Death Grip

by Matt Samet

  My brain is so porous, so rudderless and unkempt, that I imprint her words. I start to worry that I’ve become permanently locked in a psychotic fear state. I fret that all my years of panic attacks, of drugging, of feathering the edge on the rocks, of too many adrenaline rushes, of harsh withdrawals from benzodiazepines, have changed my brain forever. I will always be this frightened. This notion makes me deeply suicidal. One day I call my mother threatening to kill myself, and she—upon the therapist’s advice—says she’s going to hang up and call the sheriff. The sheriff will, of course, take me back to the hospital, where they’ll probably reinstate benzos. I hang up and beat the living shit out of the couch as Clyde slinks into his crate. Poor Clyde: He has to bear witness to these things. As I calm down, he approaches with concern writ in his eyes, and I knead his neck folds and tell him that I love him until he licks my tears with dog kisses that smell of cold cuts. Clyde keeps me alive, where no one else can. He was abandoned outside Taos, New Mexico, as a puppy, and I cannot revisit this same unkindness upon him. The suicide urge will continue for the next year, lessening only in fits and starts. Many mornings I will wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “I promise not to kill you today,” leaving myself no choice but to continue.

  The depression peaks, thick and oily like fresh tarmac over a mass grave. I shudder atop the bed awash in black waves of guilt and self-hatred, grieving the destruction of my mind and body, lamenting the freedom I’ve lost to climb and simply be in the world. Also, I’m remembering every bad thing I’ve ever done, including things I hadn’t realized were bad at the time. As accompaniment, my therapist’s voice pops into my head, intoning, archly as if accusing the villain in an old gangster film, “Thief … rapist … murderer!” I am none of these, but the voice keeps coming unbidden. Soon my mind-therapist has morphed into the “Chicken-Woman,” like the character Cleopatra, limbless in her box at the end of the film Freaks. The Chicken-Woman nests in an ornate gilded Santeria altar and says, “Hoffen-puffalo, ba-gawk.” She expunges vomit, ruffles her feathers, settles in on black demon eggs, and then proclaims, “Rawtch-rawtch-rawtch.” The Chicken-Woman shuts her eyes and goes to sleep, incubating her eggs until the next visitation. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful. The Chicken-Woman is dense and tacky and tangible, one of a host of bizarre, intrusive, self-torturing thoughts that will plague me for months. The thoughts grow synchronously worse with other withdrawal symptoms—panic, depression, sweats, muscle rigidity, tremors—offering proof that they are external and hence not to be trusted.

  The fits of self-recrimination are worse after 2:00 P.M. They crucify me to the bed as the sun hooks toward Boulder Canyon and afternoon shadows spread across the snow like inkblots. I lie corpse-flat atop the comforter, mulling over every rotten thing I’ve done, sounds and images resurfacing in strobe-lit snippets and endlessly looping mini-films. I’m stuck, with crystalline recall, reliving the myriad shabberies committed under the benzos’ disinhibiting sway. I remember every unkind expletive during a fight with a girlfriend, every arrogant fit at the cliffs, every pill I stole from the medicine cabinets of friends and family. I remember every scathing or self-congratulatory magazine article I wrote, fueled by my own bottomless insecurity and metastasized ego. And I think of the selfish, near-sociopathic things I did that went far beyond these minor sins, like the time I deliberately free-soloed in front of a girlfriend, Haven, outside Socorro, New Mexico, despite her strong misgivings. Haven turned from the cliff and walked down to the dry, cobbled arroyo floor of Box Canyon in bright December sun, sobbing, shoulders heaving while I tightened my shoelaces and set off up a 5.11 I hadn’t climbed in a decade. You should never solo with a bad head, and you should never solo if it’s making someone else uncomfortable. Haven, a talented writer and editor with black hair and ice-blue eyes, wanted marriage and children, but I’d been too immature to even move in together. Climbing, drugging, and screwing around took precedence at the time. I was thirty, refusing to grow up. Haven loved me, and here I was willing to die on a fifty-foot rock climb just to prove a point: that it was my life to throw away. Twenty-five feet off the ground on the Box’s slick andesite, I nearly slipped off, my right hand flossing into a teardrop-shaped hole just as my butt pulled me backward, my sequence bollixed because I’d climbed into the crux with hatred and with haste.

  I’d been putting friends and family through things like this forever because it was my life to throw away—on starvation, on rocks, on risk, on drugs, on Xbox. God forbid I ever stopped to consider how much I’d been torturing everyone around me. I can’t stand myself another second; the breathing difficulties worsen. I writhe on the bed, writhe on the couch, try to distract myself with the few TV shows I can tolerate. I’m suffocating, buried alive under a mountain of iniquity. The wind howls, the screen doors bang, the windows flex, the lights flicker, and I can never get enough air.

  Half-hypoxic, I start going on hands and knees up the staircase from Clyde’s yard when I need to fetch the dog inside. Then I start to fixate on not only my own breathing but also that of other people. Watching TV, I study how the actors and news anchors draw breath before each sentence. The air rushing into their lungs makes a ragged gasping sound I’ve never noticed, but now cannot un-hear. It’s like when someone draws your attention to your blinking: Having noted this simple, repetitive, animative process you can no longer avoid the fact of your being alive and all of its implied existential mass—or the fact of its antithesis, nonbeing. At heart a death obsession, this breathing focus will creep into interpersonal interactions, spiraling me down into a surreal thought loop in which I feel both pity and horror for all mankind, all of us but one breath from oblivion. I start to have dreams in which I’m breathing normally and autonomously, in which I walk across the room to do something as mundane as turning on a light switch without hyperventilating—pure heaven. I’m in cognitive but also sensory overload: I hear buzzing, banjo music, and Native American chanting nearby, always one room away, a sound I cannot quite place. And my sense of smell has become hyperacute—our wooden kitchen table smells like a burning lumberyard, and all dairy products outgas a sour, spoiled-yogurt rancidity.

  When I run out of food, I realize that it’s incumbent upon me to go shopping, but I can’t handle the supermarket. I start by going to a Subway down the block, then order carryout at a Mexican restaurant, then try a 7-Eleven for sundries, then venture into a pricey local health-food market—places where transactions take place quickly and with easy egress. It takes all my strength to stand at the register and face the cashier, to pretend that I’m not speaking through a Plexiglas wall of benzo insanity. Eventually, I work up the nerve to go to Safeway, and even to drive as far as Denver International Airport, forty-five minutes away, to pick up my father. I start chewing gum, so that the nervous energy has an outlet, so that some part of me—my jaw—is always in motion. This is how it will go, reclaiming quotidian things step by hard-won step. It is like being avalanched under: If I cannot claw my way to the surface, carving my life scoop by scoop from the snow, then I will die.

  I try climbing twice, with dismal results; my muscles are weak, noncompliant, and watery. I shuffle up to Sanitas after Christmas but can’t do more than a few moves at a time before trembling, dizziness, a cast-iron heaviness in my limbs, numbness in my appendages, and disorientation send me back to earth. There is a shaking at my core that spreads into my fingers and makes it impossible to command them. The sun blinds me, the light like ice picks in my eyes. On New Year’s Day I venture up to Flagstaff Mountain with friends but am hyperventilating so badly that even being one foot off the ground on mellow slabs is too much stimulation. I can feel the planet turning beneath me, the ground collapsing into itself. The rocks and Ponderosa pines rush up in frames, flashes, and a wicked spray of January sun. We end up at the Monkey Traverse, a long, red, sunny wall high over the green crease of Gregory Canyon. It is a 5.11 climb, fifty feet sideways, and I fake my way across on muscle memory, having done it hundred
s of times, my body automatically recalling the sequences. But the exertion, the increase in heart rate, leaves me feeling lightheaded and funny, like I’ve gone for a run immediately after finishing a rich meal. I sit on a rock to remove my climbing shoes but end up hovering instead, my body automatically poised for flight—but to where?

  Whatever this is, it just goes on and on and on.

  It has been a month since I stopped benzos and I’ve only gotten sicker. I’ve cleared out the Neurontin, but even washing those pills out I shouldn’t feel this way. I just want someone to talk to, to bounce ideas off of. But who, at this juncture? Which therapist, which doctor, which hospital will concede that the problem might be iatrogenic, that it might not be intrinsic to me, will not imply that unless I stay on meds I will feel this way forever? Which of them has confessed, “Okay, Matt, you might be right: This is looking far more complex than just depression and anxiety, and maybe we should take a step back, stop yanking you on and off ten different pills every other week, and reevaluate underlying benzo withdrawal”? Which of them has said, “Some of the things you’re describing are so bizarre and random that perhaps it is the medicine”?

  I see it now: Whatever it was that the doctors told me about withdrawal lasting two weeks, it was wrong. I’ve been fed a lie. I wanted them to be right because I wanted my life back, and the sooner the better, but I should have guessed from what I’d read on the Internet that it’s not so easy. I should have better recalled the summer of 1996, and how symptoms like depression and fatigue and insomnia lingered for months. I’m desperate to confirm my theory—to finally find a concrete why, a piece of driftwood to cling to amidst the maelstrom. An e-mail to my friend Jim shows my mindset and my dilemma: “Hey, Jim. Sorry I didn’t get back with you sooner. I had a pretty gnarly stretch there, as I decided to wean myself off the ‘good’ medicine they used to get me off the ‘bad’ medicine … I got tired of swallowing horse pills and being dizzy … I can be dizzy on my own just with anxiety, so to hell with it. My hands were shaking too bad to really type for a few days.”

  I don’t remember that at all: My hands shaking so badly I couldn’t type?

  Other than a few sympathetic friends, I have no one to talk to. My parents are burned out, tired of hearing about pills and benzos and anxiety madness, and I can’t say I blame them. They’re weary of me calling up to sob into the phone, threatening suicide, pleading that I’m choking again or cannot breathe, kvetching about how much I’m starting to abhor psychiatrists. I’ve leaned on them so heavily in the past year, on their love and on their finances. At one point my mother will tell me I need to stop calling and instead reach out to my “support network,” as if she’s no longer part of it. But the “support network”—the doctors, therapists, hospitals, and my own and my parents’ willingness to turn to these sources—is what put me here. I’m stuck; it’s hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. I will linger on for months and years in this hell until I finally work up the courage to kill myself. I see no other way out. Then I remember that phone number in my wallet for the benzo support group. It’s at least worth a try. The call will be my final lifeline. I pick my cell phone up off the kitchen table and dial.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. I … Well, I … Okay, my name is Matt. I, um, well … and I found a number for a benzo support group on the wall at the Boulder hospital. And I’m hoping I—Did I call the right number?”

  “Yes, yes! Hi, Matt, hi. You called the right number. My name is Alison and I used to run the group. That was my flyer. Up on the wall at Boulder Community, right?”

  “Yes … It was. I was … Wait, used to?”

  “Yes, unfortunately we don’t get together anymore, but I’m still involved with the benzo community. I left that flyer there a couple of years ago. I’m surprised it’s still up…”

  “Are you here in Boulder?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “Do you think you could help me?”

  “I’d sure like to try. Maybe you should tell me a little bit more about what’s going on, and then we can get together in person.”

  Alison’s voice has some East Coast twang, but also a calming softness of tone. This is the first phone call in weeks during which I’ve not felt like hanging up and bolting. It has been difficult to stay on the phone—with anyone—or even to be in the same space with people. When Kasey’s friends came over to watch Grey’s Anatomy or my father came to visit, I got a panicky, trapped-in-an-elevator feeling in my own living room. Alison tells me that she used to be on benzos herself, if I’m worried about confiding in her. She pauses, and then tells me that she’s not a doctor or a psychologist but is earning a master’s in therapy to help counsel people through benzo withdrawal. I feel that I can trust her.

  I tell Alison my story, blurting it out in chunks and diagnoses and hospitalizations and milligram counts, listing symptoms I’ve been experiencing and trying to describe the stark, omnipresent fear. Alison says little more than “Okay” and “Uh-huh,” simply letting me talk it through. Then finally, finally, for the first time in this whole horrid saga, I hear the right words, the ones I’ve been waiting so long to hear.

  “Matt, you might not want to hear this right now because I know you’re in hell, but you’ve pretty much undergone a cold-turkey withdrawal,” Alison says. “They took you off Ativan very, very quickly, and it’s going to cause a lot of symptoms—strong, scary symptoms like what you’re feeling now.”

  It’s like she’s waved a magic wand over me. I pause, letting this knowledge sink in.

  “But I thought I—That is, they said it was a safe taper. And it took me months to get there.”

  “Yes, but you started from a high dose after years of use, which is the main thing to consider, unfortunately. Four milligrams a day of Klonopin is nothing to sneeze at. It’s your starting point that really matters, because that’s where your brain has to adjust from.”

  “I see—I guess that makes sense. The idea scares the shit out of me, but it, uh, makes sense. Does this mean I’ll feel this way for a long time?” I ask.

  “It’s hard to say for sure. On my last time withdrawing, I came off seven milligrams of Klonopin.”

  “Seven milligrams? But how did you—? I mean, how—”

  “I can tell you more when we meet up. For now, just know that as scary as what you’re feeling is, it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you or that it’s permanent, because it’s not. This is far from abnormal. In fact, I’d be surprised if you weren’t feeling this way.”

  “It’s not abnormal?”

  “No—not at all, not if you’re taken off benzos so quickly. I know exactly what you’re going through. It’s terrible; worse than anything. But it’s not abnormal by any means.”

  “So when … I mean, but when should I feel better? The doctors said it should only take a few weeks, but I’m sicker than before. I mean, Alison, I feel totally crazy.”

  “It’s early days for you yet, Matt. I hate to say it, but again, given your history and how quickly you came off, it could be a while. You’re going to have to give yourself time—your best ally right now is going to be time.”

  My gut drops another notch.

  “A while?”

  “There are no hard-and-fast numbers. Some say a range of six to eighteen months, but it’s all totally individual. You could also reinstate and try to taper again more slowly, but I’m not sure you’d want to at this point. It sounds like you’ve worked pretty hard just to get off.…”

  “I see. And will I feel better every day, or better all at once, or what will it look like?”

  “Well…” Alison pauses. “From what I’ve seen, healing from benzo withdrawal is pretty erratic and individual. You might get a good few hours, or a good day of feeling totally normal—what’s known as a ‘window.’ But then the symptoms can come back stronger than ever, and you’ll just have to hang on to how you felt during that window and know that another one will come again soon. They’ll keep coming an
d keep getting longer and closer together until eventually you feel like yourself again.”

  “I haven’t had any of these windows…”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that yet, Matt. I really wouldn’t. It might stay that way for weeks or even months, but I do promise you this: You’re going to get better. You won’t feel this fear for the rest of your life. No way: Don’t let anyone tell you that. It’s this strong now because you’re in the first three months of benzodiazepine withdrawal. It is a real, physical and emotional syndrome from which you will heal—I promise. If you let time run its course, your body will find its way back to what I like to call ‘intrinsic health’—your inner sense of wellness and wholeness.”

  “It will?”

  “Yes. It will—you will. I’ve been exactly where you are today. I was there only four years ago actually, and now I’m almost totally better. You just have to hang on.…”

  “My God … I … Thank you, Alison. That is the one thing that no one has told me yet: that I will have my life back again if I just hang on.”

  I’m standing in my living room crying, trying not to let my snuffling carry across the line. Even spinning with dizziness and sheathed in muscular rigidity, even tormented by terror and insomnia, I feel relief for the first time in years. Years. I have my answer. The pills were and are causing this—it’s exactly as I’ve suspected all along. Alison and I agree to meet at a coffee shop in a few days; I can hardly wait. And then it happens: That night I get a window, a temporary reprieve. I’m out on the living room floor at 2:00 A.M. doing bottle exercises when the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut comes on Comedy Central. Because it’s so late, the film is uncensored and I soon find myself wheeze-chuckling, then wheeze-laughing, then outright belly-laughing at the ribald jokes. I have not been able to properly laugh in months, but something about the movie and the bottle unfreezes my rigid belly, and it no longer feels like my diaphragm has been dipped in concrete and rammed up my throat. There has been an electrical current coursing along my spine—a friend, passing her hand over my belly the next year, will sense it without any prodding from me—and that, too, recedes into the background. I can breathe freely, easily. I can laugh. The room takes on its normal contours; the walls lean back and resume an upright stance. The reading lamp in the corner no longer looks like an exploding sun. Even the Chinook winds have calmed, and the cold air outside the picture window is clear and still. A crescent moon arcs through the sky, dipping west over the First Flatiron.