by Susan Juby
“Fuck, he’s hot,” she said. “I love his arms.”
I’d seen her before at the young people’s meeting. She was only a few years older than me, maybe in her mid-twenties, but she affected this odd, middle-aged matron style somewhere between Jackie O and Carol Burnett. Her hair was parted in the middle and flipped up at the ends. She wore a boxy, bright green suit jacket. I think she worked in a thrift store and it looked like she’d come straight there from her shift. She smelled like mothballs and cigarettes.
She was staring fiercely at a guy in a wife beater and baggy pants who was all pretzelled up and twirling around on the floor. He did have sinewy arms.
I nodded.
“And I fuckin’ love this song,” she said, starting to move her feet in a restless shuffle, still burning eyeholes of lust in the break dancer.
“Me too,” I said, mostly to myself. I was having an out-of-body experience. I was at a social event by myself and I hadn’t yet died. In fact, I was talking in a friendly, if meaningless, way with another person who was kind of interesting.
“Come on,” said the girl, who told me her name was Rainey. I followed her onto the dance floor. She peeled off her green blazer and dumped her purse on top of it. I stood uncertainly, unsure whether to do the same.
She leaned in and shouted in my ear, “The place is full of drug addicts. Don’t leave your purse alone.”
Right.
I noticed her arms were scarred with ropy track marks and she noticed me noticing.
“See,” she said, grinning. “Fucking addicts!”
I put my coat and purse beside hers. And we started to dance. Technotronic “Pump up the Jam.” Soon we were surrounded by other dancers, most of them from the young people’s meeting. A few of them were amazing dancers, the kind who showed up on boy-band videos. Others had more enthusiasm than skill.
After a few dances, sweat poured down my face and pooled at the waistband of my tights and, in the greatest miracle of all, my relentless thinking finally stopped. I had no idea it was possible to get a break from self-consciousness without putting yourself into a drug- and alcohol-induced blackout. It was a revelation right up there with that one-day-at-a-time concept. I wasn’t self-conscious or afraid or ashamed or any of the other colours in my limited palette of painful emotional states. God save me, but I was free. Techno had done it! I was dancing in a hot, stuffy church basement, and for once in my life, I didn’t care that I wasn’t dancing with the coolest people in the coolest club.
After the music ended at 2 a.m., the people who were left went to an all-night pancake restaurant around the corner. Surrounded by club kids, cops, and hookers, we ate breakfast and drank coffee and talked in that slightly giddy way people do when they’re sleep deprived.
I got home at around four in the morning. I crept into the house, trying not to wake up my housemates. As I climbed the old staircase, I caught a whiff of myself. I smelled like dried sweat, perfume, and pancake syrup. The guy in the room across from mine, who was working on a doctorate in political science, was on his way out of the bathroom.
“Holy shit,” he said. “You were out late.”
I nodded, trying to contain my enormous smile.
“What were you doing?”
I shrugged. “I was out with some people.”
Oh yes, I was.
18
The Phobic Years
AFTER I REALIZED that I could have a social life and was capable of change, I started to love being sober. Not only that, I started to love being alive. I made friends with all sorts of people in and out of recovery. Many of the people in recovery turned out to be fascinating: the sheer variety of them was startling. And the stories they told! I dated interesting people. Enjoyed school and did well. I woke up happy. The craving for alcohol and escape eased almost completely the longer I was sober. It was therefore a shock, when the fear snagged me. I’d been sober almost two years when it really took hold. I’d always been a nervous person, but when I first sobered up, anger had surrounded me like an electric field and kept the fear mostly hidden. When the anger faded, excitement at my new life kept me busy. But somewhere along the line, I realized that I had inside me a Grand Canyon of emptiness that anxiety rushed in to fill.
There’s a line in AA’s Big Book that says that at their core, alcoholics are abnormally fearful people. I thought that couldn’t be true of me, since as far as I could tell, I had no core. When I looked deep inside I discovered … nothing. There was a void where my sense of self was supposed to be. My strongly held opinions turned out to be suspect, even to me. My belief system was reduced to the conviction that I couldn’t safely drink and probably wasn’t going to win any awards for small talk. I’d never even been able to get a handle on how I wanted to look. It changed every few months. Now I was a mod, next a hippie, followed by a sporty phase. After I’d been sober a couple of years it dawned on me that I was acutely empty, which is about as lonely and uncomfortable as it sounds.
I was also beginning to notice other newly sober people who were shrinking away from life. Jesus, I thought. Why bother to get sober if you’re just going to hide? Many of the clean and sober people I knew were taking bucketloads of antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills. They had trouble working. They had trouble living. So, increasingly, did I.
By this time, I’d left the University of Toronto, moved back to British Columbia, and enrolled at the University of British Columbia to complete my degree. The idea was to be a bit closer to my family, and I was leaving a fun but not terribly functional relationship. When the school year began, I started to experience knifing pains in my stomach that forced me to double over. This happened several times a day, prompting me to become convinced that I was dying.
I began buckling over in class, on the bus, and while getting ready for school in the morning. Frequently, I’d give a cry of pain to really increase the effect. I was sure that some former roommate had given me malaria or a tropical stomach virus. (As a fear-based person, I did not approve of international travel.)
Then I was pressured by my roommate into quitting smoking. He was a non-smoking friend from Toronto, and he, quite understandably, didn’t love living in a tiny Kitsilano apartment with me and my pack-and-a-half-a-day habit. Soon I was buckling over from stomach pains while in bed, where I’d been laid low by nicotine withdrawal. The final chemical veil between me and the world was gone, and I was left with my random, catastrophic stomach pains and my bone-deep exhaustion caused by not having my smokes. I wasn’t waking up happy any more. I was barely waking up at all. But I couldn’t stay in bed twenty-four hours a day, no matter how much I wanted to, so I got up to drag myself to school. When the school year ended, I dragged myself around to all the hotels and restaurants in town, dropping off resumés, until I got a serving job at a hotel on Robson Street run by the world’s fussiest general manager.
The dining room was overblown: studded with pillars that held up nothing; enormous vases of ferns and orchids. The tables were laden with so many pieces of cutlery that the oversized plates of overpriced food barely fit. Even the club sandwich was pretentious. It was topped with a towering contraption of toothpick, pickles, and olives. The wait staff uniforms were made of the same ostensibly posh polyester as the table linens, a sort of striving hooker’s loose interpretation of Versailles-worthy fabric. I had trouble breathing in the restaurant, partly because the many managers running around the place with panic-stricken expressions sucked out much of the available air.
I’d waitered before, as noted, but never in a uniform and never in a place that charged twenty dollars for a continental breakfast. To make matters worse, I’d gotten a large tattoo on my ankle soon before I left Toronto. After not enough careful consideration, I’d chosen a hummingbird image I found in a popular book of West Coast native art. The tattoo extended well up my calf, and when asked, I told people that it was meant to signify not only that I was from B.C. (and apparently was not afraid to engage in a little cultural and art
istic appropriation) but also that I planned never to have a job at which I couldn’t have a tattoo. Unfortunately, when I was fitted for my uniform, I was informed that I was required to wear nude pantyhose with my tablecloth skirt and matching tablecloth vest. And under no circumstances could I show any ink at work. The woman in the housekeeping department pointed at my ankle and said, “Don’t let the general manager see that or you’ll never make it through the probation period.”
I was broke and so incapacitated by mysterious stomach pains and post-smoking exhaustion that I couldn’t even contemplate trying to find another job. Besides, the hotel paid union wages plus tips. So much for my convictions.
I went to a store that catered to theatrical types, including exotic dancers, and got some tattoo cover-up. Before my first day, I worked out a camouflage. It took three thick layers of cover-up topped with two pairs of nylons to achieve full disguise.
At 5:30 a.m. I cycled my way across the Burrard Bridge in the grey dawn light to my first shift. My heart was beating far more rapidly than my speed warranted. I was having a lot of trouble catching my breath. I wrote it off to first-day nerves.
The job was, like a lot of restaurant jobs, stressful. We were expected to practically wrench dirty cutlery away from diners before it hit the table, and coffee refills were to happen at five-minute intervals. Our sections were large, and the table settings were fussy. Some of the chefs were moody. As the days went by, I got worse at the job, rather than better. My post-smoking lethargy had hardened into a suffocating blanket. I couldn’t remember anything and had to write down even the most basic request. When I wasn’t at work, I was asleep. On my days off, I would sleep for twenty hours at a stretch. On the morning bike ride to work, my heart continued to jackhammer in my chest, and I started contemplating ways I could manage to fall off the bridge. (Falling into traffic seemed a bit messier and more painful than taking an accidental swan dive.)
In addition to the terror of my job, of the restaurant-visiting public, and of restaurant managers and hotel chefs, I had managed to develop a crippling fear of flying, perhaps as a result of having been on the plane that later crashed. A week or ten days before I was due to fly anywhere, I would begin to have nightmares. The anxiety would mount as the hour drew closer. At the airport before a flight, I panted like an overheated dog and went to the bathroom every few minutes. On the airplane, I spent the flight in a state of barely controlled hypervigilance. Every noise was cause for concern. I stared at my fellow passengers, especially those who looked like they flew a lot. Did they look nervous? Did the flight attendants look concerned? Were they covering up the terrible truth that we were flying on one engine and about to run out of gas? What was that noise!?
I flew mostly to Smithers and back. I would get off the plane exhausted and wrung out. Gratitude at having survived made me exuberant for the first day, or the first two days. Then the sickening realization that I was going to have to fly home descended, and I would spend the last five days of my visit tossing and turning.
Soon I decided that I couldn’t fly any more. It was just too hard.
I was also pretty sure it was time to quit working. Maybe I could go on disability? I certainly felt disabled.
I had been sober then for about two and a half years, and I was getting less functional, not more. I still preferred being sober to being drunk, but it was no picnic with fresh bread and good cheese, either.
Instead of giving in to the fear, I did what Willa had always told me to do. She was all in favour of getting professional help. So I went to my doctor to talk about how tired I was and to ask for a referral to a shrink. I’d gone to a psychiatrist in Toronto for several months and found it helpful. Obviously it was time to see someone else.
My doctor, one of those dynamic young women fresh out of medical school, who later went on to work for Médecins Sans Frontières, took one look at me and started asking questions.
“Are you sleeping a lot?” she asked.
“Are you gaining weight?”
“Are you having trouble with your memory?”
It turned out I had something called Hashimoto’s, a condition in which the thyroid gland gets knocked out by a virus. The lack of thyroid function causes exhaustion and mental sluggishness. Had I continued untreated, I would have gone on to develop a goitre on my neck and various other symptoms that wouldn’t have done anything to make me employee of the month. Luckily, all I needed was a small pill once a day and those symptoms went away. I no longer had to make a note of it when someone wanted a glass of water.
Then my doctor gave me a referral to a phobia clinic at the University of B.C. There I underwent treatment for my fear of flying. Slowly but surely, the treatment, which consisted of desensitization, behaviour modification, and relaxation and information about aviation, worked. I could fly!
It’s something of a minor miracle that my doctor didn’t just load me up on antidepressants and anti-anxiety agents. It’s a major miracle that the psychiatrist I saw before her didn’t do that either. By actually fixing the problems beneath my symptoms, the doctors forced me to get through them. It goes without saying that this wouldn’t have been possible if I were still drinking.
I’ve thought a lot about how I started to accumulate fears. They were probably there before I started to drink and do drugs. The other thing is that once I sobered up and actually started to love being sober, I became terrified about the prospect of dying. I was so in love with life, at least certain parts of it, that anything that seemed to threaten my existence (like my job waitering in a hotel while disguised as table linen) put my body and mind into a panic. I had no experience of working through anxiety but I had plenty of experience with using drugs and alcohol to avoid it. Left untreated, I could easily have become one of those people who find it a chore just to leave the house. Facing my fears, admitting them to other people, and walking through them was one of the most excruciating things I’ve ever had to do. Spiritually, emotionally, and physically, it was also one of the best things I’ve ever done.
In the years since then, I’ve been afraid to drive, afraid to drive on freeways, afraid of public speaking, and afraid of wearing my bathing suit in public, but none of those fears has ever come close to the ones I experienced in my first couple of years. I’m still not keen to die, but as far as I’m concerned, that just means that I’m having a good life. Addiction, for me, was about a slow death. Recovery is a move in the exact opposite direction.
19
The Big Do-Over
THEY SAY IT TAKES seven years to change every cell in your body. Don’t ask me who “they” are. I’m just telling you what I heard. If that’s the case, then it makes a certain amount of sense that I had been sober for seven years before I was ready to try writing stories again. I’d completed a degree in English Lit and was working at a publishing house. My last relationship with a creative type had collapsed under the weight of its own inappropriateness.
Perhaps I had to switch out every cell in order to flush the damage done to my imagination or perhaps I had to have a complete cellular change in order to be strong enough to face the rigours of the writing and, god save me, the publishing, life. As soon as I sobered up, I seemed to make it a firm policy (though an unconscious one) to date only sober or straight-edge musicians or artists. Obviously, I was drawn to the idea of creating something but not willing to take the plunge myself. I spent most of my twenties fretting over my boyfriends’ artistic processes: Is Andre getting enough time to think? Does the smell of oranges interfere with Juan’s ability to access his emotions when he plays “Hallelujah”? And I accommodated myself to their moods. Again, it was easier than picking up a pen. Until it wasn’t.
One day I flipped open a boyfriend’s copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and read about the daily pages. These are daily stream-of-consciousness exercises intended to help the writer free his or her imagination and get writing. They are also meant to help people make writing a part of their daily routine.
The relationship with the boyfriend foundered, but I took the daily pages idea with me. I was working two jobs and had a busy social life and a lot of strange hobbies, so I felt I didn’t have time to waste with writing that was just writing. I decided I should try to turn the pages into something, if I could.
Of course, I had to overcome my abhorrence of the blank page. As Margaret Laurence said, I had to make the torture of not writing worse than the torture of writing. This was not an easy task for someone who wasn’t sure she had anything to say and who was embarrassed by nearly everything she put on paper. I decided that the key was to put myself in a position in which the alternative to writing was to be alone with my thoughts or, equally heinous, to have to stare at strangers.
Instead of my usual novel, I took a blank journal on the bus ride to work. Sure enough, I started writing. In fact, the first words I wrote in that journal ended up in what became, miracle of miracles, my first novel, Alice, I Think. It was as though the character had been waiting in my consciousness for me to listen to her. She’d been tapping softly and getting no answer until I sat down with that notebook.
Almost immediately, the writing I did on the bus ride to work became the highlight of my day. I reclaimed my driver’s licence and bought a car and started driving in the early morning to an all-night coffee shop called Calhoun’s on Broadway. There I continued Alice’s adventures. The stories poured out of me, a collection of absurd, skin-crawlingly embarrassing episodes in a teenager’s life.
I felt the same way about my writing as I did my sobriety— secretive, a bit tentative, both of which were balanced out by a surprising sense of satisfaction. It was another private revolution. When the book was done, and I shyly presented it to publishers, it was rejected for being “too raw” by many children’s book publishers and as “too immature” by many publishers for adults. Finally, in 2000, I found a press willing to take a chance on it. That was a very great day indeed. The book went on to be published in several countries and was turned into a television series. But when I look back on that book and the ones that follow it, the greatest thing of all is that writing has allowed me to reinhabit the years I lost to drinking. I have literally rewritten my adolescence. Several adolescences, in fact. I’ve written characters with integrity, I’ve created characters who are socially gifted (in a funny sort of way), and characters who are disciplined and principled. All I need now is to write about an adolescent who can touch her toes and do a back flip and all my dreams will have come true.