thunderstorms. I was told my mom used to drag me into a closet if she heard the loud crash of seasonal thunder. I inherited that anxiety. It was as if she was always vaguely afraid of something. I understood how that felt. She had found her own unique ways to cope. Some people lean into their fears, absorb them as part of being human. My mother found every way humanly possible to avoid or suppress them. She was like a loaded spring that never got to release all that pent-up energy.

  “I need to take a shower before the evening meeting, Mom. I don’t have much time,” I explained. “I got your message. What is so important that you needed to call the front desk?”

  I could hear her let out a sigh. It was a sigh of disa
ppointment. Now that I was not on drugs, I wasn’t as dependent on her. This was the sick truth between us. I don’t think she planned for this dynamic between us—it just happened along the way. She liked that feeling of knowing I would always need her for something. For the first few years in San Francisco, I rarely contacted her. When she was willing to provide financial help, it created a lifeline between us. Now I was trying to do something completely on my own, and it scared her. She didn’t want to lose me again.

  “Well . . .” she hesitated. “I am going to the post office tomorrow. Did you need me to send you anything?”

  My response was quick. “Nope.”

  There was an awkward pause. I could tell this was not what she wanted to hear.

  “I don’t need anything, Mom,” I responded.

  I felt like I was ten years old again. “I got a job now. I want to try to do things on my own.”

  She interrupted me. “Well . . . yes. But I am still your mother.”

  She wanted to help me somehow. I suppose I was hard to reach. Not only did I live two thousand–plus miles away, I was somewhat emotionally frozen toward the world, including her. The only way she knew how to help me was by buying me things or giving me cash. I found it hard to take any life advice from her seriously. I guess I have never gotten over the fact that she stayed with my father. How could nine and a half years of Al-Anon end in a place where she still put up with his bullshit? I just didn’t understand it. It tainted any other type of wisdom she tried to give me.