Nice Recovery

by Susan Juby

  In sobriety, I’ve even had the chance to revisit my many squandered hobbies and passions, like horseback riding. I decided to write a book about two young dressage riders. One is a talented, hard-working, responsible young rider. The other is extremely wealthy, unfettered by parental supervision, and owner of a world-class dressage horse. Between them they pretty much fulfill every fantasy and regret I have about my riding life.

  I discovered that I wasn’t the only girl to give up riding for a combination of romance, drugs, and alcohol. Since I sobered up, I’ve met several other young women who were “into horses” before their addictions knocked them out of the saddle. It makes a certain amount of sense. Horses and substances both offer thrills, escape from the real world, and that elusive feeling of closeness. Both can kill or maim you. Both require the sort of focus that shuts out everything else. If you want to work with a horse, you’d better keep your attention on it. If you’re going to be an alcoholic or an addict, there’s no halfway about that, either.

  A few years ago I got to know a girl who at first kept herself hidden inside a tightly drawn hoodie. Over the course of a few months, she slowly emerged. Her skin gained some colour, and the sores on her face healed. When her eyes came alive again, she was extraordinary. Like a lot of addicts, her stylishness emerged only after she cleaned up. We went for coffee and walks and she told me that show jumping had been her great passion. She’d been good at it, too, going almost as far in the sport as a person her age could. Then she discovered partying and graduated from blackout drinking to using crystal meth. The barns she rode at were wild. Cocaine use was rampant among the people working at them, and she and some of her fellow young riders were trailering horses to faraway shows, smoking crystal the whole way. The thought of those young girls on the road, towing ten thousand pounds of horses and steel, was not a comforting one. When I met her she was in treatment. By the time she left town, nearly a year later, she was a different person. Like me, she regretted the loss of riding and horses as much as anything her addiction had taken from her. We talked about her “getting back into it.” If she stays clean, I believe she will.

  I did. Get back into it, I mean. As I was working on the book about the young dressage riders, my first novel was adapted into a television series, and I received a handsome payout, which I promptly spent on a horse and lessons. Once again, the best part, other than the joy of owning a horse, was the chance to redo a part of my life about which I felt such regret. My new horse, Tango, was magnificent and a heartbreaker, and in the few years I owned him before he died, I gained a full and explicit understanding of how much it had cost my mother in both work and money and emotional commitment to maintain a horse. The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that my mother didn’t kill me at that fall fair.

  I’m not suggesting that everyone who sobers up will become a writer (or would want to!) or an actor or a rock star or even get a pony. I am saying that those who stay sober for the long term often get a chance to redeem themselves in the areas they’ve truly messed up.

  Take my squandered friendship with Giselle, my first best friend, for example. A while ago I got together with her sisters Christina and Denise for dinner and I told them how bad my memory was. They tried to stimulate recollections of our childhood together with a photo album. I saw pictures of us playing dress-up and stick and rope and belching in harmony to the soundtrack of The Sound of Music and some of it started to come back to me.

  The flip side of not remembering the good times is that, as noted, I don’t always remember the bad very clearly either. Sometimes it feels as though my poor memory is a tactfully dark blanket pulled over the corpse of my unappetizing past. I still don’t remember the exact moment Giselle and I stopped spending time together. It was around the time my escapism started to be accomplished through chemical rather than imaginative means. It was around the time the games in my life became far more serious.

  “Don’t you remember the rabbit funeral?” Christina and Denise asked at our dinner. The proffered photo showed the four of us, in all our stick-thighed, straight-haired, tomboy glory, bowing our heads and pinching the bridges of our noses, paying our respects to four Old Style beer cases that served as coffins for the bodies of four black and white spotted rabbits.

  “What happened to the rabbits?” I asked.

  “The bear got them. It was our fault: We left them out in the hutch all night.”

  Several years before, when Giselle was sick the last time, we played Remember When at the hospital as though our lives depended on it. Friends and family tag-teamed memories, trying to surround her and protect her with a comforter of childhood recollections. I felt disjointed, not sure of my place. I’d been sober for nearly ten years at the time and was still coming to terms with who I used to be. When my turn came to stand over Giselle’s bed, I tried to talk about the old times we had shared. But I felt like I had almost nothing to offer. I’d only recently come back into Giselle’s life, and so much of what she’d gone through in the years between middle school and her illness was a mystery to me.

  On the second to last night, Giselle’s mom and I stayed with her. Giselle’s mother used to call me her fourth daughter, and she didn’t seem to hold my defection against me. Together we washed Giselle and massaged her feet. Freaked out by my old friend’s pain and my fear, I tried a New Age patter, hoping she could still hear me through the red rush of the morphine: “You are in a green field. The sky is blue …” But I couldn’t remember the goddamn meditation. Then it came to me. That other game we used to play. “You are in the green field. A gentle breeze is blowing. You are dancing the Hungarian Bulgarian Goodguy dance to that song with all the jungle noises on the Mellow Moments eight-track. You are wearing your most hideous brown-and-orange-striped leotard. You are winning the Hungarian Bulgarian Goodguy Dance Competition!”

  Giselle made a low noise, laughter slipping out from under the pain. “That is so shut,” she whispered, remembering. Being with her at the end didn’t make up for my long absence, but at least I was present and I will never forget.

  The redemption process that people in recovery go through is slow and sometimes painful, but it’s often as powerful as the dawning of the sun, and it’s a process I see happening all around me. I’m certainly not the most dramatic or shining example of sobriety. I was not the most desperate case; nor have I become the greatest success. In fact, I believe that my story, in all its pathetic ordinariness, is a fairly typical example of the type of changes that recovery can bring. I’ve offered it here in the hope that other young people (and not-so-young people), mired in the seeming hopelessness and helplessness of addiction, might in some way identify and come to believe as I do that within us all is the possibility of profound change and the chance for an epic redo or, at least, the chance to be present for life.

  20

  Twenty Years and Counting

  I HAVE BEEN clean and sober now for twenty years. I’ve stayed sober through an undergraduate and postgraduate degree, through career highs and severe financial lows, breakups with boyfriends and a wedding to my fabulous husband, through the illnesses, and in some cases deaths, of people I love. When Willa told me that anything was possible in recovery, I doubted her; I no longer do. It’s true that in sobriety I’ve experienced my share of fear, anger, discontent, destitution, and loneliness, but in persevering through each new “slough of despond,” I’ve discovered on the other side amazing compensating rewards: less fear, less obsession, more peace—the possibility of creativity. As a good friend of mine likes to say, I’m having a life.

  The years, of course, have wrought other, even more inevitable changes. My status as a bright young thing in recovery is a thing of the past. I’m long in years, if not in wisdom, something that was brought home to me when one of my hip-hop–generation newly sober friends recently stopped by our house to visit. I was making potato salad and listening to music. She pitched in to help, and when a song by 50 Cent came on, she was clearly ch
armed. “Awww!” she said. “That’s so cute that you listen to rap.” Translation: “Isn’t it a miracle that a person as old as you can hear music at all!”

  But it got me thinking. If I’ve changed so much over twenty years, so has the world that my young sober friends face, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the rooms of recovery. When I sobered up at twenty, I stood out. Many applauded my decision to sober up early. They said I’d spared myself, my unfertilized children, and my as yet theoretical husband years of misery. Well, I thought modestly, it’s the least I can do for them. Today the offices of addiction counsellors, and the rooms of AA and NA, recovery programs, and treatment centres are packed with people in their late teens and early twenties. It’s the older folk who stand out in the crowd of the newly sober. With the advent of harsher drugs, for a lot of younger addicts, it’s clean up or die. Many don’t make it to their twenties.

  I asked Neal Berger, an addictions specialist, what changes he’d seen in the demographic of people coming into treatment centres. He told me that at Hazelden, perhaps the most famous recovery centre in the world, the typical patient in the mid-1980s was male, was fifty-three years old, and had started drinking when he was eighteen. This typical patient was seventy to eighty percent along in the disease process. It had taken him thirty years to reach bottom, or the point at which he reached out for help.

  In the 1990s, the typical patient was still male, average age thirty-six. This patient had started drinking and/or using substances at fifteen. He was taking a mixture of drugs and alcohol and was every bit as sick as the fifty-three-year-old man had been in the 1980s. In addition, this patient was often diagnosed with “co-morbidity” or mental illness, either caused by or combined with the addiction problem.

  By the mid-2000s, the average patient coming into treatment was male or female, was under twenty-five, had started using at twelve or thirteen, was addicted to a panoply of substances, and also had symptoms of mental illness. This was a different patient from the one seen in the mid-eighties: this was a much, much sicker patient.

  The trend is clear and ominous. Alcoholics and addicts today are much younger and have gone down harder and farther. Many, if not most, need professional help to have a fighting chance of survival.

  In the light of this sobering news, I decided to supplement my own story with those of several people in various stages of recovery today. Interspersed with their stories are the observations of addiction professionals, as well as some general, if not wholly objective, assessments of the various programs available to young alcoholics and addicts today.

  p a r t III

  And this is Now

  21

  Swimming with No Arms

  WE STARTED CALLING her Fluffy Sunshine almost right away. She was a small, voluptuous redhead who, no matter how hung over she was when she showed up at my house, always radiated a hectic but joyful energy. As we got to know her better, and her effect on the male of the species, someone started calling her Fluffy Pheremone.

  After several months of struggling to sober up, torn between her obvious desire to change her life and the pull of alcoholism and drug addiction, she seemed to turn some kind of corner. She no longer had to report in meetings every couple of weeks that she was “coming back.” Her occasional emotional hurricanes had moderated to the violence of tropical storms. After she’d been sober for a few months (in a row), I even began to understand what she was talking about, most of the time.

  How this change? Well, Fluffy Sunshine got busy. She put herself right in the middle of a group of mostly older women. She volunteered for every job within her group. When she had been sober for a few months, she went to school to finish her high school diploma and started taking college courses to become a child and youth care worker. Little Fluff blossomed.

  She’s been sober now for a little over three years, and she kindly agreed to sit down and talk to me about where she comes from and what recovery from her addiction has been like for her.

  She grew up in a home filled with drugs and notoriously bad-ass family members. Her cousins were drug dealers and her uncles were semi-famous for their violence. No one, she says, messed with her family. She remembers her mom smoking pot all day long and her stepfather being a drunk. A nice, slightly goofy drunk, but a drunk all the same.

  She also remembers the parties that lasted all night. “You never knew what was going to happen at my house,” she says. “Things could get pretty crazy.”

  By the time she was fourteen, she was a chronic pot smoker. She smoked at home with her mother and other family members. She remembers these family smoke-ups as some of the best times of her childhood. It was comforting to think that her mom cared enough to want to her to get high at home on weed that was safe.

  The good times didn’t last.

  Her mother started drinking and quickly developed a serious problem. That left Fluff in charge of parenting her two younger brothers, a job for which she never really felt equipped. Her mother would disappear for days at a time. Sometimes Fluff didn’t know where she would get the money to buy groceries. And then she had a bad acid trip.

  “I was high for forty-eight hours,” she said. “The trip was so bad it ruined my dope smoking. Every time I tried to smoke, I had a severe anxiety attack.”

  This was a problem because smoking pot was her primary coping mechanism. She smoked before school, at lunch, and all evening. She went to a doctor, who, at different times, put her on Clonazepam, Ativan, Paxil, and Celexa, all antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. Soon she was taking the pills in combination. Finally she quit smoking weed and started drinking more.

  Through all this chaos, Fluff maintained good grades. She took school seriously. She always had much older boyfriends and was popular. “I was definitely more of a leader than a follower,” she said. “I had a good image in public and a bad one at home.” By this she meant that she never brought her friends home because she never knew what condition her mom might be in.

  Fluff maintained an epic party schedule. She got into all the good clubs and went to all the parties. She calls this her “selfish phase” because she wasn’t around to take care of her brothers, who were getting into ever more serious trouble. By twelve, one was already doing “hard juvie time.”

  After she left school, she had no sober social contact at all. She would wake up in the afternoon and party until the next morning. Finally, when she was twenty, she’d had enough. She opted for what many in recovery call the geographical cure. She took the Greyhound across the country, drinking the whole way, and wound up on Vancouver Island. When she tried to leave her drinking and drugging lifestyle behind, she felt like a fish out of water. She discovered that she had no idea how to drink socially or to socialize without drinking. “How will I swim with no arms? How am I going to brush my teeth with no brush?”

  She’d been to a recovery meeting when she was eighteen, but hadn’t been ready. At twenty, she tried again. Every slip she had scared her more. She started smoking crack on her relapses, and the drug gave her the worst down she’d ever encountered.

  But she kept trying. She called people. She went to meetings. She left a relationship she’d had with a much older, enabling boyfriend. And one day, it just clicked. That’s not to say that life got easy for Fluff. She says she went through the stuff almost everyone does: transferring her addictions to food, clothes shopping, relationships. But she was willing to try anything. Like many of us, she’d thought that quitting drinking and drugs would solve all her problems. “I thought it would be calm,” she said. “But inside it’s still a big shit show sometimes.”

  Her constant refrain as we spoke was that she’s always wanted a good life, a better one than she’d had growing up. And her dreams are beginning to materialize. Those of us who’ve seen the changes in her over the last three years have marvelled at her intensity and drive. She’s a Fluffy Sunshine Powerhouse. Like many who grow up in rough situations and come through it, she’s got wisdom and a w
onderfully dark sense of humour. I asked her if she has any advice for other people who are trying to get clean and sober.

  “I had to realize that no one else was going to help me,” she said. “No one was going to save me and no one was going to take care of me. I had to change my belief about myself. I had to change my negative thinking into positive thinking, and I had to put myself first. I had to choose not to be miserable.”

  Fluffy Sunshine Powerhouse. Future ruler of the world.

  22

  You Call This a Vacation?

  WHEN I FIRST sobered up, I didn’t have enough money to take a bus, much less go to a for-profit treatment centre. Nor did I like speaking to strangers, so asking a counsellor or social worker for a referral to a government-sponsored treatment centre was out of the question. Few of the other young people I met back then had been through treatment or rehab, either. Now it’s standard.

  So, in recent months, when a friend found himself in need of help for a serious drug and alcohol problem, I suggested that a trip to treatment might be a good start. The two of us sat in his dusty living room and checked out the websites of various treatment centres. Each site featured pictures of spa-like environs and employed the word “healing” on every page.