Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  But I had to go back to recovery and learn that. You don’t get thirteen years sober, and then relapse, with newcomers saying to you “Keep coming back” without . . . I mean that’s going to hurt. That’s going to require a lot of faith in God, a real relationship with God. Some of my friends who relapsed never made it back. Some of them are dead. This guy, he had seventeen years and he lost them. He relapsed and he came back in and he said to me, “You know, Velvet, your value is not how many days you’ve been sober. Your value is your experience, strength, and hope.” Because he told me that and other people told me that, it made it feel like it was not a race, that I hadn’t lost. I had just forgotten, and so I was able to come back and not be so ashamed.

  In 1993 I was serving on the board of directors of the Costa Mesa Alano Club and there was an epidemic of girls that were being violated and there was just nowhere for women to go that was affordable and safe. Sober-living homes didn’t exist for women. I kept trying to get somebody with money to open something up, because I didn’t have money. My husband was a cable man, I’m a failed hairdresser with two little kids, so it’s not me, it’s got to be somebody else. I’m begging people to do something for these young girls, get them off the streets and give them a safe place to go. Everybody is like, “No, no, there’s no money in it. It’s high maintenance. You know, girls are just too much trouble.” I was so disheartened.

  But God kept giving me these visions, like this dining room table with six girls sitting at it, and they’re smiling and they’re healthy and they look put together, like they’re ready to go to work or go to school. I could not shake the vision. I knew that I had to do something, I just didn’t know how I was going to do it. I just kept asking God what would He have me do, how can I help, and one day my thought was to open up the newspaper and kind of look around. I found this two-bedroom house for rent, and it was right around the corner from the Alano Club so I knew that if the girls didn’t have cars they could walk. I thought, “Okay, I’ll just call this person who’s renting the house.” I told him about my vision, everything about what I wanted to do. I figured the worst thing that can happen is he’ll think I’m crazy, so I just went fully with it. I just told him my whole plan. The guy goes, “Velvet, I really would love to support you in this. I think what you want to do is great. I can waive the deposit. You just come up with eight hundred dollars to start.” And I was like, “Well, thank you so much,” because eight hundred dollars was like a million dollars for me. I could barely pay my rent.

  My husband comes home from work and I tell him about what I did and he goes, “You’re not going to believe it, honey. Today, a guy offered me eight hundred dollars for my van so he can go on the road with his band. I believe in you. I know that you’re supposed to do this. I see the way you help women, I see what you do and your commitment, and I want to help you. I want you to do this.”

  So he fearlessly sold his van, and by the end of the week, there were six girls in this beautifully furnished house. People heard about what I had done and what was happening, and they completely helped me. That was the beginning of Safe Harbor. And now Safe Harbor is one of the most respected women’s programs in the country. I get referrals from the greatest of the greats, and we’ve had thousands of success stories. I was twentythree years old when I started that house. It’s an amazing story of what the mind of God can do if you just step out of yourself to help somebody else.

  The thing I’ve always been most afraid of was to be alone and rejected and disliked. In my second life in sobriety, I had to make a commitment that it didn’t matter what the outside world said. I was so pleased with pleasing others in my first sobriety because I’d never pleased anybody before. I was so excited about that, and it became what I did. That’s why I didn’t allow myself to talk anymore. That’s why I didn’t allow myself to be ugly or have anger or any of these feelings that didn’t appear to be likable. I repressed, and then I suffered, and then of course that repression becomes outward and physical, and then . . . it’s just that whole cycle.

  But I learned I could survive the thing I was most afraid of, and if you don’t learn that, you’re never going to make it. You’re haunted. Those thirteen years, I was never ever in my truest place as I am right here, right now, today. Because when I got up this morning, I did my daily reprieve. I said, “God, this is your deal. And yeah, I’m scared, but let me serve, get my ego out of the way so that I can best serve, serve and keep my desire to be liked out of the way. Let me be of my greatest use.”

  Jamie Lee Curtis

  When I was a kid, I was friends with Kelly Curtis, and Jamie Lee was just her little sister. Of course, she’s considerably more than that. On screen, she’s been everything from a teen scream queen to a sexy leading lady to a hilarious comic (and still sexy) lead. In the past few years, she’s moved behind the camera, producing films and TV specials, and she’s written several bestselling children’s books. Jamie herself puts it like this: “I would say that I am a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, that I am the mother of two—I have a daughter in college, I have a son in grade school—I am married for twenty- three years to the same man, I write books for children, and I used to be in show-off business a lot and I am not in it so much anymore.” Jamie is such a private person, yet she tells her story with such passion and intensity, as if her life depended on getting her message across. Which it does, in a way. We both cried when I was interviewing her, and I still cry every time I read this.

  H

  opelessness is a problem that has no solution. There’s no hope for salvation or serenity or some end to that terrible, terrible feeling. In my case, hopelessness was the fact that I was hopelessly addicted to Vicodin and alcohol and I couldn’t stop even though I tried everything I knew to do to stop.

  What is most profound to me is that the Serenity Prayer and the recovery program both include the word change. Jung said, “only that which changes remains true,” and when I do public speaking, I talk about that quote all the time because hopelessness is the state of no change. Change equals hope, so you can’t escape hopelessness without change. I think that change is an absolute necessity, for any sort of salvation.

  I knew that I was addicted to drugs and alcohol for a very, very long time. I was able to manage the cocaine craze with very few consequences. I did seek professional help and got it for a brief moment. I always knew that alcohol was a problem for me, as it was in my family, and there was one point where I actually went cold turkey. I just said, “I don’t drink anymore,” and I did that for four years.

  However, in the pro cess of that, I found painkillers, and that’s when my addiction to Vicodin began. I just replaced alcohol with Vicodin and found myself on a very long ten-year path of always looking for Vicodin. I tell you that background because it lets you know that I started and stopped, I accelerated and pulled back many times in the accep tance that I had a real problem. I kept it hidden because I had everything that anybody would want. All the wealth, property, prestige, fame, attention—I only got it more and more.

  My bottom, if you will, was what I refer to as an Everest bottom because there was nothing that would show an outside person that I had a problem. It was a secret, and it was my secret. No one in my close purview knew that I was a Vicodin addict. No one. Not my family and none of my friends. After I started drinking again, my husband knew that, and he noticed when I started drinking more because there was evidence of that, but he did not know that I was a secret Vicodin addict. No one in my family knew, none of my friends knew.

  One woman knew. I got sober in February, and the December before that, she was with me in my vacation place. She is Brazilian and a shaman, she is a healer and funny as hell. She saw me when I thought no one saw me. I was preparing dinner and I poured a glass of wine, and out of my pocket I take four or five Vicodin to take with my glass of wine. And from behind me I hear this voice, with this heavy, heavy Brazilian accent: “You know, Jamie, I see you with your little pills. You think nobo
dy sees you, but I see you. I am telling you, you are dead. You are a dead woman. You may think you are alive right now, but you are dead. You are killing yourself every day. You can continue to do this and I will not tell anybody, but I am telling you, you are dead, and I love you and I do not want you to be dead.” That was in December 1998.

  On New Year’s Eve, I went to a friend’s house and we decided that we would all get together on the millennium, a year later. What we decided to do is, we would all write five things that we wished for ourselves and five things we wished for others. We would write them on a piece of paper, roll them up, put them in a bottle, and seal it. Then the next year, we would have a big party on the millennium and open the bottles and see if we had held this idea of hope for ourselves into the millennium. And that’s what we did.

  So I have just gone through Christmas, my friend giving me that very clear message about seeing me dead, and then on New Year’s Eve, thinking about this millennium, this idea of hope. Whatever else happened in January I don’t remember, but I clearly remember that I woke up many mornings feeling sick and tired and being sick and tired of being sick and tired. There were many, many more moments in that month where my willpower, my strength, my belief that I was more powerful than this drug, failed me one more time, and I woke up filled with shame, private shame. No public humiliations, no paparazzi pictures of me scoring drugs. No public humiliation at all, but private humiliation that one more day, I had said that morning, “I am not going to do it again,” and when that afternoon rolled around I had to find drugs, I had to find something.

  That was January.

  I was so terrified. I was terrified of the public side of the surrender to my addiction. I couldn’t go to a treatment center because I had a young child, a little boy, he was two years old then. I couldn’t not be with him for a month—impossible, impossible. Which is why I now support places where women bring their children. Had I known then that there was a place I could go with my little boy, that might have made me think, “I can do this.” I was terrified of the public shame. That fear actually kept me in check during my using years, kept me from really behaving badly or driving badly or whatever. It was the fear that I would get caught. That was too big for me, I was too proud of myself. I would not have been able to suffer that.

  After January was over, I remembered that a girlfriend of mine, an actress, had been in rehab and I called her. I had reconnected with her through another channel and she had a child of my son’s age. I thought, “Oh, I should call her because she will be safe for me because she’s a public figure. She’ll help me, she’ll know how to help me.” Our kids had a play date and I went over, and while we were standing and watching them play on a trampoline, I turned to her and said, “I am addicted to Vicodin and alcohol.”

  She looked at me and said, “Me too. Isn’t it the greatest thing? I couldn’t live my life without it.” At that moment I looked at her and went, “Wow!” Then she said, “And I have a doctor who will give us Vicodin.”

  Prior to that, finding Vicodin had been an ongoing problem. I had stolen them, talked my way into them, occasionally befriended an injured person. Honestly, I befriended a lot of injured people. I was drawn to people on crutches. I might show up bringing flowers or fruit, and then I’d use their bathroom and go through their medicine cabinet. I never had a dealer. I had been on a movie where, through a stunt person, I was able to get a number of Vicodin at once, which lasted me for a very long time because I only used during my cocktail hour. I would never use during the day, ever. I was an unbelievably controlled drug addict/alcoholic. I never would drink in the beginning of a day ever. I’d save it for cocktail hour.

  So I’d never had more than maybe thirty Vicodin, except for that one time on a movie, and now I was being told that there was a steady stream. By the way, this was before drugs were available on the Internet. If they had been available like that, I think I would be dead today. My friend actually gave me the name of that doctor and gave me some of what she had, so I drove home thinking that God was really looking out for me. We had children of the same age, so we could see each other socially, and now I had an open stream to this drug, and I thought that God had completely answered my problems.

  The next morning I woke up and I knew that my friend was going to be dead and I was going to be standing at her funeral with her children in the front row, and I would look at them and I would know that I killed her, that I had her blood on my hands. Or I would be dead and she would be at my funeral with my kids weeping in the front row and she would be standing there knowing that she had my blood on her hands. I haven’t had a drug or drink since that moment.

  That was my moment of clarity—between connecting with a friend, a compadre, a colleague, to the next morning realizing that one of us was going to be dead. My Brazilian friend’s prophecy was going to come true, and we would die from this. There was no question, because I knew what an open stream of this drug would do to me. I knew.

  That day I called the only sober person I knew. We had ended up spending a lot of time together, taking care of a friend who was very ill, and I had shared with him that I had a problem with Vicodin. All he would ever say to me is “There is a solution. If you ever need me, I’m here.” No proselytizing. I called him and I said, “I’m terrified,” and he said, “I understand.” I said, “I feel like I need someone in my profession to help me walk in there. I don’t think I can walk in just on my own.” He said, “Stay where you are,” and five minutes later the phone rang. It was an actress friend of his, and she said, “I’m so- and- so, and I heard you’d like to be a guest in the meeting tonight.” I sat in back with her, and I don’t think I heard the message that night, but I sat there. Then the next day I got someone to work with me in recovery, and that’s how I got sober.

  The thing is, that moment was just as invisible from the outside as my problem was. See, I’m a creature of habits, many habits. I wear the exact same clothing every day. I eat the exact same thing every day. I go about my day in the same manner every day. I wear my hair the exact same way every day. If I love a certain blue shirt, I have ten of them in my closet and nothing else, and when one gets dirty, I get another one. So that morning I woke up in the exact same room that I woke up in every day, with the exact same sheets, and ate the exact same thing for breakfast, and had the exact same cup of coffee the exact same temperature, the way I like it. I read the exact same paper at the exact same time.

  The only thing that had changed was my certainty that I was going to die from this, and that I would hurt my family, the very thing I loved most in the world. Prior to that, I didn’t think about my family suffering from this. In fact, I thought that I was doing this to make me function better, that I deserved this because I did so much for everybody, so this was my reward. But that morning, the idea, the clarity that it was going to kill me was the crystalline moment. It cut through everything.

  What I felt after I made that phone call was immediate relief, immediate surrender. It was that fast, because the secret was out. And then I dove into my own recovery, dove into it, couldn’t wait to continue, because I’m an action girl. You give me something to do and I’ll do it, so all I had to have was some direction. And my recovery is the single greatest, most important thing I will ever do in my life. I have had all sorts of accolades, and they are irrelevant to me. The single most important thing I would ever do in my life is to have arrested this addiction, this family trait, this family history, this family link—to say that the buck stops with me. That is the single greatest thing I will do, bar none.

  I was in an interview about the book I was promoting, a book about selfesteem, and so the whole conversation with the writer from this women’s magazine was, well, how do you account for your good self-esteem? My daughter was at the table with me, and I was talking about this and that, and as I sat there, I looked at this woman and I looked at my daughter, and I took a big breath and I went, “I think that the biggest reason that I’m feeling so g
reat is that I’ve been sober for two years.” She said, “Gee, I didn’t know that!” Yeah, well . . . nobody knew. But I knew what I was doing in that moment. I knew exactly what I was doing, because what I wanted was to connect the word recovery with a positive change.

  She, of course, was like, “Well, let’s talk about that! What was your addiction?” and I said, “I am not prepared to talk about that. The addiction is not what’s important here. What’s important is the reason I told you about it. When you asked about positive influence, positive change in my life, to not include that would be a complete omission of something extremely positive.”

  That was the beginning of my public discussion of addiction. That was how I entered the public debate, in that interview, in that moment. That, of course, became the banner headline of the article and I knew it would.

  Then I took it to work with me. What I did was, I put up a sign by the lunch trailer that said, “Recovery meeting in Jamie’s trailer at lunch.” We ended up having a disparate group of men and women, young and old, very sober and newly sober, who sat together every other day at lunch and talked. One of those men, recently sober but passionate, said, “When I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, I am looking at the problem.”

  See, before that, I was in the victim/blame world, because that is the deluded mind’s favorite couplet. You are the victim and everybody else is to blame. It’s the perfect little sandwich. I now know, when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, that the problem exists from here to here, between my ears. The perceptions that go on in this head, they are the problem. I am the problem, and I have a solution for that problem. It’s not you, it’s not my husband, it’s not my kids, it’s not my coworkers, it’s not anything outside my own head.