I met my husband when I was twenty-five, and we’ve been together through most of the time since, but there were a lot of ramifications related to the eating disorder that affected our marriage and affected my other relationships. One of those ramifications is a real difficulty with intimacy and trust. Another big one is the inability to face conflict, the inability to stand up to another person and articulate my feelings, my emotions, needs, wants, fears—any of that stuff. I would run away from problems, I would hide, I would think that if I found another husband, then that would take care of the whole problem, rather than realizing that I was a big part of the problem. All of this went on for years.
Then in my late forties, my husband turned sixty, and he was under a tremendous amount of stress due to work. He basically said he wanted out. We got into counseling, and I kept telling myself that it was all going to be fine, and he kept saying, “No, I really need some time apart. I really need to be separated. I am not at all sure that I want to continue this marriage and I need to figure it out by myself.” I thought that being in counseling would solve the problem, and I also thought that getting a new house would solve the problem. I mean, it’s classic. It’s the parallel of “Well, if I just lost five more pounds, that would take care of the problem,” only I was thinking, “Well, if we just get a new house, that will take care of the problem.” We did end up buying a new house, and I did keep thinking that as soon as the house was finished and we moved in, everything would be fine.
Well, my husband viewed the arrival of the new house as his opportunity to start the separation. I honestly didn’t believe that he meant it until I moved into the house alone. He refused to come. I went into total chaos then, and started exercising compulsively. I stopped eating. I went right back into the beginnings of a full- blown eating disorder.
The moment, the second moment—I remember standing in the new bedroom, in the middle of the room, in this house I was so sure would fix the problem, and it was quiet and calm but I was feeling as if I was internally spinning, and the lightbulb went on in my head. I realized, “Oh, my God! I am doing exactly the same thing.” Only unlike the other time where I was just totally dead, this time I was completely agitated. There was a part of me that was able to split off and pull back and realize I was out of control. I was using the eating behavior to hide, to tell myself that “Well, I’m losing my husband, but at least I’m losing fifteen pounds, and that will make it all better.” I realized that all these years, I had not been as really recovered as I told myself I was.
There’s a phrase that I think is very useful: trying to live inside out instead of outside in. It’s just a reminder to pay attention to your own standards, your own needs, not everyone else’s. I was trying to live up to other people’s definitions of who I was, trying to measure myself against standards that I was allowing other people to impose on me. I really didn’t see that, as an individual, I had permission to live inside out, starting with who I was, starting with understanding what my various specific individual needs, abilities, desires, loves, passions were.
We also have to face the reality that there are some things that we can’t change about ourselves. I have realized that I am fairly introverted and I am quite obsessive, I am quite compulsive. Part of that is in my makeup, and I can learn to manage it for better or for worse—that’s my choice, and that’s within my control. But I cannot turn myself into some sort of gregarious, outgoing personality; that’s not who I am.
Perfectionism is a big part of most eating disorders, and that’s something we’re born with, to a large degree, and we can’t change it. But we can choose to set our own definition of what is perfect rather than go constantly chasing after what somebody else says is perfect. If we create our own definition of perfection and keep it close and make it something that is truly gratifying so it gives us a sense of joy and accomplishment and purpose and meaning in life—then that’s great. We can be as perfectionist as we need to be in that sense. But if instead we just blindly accept someone else’s definition of perfection—for instance, as a thin model in a magazine—then that perfectionism will end up doing absolutely nothing for us, and it will make us sick.
The third moment . . . This was after I had been working with a therapist for a while, after the second turning point. Things didn’t seem like they were going to work out in my marriage. I had been at an afternoon gathering with some friends, and I left early. I was driving through the Sepulveda Pass—not on the freeway, but down onto Sepulveda—and it was a spring afternoon and all the trees were just starting to turn green. I drove around this bend in the road, and I just looked at this wall of green foliage in front of me, and I felt one of those moments of absolute, intense pleasure. Just the beauty of the color and the quality of the light, and the way the leaves were moving. I couldn’t tell you why, but that moment told me that whatever happened, ultimately my happiness didn’t depend on my marriage, it didn’t depend on my husband, it didn’t depend on anything except this ability to feel this heightened sense of joy. In that moment I knew that I was going to be all right, and whatever happened, I was responsible for my own future. After that, everything really was different. That was the ultimate moment, and I haven’t looked back.
I still have moments of depression and anxiety. I am probably never going to get rid of that, but I understand now that they are fleeting. I understand that the world isn’t going to come crashing down. I have learned about mindful awareness and meditation, and I have this whole arsenal now of strategies I can use when I start to feel despair creeping up. And there are always moments when I notice the way the light falls, and the color of the leaves.
Ron Smith
Ron is career military and one of the elder statesmen of the Washington, DC, recovery community. He’s the former chairman of psychiatry at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and both professionally and personally, he’s an enormous inspiration to a lot of men and women in our armed forces who are struggling with addiction. He’s also been extremely supportive to me as I’ve struggled with this book. He told me once, “As a therapist, I’m always waiting for these little windows, the moments when psychic change is possible. So I can point them out to whoever I’m working with and say, “Did you see that little window? What do you think might be possible in your life if you choose to look through that window?” These windows of change are not just the purview of addicts and alcoholics, but opportunities in the human experience. But addicts are lucky, in a way, that we have to pay attention to them because our lives depend on it.”
I
think I grew up buying into the American dream . . . what would make me happy was accumulating stuff, Mercedes-Benzes, race horses, women or Porsches or what have you. Then I got more stuff
than I ever dreamed of, or needed, and I realized that another new car will not make me any happier. There’s that hole in your soul, and then you’ll hear a truth like that—that more stuff is just more stuff, that another drink won’t fix it—that you just can’t deny.
One of the earliest memories I have is when I was about four. I grew up away from my family of origin, essentially as the only child in this tribe of elders, a missionary community in Deer Lodge, Tennessee. I did have a lot of love and attention. There was nothing my grandfather couldn’t do. I worked with him every day, and he really loved me and instilled a sense that I could do anything. He communicated a sense of competence and agency, autonomy and possibility. My grandmother was more candid about my powerlessness, my smallness and ignorance. So at one level I had a wonderful childhood, but also I felt somewhat isolated and alone. When you’re very young and you’re surrounded by adults, you can see where the real autonomy and agency in your life is. I didn’t know how to live life, and I wanted to know.
One Friday afternoon, my grandmother and I went to the church to clean up a little. She went into the church, and I went into the library and looked around at the books. I remember an awareness came over me that there was wisdom o
r knowledge or a way to live out there, and I didn’t know exactly what it was, but if I could look in these books I might find it there. I wouldn’t have said wisdom or knowledge or any of those words. It’s only looking back that I could fit it into words. But the feeling came over me of peace, and of excitement at the possibility of what was available in that room.
Thirty years later, I was attending a course on alcoholism for physicians at the Naval Regional Medical Center. I was a young intensivist, the first physician in the federal system trained in critical care medicine, and I was the director of the largest intensive care unit in the country. I had stopped drinking for about six months because it was that or end up in prison, but I wasn’t in any kind of recovery. I remember the confusion and the loss, feeling adrift, and I was aware that I couldn’t go on living the way I was living. I loved my work and I was very successful professionally, but my personal life was agony. My beautiful wife had left me, taking my two sons, and I was very lonely. I would come home at night to my suite in the Bachelor Officers Quarters, and not know where to go or what to do, and I was just lost. I’d thought that if I stopped drinking, things would get better in my head and they didn’t. I remember riding up the elevator that day, feeling in despair, and then the elevator doors opened and I looked out into the room of the alcohol treatment program, into the joy of recovery.
My idea of alcoholism, unfortunately, had come from the movie Days of Wine and Roses, which is not a good picture of recovery. Alcoholics in that film were people down on their luck, people in desperate straits. When those elevator doors opened at Long Beach, I saw real recovery for the first time. There were many sailors and marines, astronauts and people from Congress—people whose lives were working out. Everybody was talking honestly, talking about being vulnerable, about not having answers, about recovery and possibility and agency and autonomy and responsibility.
That moment, I felt a wave of belonging, of hope, of home. It was the same feeling I had when I was four and looked at the books in the library, and I recognized it again, the sense that there was a possibility, a hope, a journey to be taken. There were no voices, no euphoria. It was like coming out of a dark wood into the light.
I always wanted that “Paul on the road to Damascus” moment, the burning bush experience, where God or Yahweh would talk to me. I didn’t get that, but what I got was a feeling of being on course in my life. I knew it was going to be fine.
That was thirty years ago, and I haven’t had a drink since, and it hasn’t been a struggle. It’s been so much fun. Alcohol is no longer part of my life, any more than the baseball cards of my youth are. It’s just not relevant to me anymore. I know I’m an alcoholic, and I know that I’m only one moment or one drink away from relapse, but I have not experienced the last thirty years as a struggle. It has been a search for joy. It has been ridiculously hard at times, and I have learned to love the suffering and the joy.
At both those moments, when I was four and when I was thirty-four, I was out of ideas. At four, you don’t have any ideas yet, but I knew something was wrong in the universe and I was trying to figure it out, and when I came in that room, I knew, “Here’s something that’s right.” And when I was thirty-four, coming off the elevator, I didn’t have any ideas, I didn’t have any solutions, I didn’t have a new self-help book to read. If I’d known of another one to read, I would have. If I’d known of another philosophy, another church or synagogue, I’d have gone to it. I’d been looking, but I was out of ideas. I was emotionally dead, emotionally and spiritually bankrupt, and at that point I was receptive. Christ said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and I think that’s what is wonderful about the receptivity to new ideas.
I don’t think there’s anything I could have done or said to get myself there any sooner. If I could, I’d probably be rich as an analyst, saying those words to others. It’s like a rose blooming—you can’t pull the petals apart to make it happen earlier, or faster. All of a sudden your brain cells are open and vulnerable and without knowledge, wanting knowledge, and then I think that’s when the light gets turned on.
On that day at the Long Beach naval hospital, when I made the decision to turn my life and my will over to the care of whatever was in those rooms, two or three things happened. First, I was sure that whatever was there was better than where I had come from. Second, I knew it was going to be okay if I stayed in the room. And third, it was going to be a lot of work.
I think most alcoholism is a terrible form of breast-feeding into adulthood. I was holding on to my bottle, almost like Linus holding on to his blanket in the Peanuts cartoons. It’s your transitional object to soothe you, and I didn’t know of anything else that would soothe me. I didn’t believe and had no reason to believe what they said, that every feeling of comfort that you’ve tried to get through alcohol and drugs is available without that stuff. I’d never experienced that. At one level, you have to make a decision to stop using and drinking with no data, no personal experience. The only data I had was seeing those people when the elevator doors opened. I knew that alcoholism was fatal because I saw people dying of it every day, and then I saw ninety people who had that fatal illness who were alive. When I saw that, I decided I could let go of the bottle.
I’d say the capacity to recognize those moments, to be aware of them and then respond to them, to make the changes that are necessary, is of critical importance. I think that’s the difference between people who live a good life, a successful life, and ones who end up badly, who are unhappy and miserable.
God looks like the awareness that gets handed to you when those doors open. I don’t know if there’s a visual component. It’s almost like a medicine ball in the gut. I still have that Yahweh thing—I can’t see him, I can’t hear him, I just feel his presence. Early in recovery, I was agnostic and lost, and I’m still agnostic and lost. But as a result of doing the things they said, I get on my knees every day, and that’s how I keep in touch with that feeling, the sense that things are going the way they’re supposed to, that the universe is exactly the way it’s supposed to be at that moment. That’s what God is.
There are still moments when we come up against meaninglessness itself, when there is simply no way to construct a narrative that has meaning. How do you have faith then? And that’s when you make a choice. Faith is a choice.
But it’s also a journey, man, and it’s terrific.
David Black
David’s a hell of a writer. As a journalist, he’s covered Baby Doc Duvalier’s secret police in Haiti and exposed a white slave operation in New York’s East Village. His book The Plague Years, about the AIDS epidemic, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, and his mystery novels have won numerous awards. He’s written for Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Law & Order, and many more series, and wrote the screenplay for the feature The Confession, starring Alec Baldwin and Ben Kingsley.
David’s also one of my closest friends. He mentored me through the process of writing Symptoms, and he’s been tremendously helpful with this book too. David has an unusual, adversarial relationship with his recovery, and yet it works for him. I’m sure there are people out there who’ll read it and think, “Yeah! That’s me!”
T
o this day, I’m not sure I’m recovered. I have to think of myself as a drug addict—a potentially active drug addict—every moment I’m alive, because the minute I think I’m recovered, I think,
“Okay, I’ve taken the test and I’ve done well on the test and now the test is over.”
Drug addiction and alcoholism for me were kind of a narcissism. Everything is about the self. Everything in the world relates to self. In recovery everything was related to the drama of trying to stop using, which is almost as good as the drama of using. So I had to realize that whether or not that drama existed, it was not the most important drama going on in the world. It was a sideshow. And I think you can only get that if you believe that there’s a power greater than yourself and you’re able to connect to
that power . . . or at least see yourself in relation to that power and recognize yourself as just the sideshow, not the big top.
I grew up in a very left-wing family and always felt like a bit of an outsider. A Jew in a Yankee town in Massachusetts. A Trotskyist during the McCarthy era. A reader among people who didn’t read. A bit of an oddball, which drove me to drink, not as compensation, but as kind of a badge of pride. I started trying to get sober twenty-five years ago. Took me about six years to finally do it. By then, I’d pretty much given up on myself.
I was a binge coke user mostly. I wouldn’t use for two weeks, then I’d use for three days straight. Then I’d stop, but the pressure to use, to use, to use would start. I would go to mutual support groups, but they didn’t help. The pressure would build up more and more and more, and finally I’d say, “Well, I’ll just use once more. Just once more. Just once more.” I really was pretty hopeless. I didn’t even want to stop. I wanted to want to stop. And I just thought that that was it, I was going to commit myself to using, because whenever I had my first snort of coke or my first puff, I felt like “I’m home.” To this day, being sober makes me feel I’m in exile. My home is that alternate state of consciousness, and I decided that was where I wanted to stay.
My father was a committed atheist, an old-fashioned leftie, so to even admit that I was interested in thinking about God might be the equivalent in someone else’s household of ripping up a Bible. We were one of the last families I knew to get a television. TV became very, very important to me. I loved TV. Where we lived, we could only get one channel clearly, and there were only two other channels available anyway, but you had to turn your antenna in different directions to get the different channels. When I was nine or ten, there was a new gizmo on the market called the rotor. One component was a dial marked north, south, east, and west, which sat on top of the TV. You could turn the dial and turn the antenna up on the roof, so you could get all three channels. This was a big deal.
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