At one point, I became paranoid that Percocet was making my face look sickly, so I decided to invest in the best eye creams, face masks, and colognes. I even bought a perfume that smelled like “Rich Lady Who’s Going to Die Soon” and spritzed myself with it every night before bed so I could feel extra glamorous. Unfortunately, none of the products I bought improved my appearance. Pills had made my face so fat and puffy that I looked like Flounder from The Little Mermaid. It probably didn’t help that I was also stuffing my face with chocolate bars. Remember heroin chic? I was heroin not chic. Opiates made me crave sweets. After taking my pills, my nightly ritual was a visit to the corner store for one giant jug of water and an imported chocolate bar. Then I would go home, lie in bed, and eat the entire thing in seconds. My roommate knew something was going on when she found countless chocolate bar wrappers floating around the house and opened the fridge and only saw “Hi, I’m on painkillers!” food like rice pudding, ice cream, and strawberries, but she probably just assumed I was stress eating.
When I wasn’t binging on chocolate or moisturizing excessively, I was starting to nod off in public. Nodding off isn’t like falling asleep. It’s when you are so stoned you can’t even keep your eyes open. Once, while in the throes of my drug problem, my family came to visit me in New York. We were all riding in a cab on our way to a museum when I started to take an impromptu nap against the window.
“Ryan!” my sister whispered. “Why do you keep closing your eyes and falling asleep? Is everything okay?”
Startled, I muttered, “Oh, yeah. Sorry. I’m just super exhausted . . .”
My mom was sitting in the front seat of the cab and stayed silent even though she knew I was on drugs. A few nights earlier, we were going through my bag looking for something when she saw that I had a bottle of Vicodin hidden in a side pocket. I took a deep breath and prepared to make up some lie about how the pain from my compartment syndrome had come back, but luckily I didn’t have to. Instead of confronting me, she just zipped up my bag and asked me where I’d like to go to dinner. My dad did the same thing. Whenever I visited him in California, I’d take entire bottles of painkillers from his medicine cabinet. When I’d be back in New York, he’d call me and I’d think, “This is it. This is when my dad realizes I’ve been taking all the pills and I have to come clean.” But he never said a damn thing.
I don’t blame my parents for looking the other way. I was an adult living a separate life from them in New York. My issue with drugs was my issue only, and nothing they did could’ve changed anything. It is fascinating, though, to witness the level of denial some parents can have about their children. They remember the trophies, the stellar report cards, the nice boyfriend you bring home for Christmas, but they choose to forget the churlish attitude and the long stretches of unemployment and the bill from the STD clinic that shows up on the shared health insurance plan. Whenever I went home for the holidays, I played a version of myself that I knew my parents would like. I gave them their special boy even when their special boy was taking all their drugs and acting like a demon. Being fucked-up is an inconvenient truth many people like to ignore. We live in a culture that’s only interested in self-improvement. The girl who sleeps her way through her twenties and does all the drugs secretly wants to be the first person to settle down just so she can show the world how far she’s come. The workaholic stress case reads Keep Calm and Carry On, tries yoga, and turns into a completely different person. Hooray! People are constantly trying to shake off any qualities that could be perceived as messy. We want to deny that there’s any part of us that could take pleasure in the wrong things when the fact is that you can experience true comfort in destroying yourself.
On December 31, 2011, I reached a new low in my drug use when I decided to take a bunch of Percocet and almost slept through my New Year’s Eve plans. Earlier in the day, I had gone out to eat with a friend and kept accidentally nodding off in the restaurant. I apologized for being “so sleepy” and went home with the intention of taking a nap before getting ready for the night’s festivities, but the drugs had other plans. When I woke up from my nap, I looked at my phone and saw that it was 10:45 p.m. I was supposed to be at a house party an hour before. Panicked, I called up my friend.
“Hey. I’m sorry. I took a disco nap and I guess it accidentally bled into ’90s grunge.” Please laugh. Please never figure out how much of a mess I’ve become.
“How the hell did that happen, Ryan? It’s New Year’s Eve—the one night a year where being on time is kind of crucial.”
“I know, I know, but I’m on my way.” I threw on some clothes, ran the fifteen blocks to the party, and showed up right before the clock struck midnight. When I opened the door, I was unnerved by how joyous the mood was. People were dressed to the nines and bubbling with energy. They were acting like they were actually happy. To save face, I did my best impression of a person who was having fun, and everybody bought it. By now I was an expert at acting normal and hiding the fact that I felt deader than dead on the inside. As I walked home alone from the party at 2:00 a.m., I thought of a perfect New Year’s resolution for 2012: try not to sleep through it, you fucking loser.
I attempted to quit painkillers many times, but it never worked. I’d go to Los Angeles for a few weeks to dry out, only to end up flying back to New York early so I could get high. Or I would flush the pills Dr. Kearns gave me down the toilet and delete Olivia’s number from my phone, which would last a few days until I got a craving and I’d send Olivia a message on Facebook saying, “Hey, babe. Someone stole my phone and I lost all my numbers. Can you give me yours?” When I was really feeling hopeless, I would attend NA and A.A. meetings, but it was pointless because I didn’t identify as an addict. My only hope at getting better was to wait until something happened that would make me come to my senses and quit doing drugs for good. For many people, this rock bottom comes in the form of a horrific accident or an overdose, but I got lucky. All I needed was a limp dick.
Somehow, in the midst of always being on drugs and writing a billion posts a day for Thought Catalog, I went on a college speaking tour. Even though I had experienced some success as a blogger, I felt like a hack telling someone four years younger than me how to land a writing job. If I were being honest, my number one tip would be to take a bunch of opiates and write some sappy blog post about love. That’s what worked for me.
One of the colleges that asked me to give a talk was McGill, a university in Montreal. I had never been to Canada before and was excited to visit, but I worried that my growing dependency on painkillers would prevent me from stringing two coherent sentences together, let alone inspire a bunch of students. Since I never went to these schools stoned—even a druggie loser like me had a conscience—I would binge leading up to the trip and then start light withdrawals the day of my talk. It was an idiotic plan (why would you send your body into withdrawals right when you needed it the most?), but rational thoughts had peaced out of my brain a long time ago.
I flew to Montreal in the middle of January. The weather felt like knives on my skin, and I was starting to wilt. When I got to the event, I realized that this wasn’t some casual intimate setting I could sleepwalk my way through. I was speaking to two hundred people in an auditorium. My legs started to shake. Visions of me passing out or—worse—puking Exorcist-style all over the podium began to haunt me. But then something truly spectacular happened. As I started to talk, a sense of calm washed over my brain and I realized I could do this. I don’t know how the words and jokes came out of my mouth but they did, and everything was fine and people laughed and they clapped and they got the person they wanted me to be that night.
After the talk ended, I planned on going back to my hotel room alone and letting my body finish withdrawing, but my friend Laura, who lives in Montreal, persuaded me to go out to dinner with her and a few of her friends, one of whom was named Sam. Sam was a beautiful pale-skinned gay boy with wispy blond hair and crystal clear eyes. During dinner, I avoide
d him because I was feeling shy and unfuckable. When you do opiates, your sex drive goes AWOL. Since your brain is experiencing a thousand little orgasms a day, you completely forget about the existence of real-life ones. I still had occasional make-outs with guys, but when it came time to actually get down to work, I’d be like, “Hey, do you mind if we just cuddle for ten thousand hours while I play the same Washed Out song over and over?” Even if I weren’t feeling asexual, I’d never pursue Sam, because he was way out of my league. On the spectrum of attractiveness, I fall in the depressing middle. People like me aren’t ugly, but we never get laid because of our looks. We need to razzle dazzle them with our personalities and get them appropriately buzzed before they can be like, “Okay. Sure. I’m horny enough to do this.” Sam, on the other hand, could have shit for brains and you’d still be like, “That’s so interesting. Let me see your cock.”
After dinner, we all went to a bar. I was getting drunk, which was helping to ease my withdrawal symptoms, and having an okay time. Every so often I would catch Sam looking at me and assume it was because my face was twitching from the absence of Percocet, but then Laura pulled me aside and told me, “Dude, wake up. Sam is into you.”
“No, he’s not.”
“Yes, he is. He just told me.”
Seriously? I’m twenty pounds overweight, I haven’t taken a dump in five days, and my face is doing an involuntary rendition of the Macarena, and you’re telling me this megababe is interested in doing sexual things to my body? I couldn’t waste this blessed opportunity. When someone attractive decides they’d like to have sex with you, you have to say yes. It’s the law. I sat down next to Sam on the couch and talked with him for a few minutes. We both knew this was heading into make-out territory, so every word out of our mouths sounded like a stall until we could come into each other’s mouths. Impatient, I took the plunge and kissed him. Within two tongue thrusts, we were making out in the club like a couple of horny monsters. I asked him to come back to my hotel so we could spare innocent bystanders the sight of me devouring someone’s face. Once we got to my room, we rolled around on the bed and did that dance where you’re not sure if you want to commit to a full-on hookup so you blue-ball each other until someone either falls asleep or takes it to the next level. Sam didn’t want to go to bed. He wanted to fuck and/or possibly give and receive a spirited BJ. He took off his underwear and revealed a dick that was so rock hard and stunning it could’ve been on the cover of Vogue. I started to take off my underwear as well, but then I looked down and saw something so horrifying it caused me to gasp. My penis was flaccid. I began kissing Sam, hoping that it would jump-start something down below. I grabbed his ass and stroked his dick. I even tried the old, reliable dirty talk. Still nothing. I couldn’t believe it. I never had trouble getting hard before and I had hooked up with some legitimate gargoyles. Now I was with Sam, one of the hottest guys my penis had ever had the pleasure of meeting, and it chose to ghost on me.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” I said, my face flushed with embarrassment. “I think it’s because I’m too drunk or something. This never happens.”
“It’s okay,” Sam assured me in a way that sounded like he actually meant it. “I really don’t care.”
The next morning, Sam woke up and instead of running for the hills, he spent the next few hours in bed with me. The trauma from the night before seemed to be erased from his memory, and now all he wanted to do was spoon and make out underneath the covers. It felt great. Lying there in bed, legs intertwined with someone else’s, I realized that I was, for the first time in almost a year, experiencing real intimacy with someone. It was something I had willed myself to forget. I forgot what it felt like to wake up next to someone and put your arms around each other. I forgot about the terrible dry mouth and the morning breath and the hot air that sometimes accidentally escapes from your lips and lands on the other person’s cheeks. There are people in this world who experience this sort of closeness every day, and here I was, shocked to my core over an uncharacteristically tender one-night stand.
I started to realize what I’d actually sacrificed for drugs. Every night of fun I had with the Girls on Pills gang, every stoned morning I spent writing some blog post for my job had all added up to me sleeping alone with a limp dick, and I hadn’t even noticed. Pills are smart. They put me to sleep and then slowly robbed me of things in the middle of the night—so slowly, in fact, that I hadn’t even noticed that anything was missing. They took away my desire to love, to feel joy, or even to show up to my best friend’s birthday party. They took it all bit by bit until one day I woke up and saw that my life had become nothing but static.
Being with Sam, I felt myself wake up. For the first time, I didn’t want to grab my clothes and run to my comfortable cave of isolation and drugs and the Internet. I wanted to stay and bathe in his affection. I wanted him to hold me tighter and longer. I wanted him to tell me I could have something real like this and that it wasn’t too late for things to change. Each second I spent with him, I was able to see more and more just how small my life had become. I’d been deluding myself into thinking that all my new friendships and happiness were based off something authentic when they were rooted in being high. Nothing had been real. When you take drugs, you don’t want to see things for what they are, so you choose to look at illusions instead.
That morning I realized I had a decision to make. I could continue letting drugs dictate my life and ruin my body and isolate me from the people who mattered most. I could keep putting fancy lotions on my face to conceal my rotting corpse and go to parties where everyone but me looks alive, and I could spend more time with people who don’t know anything about me except that my favorite kind of pill is a 10/325 Percocet. I could take my parents’ drugs and force them even further into denial, I could spend all my settlement money on pills and quit my job and become a full-time drug addict whose life is fantastic until they’re out of drugs, and then it’s a flurry of text messages and a lot of panic and a lot of anger and a lot of your body shutting down until you can get your hands on the poison that it’s been running on. Or I could stop taking pills and have a life that everybody is entitled to. A nice life. A good life. Maybe even a boring life.
When I returned to New York, I stopped going to dealers and my corrupt doctor and slowly started to put the pieces of my brain back together. Making the right choice had never felt so satisfying.
People who have never had a problem with drugs sometimes have a difficult time understanding the dark places it can take you. But everyone has experienced a period in their life when you do things that hurt you simply because you’re not interested in feeling good. You think “good” is for old people who don’t know how to have fun, and all you want to do is see how much hurt your heart can take before it gets damaged beyond repair. You want to do reckless things like go home with an asshole because you’re convinced it will reveal some important truth about yourself, a truth that you need to know in order to keep going. But the only thing sleeping with assholes reveals about you is feelings of profound emptiness and occasionally herpes.
There are people who are moving forward in life, and there are those who are letting everything fall apart. When I was on drugs, I remember looking at people my age and being like, “How is their life so functional?” It felt like I was given tiny adulthood quizzes every day and failing miserably. Something just did not compute, and the more time passed the more I’d feel alienated. In my sad little brain, I thought, “You can have your lame relationship and good eating habits, but I have my awesome drugs, so who’s the real loser now?”
A lot of people feel the same way I did (and sometimes still do), and they deal with it by retreating further and further into oblivion where nothing can hurt them. Some never get better, but I was fortunate to be scared straight. When I really focused in on my life and saw the mess I had created, I said to myself, “Bitch, you did not live in a body cast, roll around in a wheelchair, have leg braces, get hit by a car, and lose fu
nction in your left hand just so you could take four Percocet and rub $200 lotion around your eyes. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.” I think part of the reason I did let myself succumb to a pill problem was defiance. Growing up with cerebral palsy and getting in my accident had made me into a golden child by default. Everyone was in awe of how I turned out, which created some unexpected resentment. People were banking on me turning my bad deck of cards into gold. But what if I didn’t want to be an inspirational story?
I have since given that angsty part of me an Ambien so it could go to sleep, but I will tell you nothing is cut and dry. I’m not perfect, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, I find myself cozying up to a messier version of myself. I never punish myself for regressing, because punishment and shame are what led me to being that person in the first place. Every destructive thing I’ve ever done to myself has come from not having self-love and not believing I deserve a happy, balanced life. And that doesn’t stem from entitlement. On the contrary, it’s about realizing you’re like everybody else. You want a partner who understands you, a job where you feel valued, and friends who will actually hang out when you ask them to. Once you register how damn similar we all are and that you’re not alone on Crazy Individual Island, you can stop going blind from only seeing yourself. It took me a long time to understand this, but the second I did I was finally able to lead a life that felt meaningful. Now I’ve become a person I never thought I would be. I work out six days a week, I try to eat right, and except for the occasional bedtime Xanax, I don’t do drugs. Sometimes my newfound maturity makes me want to barf, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. My existence, while less exciting, doesn’t resemble a flimsy piece of trash anymore. It feels like mine. I’d been renting my body for twentysomething years, unsure if I wanted to make the commitment to myself and buy. “I don’t know,” I’d think to myself. “It’s kind of a dump. Am I really a wise investment?” The answer, of course, is always yes.
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