Leave the Light On

by Jennifer Storm

  1. What does the recovering me like to do now?

  2. What have I always wanted to do but have never done because drugs or alcohol got in the way?

  Those questions bounced around in my head as I left therapy that day. I thought of the peacefulness I felt while sitting on my deck reading and journaling. I liked that. I still loved movies and watched a ton at home without drinking, so I guessed I liked that. I enjoyed spending nights at Denny’s with my new friends in recovery. I liked the true laughter that erupted from us all without any outside chemical influence. I still loved to listen to live music and to dance, but those things usually only happen in bars or at parties, and those bars and parties usually involve alcohol.

  I still wasn’t totally convinced that hanging out with my old friends wasn’t the best idea. After all, these were people I had known half my life. But I was beginning to see that I was changing, and with every step of growth I took in recovery, I got further and further away from the friends I thought I had, and further away from the person I once was.

  Sometimes I would go out and have a blast and enjoy just being clean and sober, but sometimes the nights would end with me feeling like a lost puppy. I would feel totally alienated from the people I thought I knew so well once they became engulfed in the party scene. I would often write in my journal about these times, as I did this one night while caught at a party and feeling my skin begin to crawl.

  Sometimes I feel so incredibly alone in my own skin and in this world that the isolation of being a recovering addict is painfully deafening in a room full of laughing social drinkers enjoying petty conversations and flirting. I feel like in an instant the room stops and swirls around me, and they all stop and stare at the freak who can’t compare. At the girl who took it too far and now lives in shame beyond repair. She gets all dolled up and looks the part, but when it comes down to it she can’t cut the rug up like you do after four or five fuzzy navels.

  Her insecurities shine on her forehead and her confidence falls to the floor in beads of sweat from her lower back, releasing all that she thought she was, only in a moment uncovering her weakness and exposing her darkness to a room full of oblivious drunkards.She desperately looks into the eyes of the strangers who have formed around her, who were in an instant transformed by the elixir of the evil that once tempted her, turning everyone from friend to foe. Her breath catches as she sees the confusion in her loved ones’ eyes because what is staring back at her is a total surprise.She can’t handle this person who is suddenly standing before her, small, wilted. She looks unfamiliar against the backdrop of the strength you know her day-to-day shell to be. And you can’t move, like your feet are trapped in a vise that contorts. Your voice shakes coming up your throat and out of your mouth as you try to explain that today is just one of those days I once mentioned to you that I could possibly have while trying to be “normal.” Some days it is so foreign, the space between the old life and the new one, that I get so lost in a tunnel of what-ifs and once-was’s that I can’t see the water filling up around my feet as it quickly engulfs me and I find myself drowning in the probability that you won’t really like me once you really see me.

  Some nights were hard, but the more recovery I gathered, the more I learned that going out to bars and trying to act as if was not only not in my best interest, it could result in my own relapse. In recovery, you have to be vigilant about your disease. You have to sometimes place your needs and recovery above everything and everyone else. This can seem incredibly confusing and selfish to those not in recovery, but for those of us in recovery, it seriously means life or death. However, like a good addict by nature, I would have to learn this lesson by trial and error—over and over again.

  11

  SUPERHERO

  AT THIS EARLY STAGE OF MY RECOVERY, WITH NOT EVEN a year under my belt, I still wanted to be around my friends and also my family, even though I had chosen to move away and knew it was not a good idea. I needed to feel connected to them, and being four hours away was really hard. Both of my brothers were living in their own addiction at that time, and I hoped that by going home I could show them that recovery was an option and a good one. I thought I could save them. I was misguided.

  I would go home and visit my brother Brian who was living in a one-bedroom apartment in the same complex where my brother Jimmy was living with his girlfriend and their daughter, Cheyanne.

  Brian was in rough shape. I remember going to his apartment one Saturday morning and knocking on the door. I banged loudly and heard nothing. I kept banging, and finally I heard a rumble and my brother faintly grunting. As he opened the door, I could see he was shirtless but wearing a pair of dirty jeans. His hair was matted and messy and he was squinting hard at the sun that had suddenly flooded the dark apartment and his vacant eyes. He pulled his head down to avoid the sun and eye contact, and he motioned me in through the door. As I walked in, the stench of stale beer and cigarettes filled my now-flaring nostrils. I waded through the mess of clothing, crushed beer cans, and random trash cluttered around my feet as I stepped toward the couch. A beat-up love seat sat on one side of the room, and a mismatched, beat-up couch had been pushed against the wall. In between, a worn-out coffee table was littered with cigarette butts and ashes, beer cans, a little pile of pot seeds, and an overflowing ashtray.

  I sat down and my skin began to crawl from the smell and environment. My mind flew back to how many times I had allowed myself to fester in environments similar to this—the all-night crack binges, the hangovers, and the horrible mornings that followed. I pulled out my cigarettes, fired one up as fast as I could, and handed my brother one too. I lit my brother’s cigarette, sat back, and took in the sight of my brother before me. His face was broken out with angry, pus-infected pimples scattered all over his forehead, cheeks, and neck. Just from that I knew he was doing a lot of coke. I remembered how my face would break out, and a shiver went up my spine. I tried to make idle chitchat with him, talking about my new apartment and how great the recovering community was in State College. He wasn’t really hearing me; he just looked over and asked me if he could borrow twenty bucks. He was supposed to have been paid at the bar where he was working, but they stiffed him … blah blah. I knew he was handing me the standard line of bullshit I had been so familiar with giving only months before, but I didn’t let on that I knew he was full of shit. Instead I felt nothing but pity and sadness for him. His hopelessness was palpable. I wanted nothing more than for him to see how well I was doing and to begin to understand that he, too, could be okay.

  He said he hadn’t really been eating much because he didn’t have money, and I could tell that was true. My brother had always been skinny. When we were little, everyone in our neighborhood called him “Ethiopian,” because no matter how much he ate, he always seemed to weigh about as much as a sack of groceries. Today I could see his rib cage was just a little more pronounced, his stomach more concave than usual. He saw me looking at him. I pushed out a little laugh and said, “Ethiopian,” and I saw a glimmer of light flash across his eyes, a brief recognition and connection to our past—our uninhibited, unencumbered childhood before addiction took charge of it all. He laughed and said, “Yeah, whatever, Keenifer,” a nickname I had always loathed because when I was a child my brothers taunted me unmercifully with it until I cried. Lately I had come to love it, because as I grew into an adult, it became one of those playful things that embodied everything about innocence. It’s one of those words that can send me into a tailspin of memories of pigtails, ice cream trucks, and all things hopeful and lingering from my days as a little girl.

  Brian made a joke about going into the store and buying four packages of ramen noodles because they were only about twenty cents a package. Something about the image of him walking up to the cashier and handing over a pocketful of spare change for what would be a week’s worth of food was too much for me to bear, and my heart sank as sadness flooded me.

  I pushed the pain down and swiftly began speaking
about how great rehab was, how my new life in State College was amazing, how meetings aren’t that bad, that cool people were there, and that I thought he should come and stay with me for a little bit. His eyes dropped to the floor and he nodded his head, agreeing, “Yeah, I am sure it’s great. Maybe sometime I will visit.”

  I wanted nothing more than to connect with him, for him to see how well I was and to want what I had. If I could have physically force-fed my recovery down his starving throat, I would have sat there all day spooning it to him. But he didn’t want to hear it; he wasn’t hearing me at all. I was just external chatter bouncing off him like background noise in a bar. I realized that no matter how much I loved him, there would be no penetrating the brick wall of denial that enclosed him until he was ready to start lifting up the bricks and seeing beyond it himself.

  His blank, dark eyes were off in another place, a place of desperation that was beyond my reach at this point. I recognized that look, and I understood the denial and despair that went along with it. Reluctantly, I also realized I was no match for his disease that day. I reached into my wallet and handed him a twenty-dollar bill. He took it without meeting my eyes and said, “Thanks, man. You have no idea how much this will help.” Then he jumped up and said he had to be at the bar to paint; he wanted to make sure he was there so he could finish the job and maybe get paid and then he would pay me back. I responded, “Yeah, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Whenever you can,” knowing I would never see that twenty dollars again and wishing against all odds that he would use it for food instead of beer and dope.

  Visiting Jimmy wasn’t much better, except the house was cleaner and his daughter, my little Cheyanne, was there for me to play with. I loved her and cherished every minute I could spend with her. Something in her big brown eyes, when they looked up into mine, made me feel like I was seeing myself. Whenever she was fussy or crying, all I had to do was scoop her up in my arms and she would gently release her tensed-up body against mine, slowly rest her little head on my shoulder, and quiet down. I would sometimes rock her to sleep and end up putting myself into a peaceful, calming, meditative state for hours. There really is no feeling quite like having a baby asleep in your arms. It is like God’s perfection right there for you to hold, feel, and smell. It is brilliant!

  Jimmy was still tending bar at the place I used to frequent— the same one where Brian was supposedly painting. It was a decent nightclub, but to me it held memories of many drunken, high, rough nights out on the town. It was a place I never wanted to frequent again, so I didn’t go there to visit him. Instead I visited his apartment, but I could tell his life was just as chaotic as it always was.

  My parents had told me about the fights he and his girlfriend got into, and she would call me screaming about what an asshole he was and how she was going to leave him. It was total drama—drama in which I normally would have been cast in the supporting role. But today the drama just drained me of all energy. I couldn’t stand listening to it because it sucked the life out of me. It made me extremely grateful that my life, while still unknown and frustrating at times, was no longer a drama fest. Even though I was still fighting the idea that I could hang out with my old friends, the usual drama that came with all that was subdued by my lack of participation in the partying.

  Eventually I stopped driving home every weekend to see my brothers. It was pretty obvious I could do nothing to help them. I saw my niece as often as I could, usually while my parents were caring for her, so I wasn’t forced to walk into the sadness and destruction my brothers’ lives had become.

  I had really thought I could save them, as though my cape of recovery swinging behind me would be a sure signal to them of hope and a chance for a different life. But I slowly realized I just had to love them, pray for them, and let them go. I could still be an example for them, but not an in-your-face example. I knew the more I tried to hang out with them in their element, the more dangerous it would be for me. It’s like a saying they have in the rooms of recovery: “If you sit in a barber shop long enough, you are bound to get a haircut.”

  12

  NO REALLY MEANS NO

  I HAD BEEN LIVING IN MY NEW APARTMENT FOR a couple months and still wasn’t dating anyone. I was taking a break after Matthew, as the people in the program had suggested. The first time my friend Kathy came from Allentown to visit me in State College, I was so excited. Although we maintained our friendship with almost daily phone calls, she hadn’t been to see me in State College once, so I felt I had been making all the effort by going home to visit her. She surprised me for my birthday with tickets to see Pearl Jam, who were performing about an hour from State College. I was ecstatic and couldn’t wait for her to come. She and her sister Jen were driving up on Friday and were staying all weekend. The concert was on Sunday, and they were going to leave right afterward.

  Kathy and Jen arrived close to 6:00 p.m. that Friday. As they unpacked, I saw Kathy pull out a big bottle of vodka. She asked if it was okay to put it in my freezer. Seeing the bottle made me a shiver a bit, but I didn’t have any craving to drink it, so I shrugged and said, “Sure.” She still drank heavily, and when I came home to Allentown and we hung out, my recovery wasn’t something she ever considered when slamming back her shots. With the alcohol out of sight, we began catching up and talking about how excited we were to see the concert. We were blaring Pearl Jam songs in preparation. My excitement was growing since I had never seen Pearl Jam live before. I loved going to concerts and had all my life. In fact, I had just gone with my brother Brian to see the Further Festival, which was the Grateful Dead minus Jerry Garcia, and I was amazed at how much better the music actually sounded when I wasn’t on anything.

  We were heading to a party that night held by some of Kathy’s Allentown friends who were going to school in State College. I was slightly apprehensive about going to a party. Kathy did several preparation shots of vodka, and then we were on our way to the party. I drove her car because I was the only one not drinking. The party was in full swing when we pulled up to the little ranch house. People had spilled out onto the front lawn and were scattered on the side of the house and sitting on the curb, drinking and smoking. The sight was commonplace in downtown State College on the weekends, with house parties everywhere and people stumbling all over town drunk off their asses. No cops seemed to notice, or if they did, they simply looked the other way.

  The house was packed and music was blaring as we navigated our way through the front door and into the kitchen where Kathy’s friends were. A blue plastic container in the corner of the room held a big silver keg. I stared at it for a moment as someone tapped off a fresh beer. It immediately sent me back to my drinking days. I could smell the foam that was sliding off the side of the plastic cup. I felt the weight of the cup being placed in my hands as it had been so many times before. I could taste the bitter rush of that first sip as it awakened every taste bud in my mouth. I didn’t realize I had been staring at the keg while trapped by these memories until a guy with a beer in hand called out, asking me if I wanted one. I must have looked like a moron as I briskly shook my head no. I was trying more to shake the memories free from my head than decline the beer, though it accomplished both. The guy turned around to engage another partygoer as I continued to shake my head a bit to get rid of the last of my thoughts. I calmly told myself, “I am in recovery now and that is not my life anymore.” It worked, and I regained my footing enough to move into the living room.

  I made small talk with some people and mingled for a while. Kathy was sitting on the couch getting stoned with a guy friend of hers whom she liked to hook up with every now and then when they were fucked up. She waved me over and introduced me to his friend Ted, a hippie dude with long, dirty blonde hair and an adorable smile that he flashed my way as he held out his hand to shake mine. He asked me to sit down with him, and I agreed. We started bullshitting, and he asked how Kathy and I knew each other as the pot pipe that Kathy was hitting began making its way over to my side of
the room. Ted grabbed it and offered it to me. I looked at it momentarily as a little stream of white smoked danced above the silver bowl, and I said, “No, I don’t get high anymore.” He cocked his head back and gave me an inquisitive look. I simply answered, “I used to drink and get high a lot, too much in fact, and I recently got into recovery.” He gazed at me as he took a huge hit off the pipe. While blowing it out his mouth, he nodded his head up and down as if in approval and said, “Right on, dude. I got a cousin who’s in recovery. That is cool. Good for you.” And just like that, Ted accepted my recovery as he blew out his hit of the pipe.

  It felt good to have someone be so nonjudgmental of me, and suddenly I felt happy. I must have had some dumb-ass smile on my face because Kathy started cracking up at me, which sent the entire room into giggles. I laughed along with them, even though my reasons for laughing were clearly different. It felt good to laugh real laughter and not the pot-induced laughter they had. It also made me feel as though I fit in, even if just for a moment—as though I wasn’t this outcast trying to blend into an environment that I really had no business being in anymore.

  The party began to thin out. Kathy had disappeared somewhere with her guy friend. I hadn’t seen her sister in hours. I was sitting on the couch with Ted, talking away a mile a minute. We were asking each other everything from what his major was to how I got to State College. I didn’t share a lot with him. I didn’t tell him how bad my drinking and drugging had been or about rehab or anything. I didn’t feel totally comfortable with him, and I wasn’t about to start throwing my life experiences at him. I also didn’t want to reveal too much for fear it would scare him away. I liked him; he was sweet and had that killer smile that made me feel warm every time he flashed it my way.

  It was getting really late, and Ted caught me letting out a huge yawn. He mentioned needing to crash soon himself. We went to search for Kathy or Jen. Ted said he figured Kathy was in his roommate’s bedroom, and as he cracked open the door, sure enough, there they were, lying in bed together making out. I asked her when she would be ready to go because I was tired. She looked over at me with wide eyes and said that she was planning to stay over. I sighed and asked where her sister went so we could go home. She said that she had given Jen her keys and let her take the car back to my house about an hour earlier. She muffled an apology, saying that I had been busy talking with Ted and she didn’t think I would mind staying over. She said we would call Jen in the morning to pick us up.