by Nic Sheff
Everyone nods in agreement. I feel humiliated, but I try to just keep my feet on the floor, my arms uncrossed. Ray notices my agitation and encourages me to sit with the feelings this has brought up. The truth is, I’ve always known, at least somewhere inside me, that Zelda was partly just a status symbol. I felt important with her. Hanging out with my celebrity friends I always felt important—cool—whatever. But underneath that, I can see now, was a deep-seated feeling of worthlessness. Surrounding myself with famous people helped me to hide that ever-expanding chasm in me. Was Zelda a part of that? I guess it makes sense. But what am I without her? I can’t possibly stand on my own. There’s no way.
After group we all go up and smoke cigarettes. Everyone tells me how proud they are of me for being so open. They tell me they support me.
James and Jim have emerged as real friends to me. These guys are fucking funny as hell. Plus James is really very cool. He’s reading this biography of Georges Bataille and lived in Brooklyn for the last couple of years. I enjoy just talking to him and we play a lot of cards and stuff.
When the cigarette break is over I have to walk back down the dusty path leading to one of the group rooms. I’m scheduled for this thing called SE with a woman named Georgia. SE is Somatic Experiencing, but that’s as much as I know about it. Georgia is tall and thin with pixieish gray hair, librarian glasses, and a color-coordinated little suit. The color she’s coordinated is brown. I have to sign a release in order to do whatever it is we’re about to do. We shake hands and I sign. What does Dylan say in one of his songs? “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
Exactly.
I sit in a chair opposite her and she smiles.
“Okay, well,” she begins. “Why don’t you put both feet on the floor and uncross your arms?”
I didn’t realize my arms were crossed, but I do as she says. Then she asks me about my past. She asks what I’ve been focusing on. I talk to her about different stuff, eventually getting to the part about getting beat up when I was on the street—prostituting myself.
“Great,” she says, somewhat incongruously. “Where do you feel that in your body?”
“What?”
“Go inside. What are you feeling? Is it shame? Terror? Anger?”
“Maybe all those,” I say, swallowing hard.
“And where do you experience that in your body?”
I try to check in with myself.
“I guess I feel it in my chest and stomach.”
“What does it feel like in your chest and stomach?”
“It’s a tightness in my chest and maybe a nausea in my stomach.”
She talks me back through the night. She has me describe it to her. “What happened?”
“I don’t really remember,” I say. “I mean, it’s all just blurred out. I met him at a bar somewhere downtown. It was him and his boyfriend.”
“Can you remember what they looked like?”
“No. Well, the boyfriend was maybe Eastern European, I think. He had an accent and, uh, long hair. The first guy was really muscular, like a body-builder type. He had a shaved head.”
“What did they do to you?”
“My ribs were broken,” I say. Then, suddenly, I have this horrible memory/sensation of the muscular guy on top of me. I feel like I’m gonna throw up. It’s like I can’t control my breathing and I’m hyperventilating some. I’m choking all at once—like something is being shoved against the back of my throat. I can’t breathe and I start crying. Georgia helps me get back, grounded, feeling my feet pressed against the floor.
I can’t stop crying. I feel very out of control. I’m really feeling this stuff in my body and memories are jarred loose that I would’ve been content to have kept hidden. According to Georgia, the body traps memories of trauma within it. Animals in the world will shake or something until the trauma is released, but humans aren’t connected with how to do that. We need guidance. I guess the concept makes sense, as far as it goes. The session’s only a half hour long, but by the end I need to just take off running up the hill. I feel genuine sadness over what I put myself through. I mean, I can actually feel it, which is different for me. It’s weird actually starting to own all that’s happened.
This is all made more acute by the appearance of Patrick.
Patrick had been at Safe Passage Center before, but I guess it hadn’t quite done the trick. What I’m struck by immediately with Patrick is that he reminds me of someone who I had back when I was working the streets. I mean, I know I’ve never actually seen this guy before, but I can’t even be in the same fucking room with him. He looks like Steve Buscemi in Fargo, with yellow, crooked teeth, and thick, wet lips. He has pasty skin and an obvious comb-over. His eyes are strangely perverse. He blubbers constantly, crying with the wild abandon of a forgotten child. He snivels and squirms and nobody is really sure why he’s even here. But I can’t stand to look at him. I run from every interaction I might have to have with him.
I explain the situation to James and Jim. They try to buffer the impact by keeping us separate, but it’s not that easy.
In codependency group, we have to do these role-plays to help us learn how to assert ourselves. This is, like, fifteen minutes after the stuff about my time as a sex worker came up with Georgia. And, of course, I randomly get paired with Patrick. So here’s my chance to confront my past and walk through the fear. Wayne from my old Serenity group co-leads with this Emily woman. It’s weird, but almost all the female therapists here look alike. They are all fat and strong and dress very similarly. It’s like they harvested them all from the same gene pool.
Today Wayne and Emily have us focusing on boundaries. Boundaries are where you practice standing up for yourself, saying what you will or won’t do, take, etc. We have to role-play it out. For instance, Patrick is getting a divorce from his wife and she’s guilt-tripping him about money. I’m supposed to play Patrick’s wife and he’s gonna set the boundary that he’s not giving her any more.
“So,” he says in a voice that is overly sweet and insincere. “You be my wife and I’ll tell you that I don’t owe you anything else. Are you all right with that, Nic?”
Sitting this close to him I am barely able to speak. I’m very hot and sweating and I want to run screaming from the room. Worse, I’m supposed to maintain eye contact. I start to actually think I might fucking pass out. I just can’t take it.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur. “I have to…I have to go.”
I mostly stumble toward the door.
“You all right?” asks Emily after me.
“I’ll be back,” I say.
I never come back—or, at least, not until the next class.
I go into my cabin and am suddenly very cold. I get under the covers and shake. I shake all over the place, like an animal who just escaped from a predator. It goes on for nearly an hour and a half. I try singing a little to myself. It doesn’t help much.
DAY 635
It’s the day after Christmas and I’ve started to really value the time I’ve spent at Safe Passage Center. Ray, the core group leader, has almost taken on a sort of surrogate father role for me and a lot of the boys. He is so strong, yet gentle, and just a sweetheart. He embodies a sensitive masculinity, ying and yang—something I never knew was possible. Somehow he manages to make everything we’ve been through seem less shameful. He helps us love ourselves more through his complete acceptance and openness.
The focus here is really on loving yourself. That idea is something I never really understood before Ray. He talks to us with such honesty about his own struggles hating himself—not feeling like he was good enough. As Ray shares, I can see so many similarities in our stories. Maybe it was my self-loathing and insecurities that made me act the way I did. That’s sort of an amazing realization for me. I never really thought about the fact that I’d have to learn how to really care about myself in order to stay sober. I always thought it was more about learning to care about other people. Like, I shoul
d stay sober for Jasper and Daisy, my dad, Spencer, friends, girlfriends. I never understood that I have to really want to live for myself and as myself—not as anyone else. If I could be content with who I am, I wouldn’t have to escape myself always. That sounds simple, I guess, but it seems impossible. I don’t even really know how to begin. Maybe being here and going to groups and everything is a start. At least, I’m starting to feel a difference—a clarity or something.
Basically I’ve just really been trusting in the process here. I want it to work. I want to change and I actually have hope that it might be possible. A lot of this is due to some of the more intense alternative therapies they offer here, like Somatic Experiencing. Through these sessions I’ve been able to recall events from my childhood that I had completely suppressed from my memory. There was one event in particular that I was able to confront through these therapies. They say in the twelve-step program that the only people who can’t stay sober are the ones who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. I didn’t know it, but I was constitutionally incapable of being honest with myself. Now that I have discovered some of these truths about myself and have been helped to move through them, my mind isn’t such a scary place anymore.
They talk a lot here about the grieving process, citing the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. In her book she describes the phases of grief one must go through in order to move on from the death of a loved one. Here they say that those same phases of grieving have to apply to any trauma that occurs in our lives. Suppressing the pain, ignoring it, blocking it out, or getting high so I don’t have to feel it—those coping methods just don’t work. And I believe that. My insides always felt like they were consuming themselves. I felt fear for no reason, panic in response to everyday situations, and, of course, that terrible, violent self-loathing that controlled my life.
At the Safe Passage Center I am taken back through the trauma, re-experiencing it so that I can finally grieve in a healthy way. Maybe this all sounds crazy. But as new age and touchy-feely as it seems, I have really seen my life change. I am embracing who I am. I am not hiding anymore.
Today they have me doing this therapy they call Breath Work. They have me get up real early so I can do it before morning group. It is very cold this morning and I have to wrap myself in this army jacket that James gave me. I drink a little coffee and walk down to another group room. I’ve never worked with the woman who leads Breath Work, but I’ve seen her around the treatment center. She is very old and spindly with gray hair and no makeup. She looks really cool, with blue jeans and big boots on.
On the floor of her office she’s constructed a sort of crucifix-looking thing made out of pillows. It actually reminds me of the things they strap you to when they execute you with lethal injection on death row—or at least the way they made it look in Dead Man Walking.
Anyway, the woman, Gertrude, asks me to take off my shoes and lie down on the pillows.
“Now,” she says, “just clear your mind. Don’t try to control your thoughts at all. Let go completely.”
I try my best to do what she says. I want to get as much as I can out of everything they are offering me here. These regression therapies are always very frightening. Usually I’ll end up going back to a time when I was on the street, or some other sexual stuff that happened to me when I was young. It is always very painful and I’m nervous.
Gertrude puts her hand with wax-paper skin on my chest. She tells me to breathe fast and deep—never stopping. She doesn’t want me to talk. I’m just supposed to hyperventilate and she’ll guide me through it.
So I begin.
At first I notice just how dry my lips feel as the breath goes in and out. I feel light-headed and my stomach and legs start to cramp up. My mind races through many different things, but never stays with any one memory. Then, suddenly, I can’t stop thinking about that time at Zelda’s when I went into convulsions shooting cocaine. My body seizes up. I remember the song I sang to keep myself conscious. I remember it all, but I’m also feeling it inside me. I am scared. I am terrified I am going to die. It is just so frightening. I never really got that before, you know? I never felt how scary it was to come that close to death. I feel it now and I’m shaking, shaking, shaking and then I have to stop all at once and throw up into a trash can next to me. Nothing really comes out, but I just retch again and again.
Gertrude rubs my back and tells me everything will be all right. It’s not easy feeling everything so strongly and it makes it a lot harder to dismiss what I’ve been through. It just all seems so real now, whereas it never really did before. And, as difficult as it is to feel all this stuff, I believe that it is my only chance to really heal—to have a Safe Passage, which is the promise of this treatment center.
After doing Breath Work I have enough time to call Zelda, who just got out of detox and has moved into a Sober Living. I want to share all these new experiences with her. I want to believe that she can fit into my life as a healthier person. None of the therapists here agree with me, but I still want to try. My relationship with Zelda is the one aspect of my life that I haven’t completely given over to this process. It’s the one thing that I’m still protecting, though, honestly, I am beginning to have my doubts as to whether I could really ever be with Zelda.
Zelda is really having the roughest time ever getting sober. She’s had two big seizures and had to have her gall bladder removed. All the drugs we were shooting dehydrated her or something. That caused stones to form inside her and I guess it hurts real bad.
But when she answers her phone I listen to her voice and it doesn’t fill me with the same crazy feeling of passion it used to. She sounds distant and still just so caught up in that world I left behind. She tells me all about what’s happening with Yakuza and Justin and all our friends there. I can’t talk to her for very long. I have to get to group.
“I love you,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says. “I hear you. I just don’t even know who I am. It’s hard to imagine anyone loving me.”
I feel this profound emptiness at the other end of the line—an emptiness that I used to feel within myself, but that is lessening as each day passes. I realize suddenly very clearly that loving Zelda is like loving a black hole. I’m not saying I’m willing to act on that yet, but it is an awareness that I want to share in core group.
When I get to the group room, they tell me Ray isn’t going to be in today, which is frustrating because I really wanted to talk to him about all this. Instead I just tell Kris and the rest of the group. I stammer over my words.
“You know,” I say, “I talked to Zelda this morning and I’m really scared that I’m not going to be able to work things out with her.”
Everyone seems shocked, except Kris, who says, “Uh, you think? It’s about time.”
I laugh. “It’s just that, you know, here I am having all these opportunities for healing, while she’s back in Sober Living, basically doing the same stuff we all did there two or three years ago. It’s not her fault, but it’s so hard for me to envision her changing. Not to say that it can’t happen—but I have a sense of independence now that I never had with Zelda.”
“Look,” says Kris. “Whether she changes or not, you need to learn to be on your own—not to depend on others to complete you. Until you have that, you have nothing. So, yeah, I suggest you separate from Zelda. And it doesn’t have to be forever. But, honestly, it’ll probably have to be.”
I’m not sure what to say. I know I’m not ready for that yet. Or at least I don’t think I am. I just try to sit with all this.
After group Kris tells us they’re having an emergency community meeting today and, of course, I immediately assume I’m in trouble. It’s been surprisingly warm over Christmas, even though I’ve had bronchitis and am on antibiotics and shit. We didn’t really do anything for the holiday, which is fine by me. This is the third Christmas I’ve spent in rehab. It’s definitely easier than being with my family.
I’m one of the first people in the community building aside from a wall of staff. My eyes make contact with Wayne’s and my stomach drops out of me.
“What’s wrong?”
I see the tears in Wayne’s eyes. I sit next to him.
“Ray’s dead,” he tells me. “He died suddenly last night of a heart attack.”
I find it hard to breathe and I’m crying all at once. The rest of the clients and therapists take their seats around the room and I just cry.
Jim is hit hardest by Ray’s death. Ray had really become like Jim’s father—and they both acknowledged this. Jim gets, like, physically sick from the shock of it. He’s crying so much and I hear him run off to the bathroom and throw up. Those who knew Ray each take turns saying a word or two about his impact on us. Kris is really crying and the air just seems thick with sadness and grief.
Jim’s strong, thick body is crumpled on mine. I actually kiss him on the forehead before I am able to think long enough to stop myself. He immediately runs up to his cabin and slams the door once the assembly is over. I walk up to go smoke. I really don’t talk to anyone. I try to go to my next group, but this strange cold feeling keeps shivering through my body. I literally can’t control it. It jerks and spasms. My body seems to be reacting completely independent of me. I’m forced to excuse myself and I go to lie down in my cabin.
The fit of shaking lasts for several hours. I’m so cold, it’s like the chill has buried itself into the very depth of my being. My legs jerk involuntarily and my mind seems sick with fever. Faces come out of the wooden screens that are set up around my bed to separate me from my roommate’s side of the cabin. The knots and lines in the grain of wood become shapes that I can’t blink away. There’s something amazing about being able to actually feel stuff now. I’m not sure what it is exactly that they’ve done to me here, but as hard as it is, I am so grateful to actually be connected with what’s going on with me. Annie says it’s the first step: dropping in—feeling my feelings—owning my past. I’m really just in it—acknowledging the pain and hurt I’ve caused to people who love me—to people I love.