Kindle Notes & Highlights
I have a spine disease called ankylosing spondy- litis (AS). One of the particular torments of this condition is an inability to find comfort either sitting down or standing up. Seated in the departure lounge, I shift and wriggle in my seat.
for the next six hours, I’m about to leave pain behind as well—along with its accompanying stress, sorrow, and existential angst.
“Opiates,” she writes, turn you “into a cool spectator of your own sensations and desires and of passing time, as languorous as all those images of divans and draperies and long pipes had promised.”
ANKYLOSING SPONDYLITIS IS a degenerative autoimmune disease. A form of inflammatory arthritis, it typically strikes young people in their prime—in my case, at twenty-eight, shortly after the first of my two sons was born. AS is roughly analogous to having rheumatoid arthritis in the spine. My immune system attacks my body, causing chronic inflammation that began in the sacroiliac joints at the base of the spine and for the past ten years has been gradually moving upward.
A lifelong non-smoker, a cautious adolescent, and the most sober adult at any party, I have nevertheless been fascinated by intoxication, addiction, and altered mental states for as long as I can remember.
De Quincey first took opium for relief from a blindingly painful toothache—or possibly trigeminal neuralgia—on the advice of a college acquaintance.
Having some sort of time limit on suffering makes it endurable. It’s the same way that running a marathon is tolerable because you know that it will eventually end. Every step gets you closer to relief.
the way we experience that pain—empowering, terrifying, humbling—can vary dramatically.
Chronic or recurring pains are insidious. They eat away at energy, optimism, endurance, sense of self.
Study after study points to galloping use of opioids—particularly in North America and Australia—to treat a wide range of afflictions. This surge is often reported in the news inaccurately, incompletely, and with breathless alarm. It’s “a problem.” It’s “a rash.” It’s “a flood.” It’s “an epidemic.” The “painkillers are killing us.” But the headlines are hyperbole mixed with truth. What is true is that more people are now becoming addicted to prescribed opioids, whether their own or someone else’s; more people are seeking treatment for physical dependency (different from addiction) as well as
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Getting lost, you find yourself.
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bram Stoker. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë.
Opium, morphine, and heroin eased the tuberculotic sufferings and the passing of Frédéric Chopin, Aubrey Beardsley, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and D.H. Lawrence.
Of course, of course, yes of course: drugs are more likely to be detrimental than improving to literature or art. And yet, some undeniably beautiful and passionate work arose from that drowsy hour—and its release from pain.
writer Neil Gaiman’s advice: “Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.” The breakup, the breakdown, the lousy boss, the crummy landlord, the diagnosis. They’re all experiences that I can one day turn into writing. That desire to produce something, anything, that feels meaningful becomes more urgent as the setbacks increase.
Art certainly acts, like drugs, as a form of short-term relief, and helps me put routine pain into perspective.
Sometimes I imagine my ambitions as circus lions circumscribed by rings of fire. The fire is pain. Pain causes physical limitations; eats at my fragile sense of optimism; confuses my thoughts and imperils my livelihood; deadens the association-making ability from which creative work emerges. Pain makes me strained and cranky as I try to play with my two young children, who can absorb depression just as they thirstily absorb every other influence. Endurance is possible, but endurance on its own does not equal a full, contributing life. Our purpose in life is not, cannot be, simply to suffer.
“When the alarm goes off in the morning,” I tell her, “my first feeling is of dread. I’m thinking about the amount of work I’m going to put into just sitting up.
A half an hour of running is, for me, as for many others, a reliable way to emerge from the enervating fog of depression.
Will Self, the tall and cadaverous British novelist and essayist, is a former heroin addict.
opioids loosen the restrictions on creative thinking—and seem to enhance one’s ability to find patterns.
SO I WRITE this, again, under the influence. It’s a release that I’ve earned through the sheer effort of waiting for it all day. At last I take the pill, and I begin to focus intently on the pain in my neck and down my back—waiting for the magic moment when it begins to melt away. I watch, feel, and wait. Minutes pass. Is it gone? I think I feel it leave. But no. The pain is still there. Then, as it always does, at almost exactly the one-hour mark, something shifts. The ropey muscles of the neck that pull my head forward, the tight muscles around my hips, mid-back, and sacroiliac joints (in an
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Rattle rattle in my backpack: a pen and that little bottle of pills. In my jacket pocket I sometimes feel for its slim plastic cylinder and child-proof top as if I were Gollum fingering for my precious.
Seeing a painting in a gallery, or in the artist’s own home or studio, is quite different from looking at it in a book or on a screen. You realize that an actual person—imagining, dreaming, suffering, working—held the brush, made each stroke, set down her brush in weary despair, looked out the window at the sculpture garden, back inside at the anatomy textbooks, the ceramic tiles, the bottle of tequila, or the hypodermic needle. In her diaries, you can see how Kahlo endlessly tried to reason with herself, to find hope when feeling low. She lived large when her health permitted it, collecting
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Like De Quincey, Frida Kahlo exploited her suffering for its inherently dramatic possibilities in art. I recognize in De Quincey’s lush descriptions of the pains and the pleasures of laudanum the impulse I see in myself to romanticize my experiences. In Kahlo, I recognize the desperate nature of that impulse.
For those few writers who have questioned the authenticity of Kahlo’s symptoms and ongoing suffering, I can only prescribe a handrail through the vagina, if any of them have one, in hopes of provoking a more compassionate—and ultimately more clinically effective—response.
addiction may be viewed as a brain disease, or as a moral failing, or as a “disease” of choice, or as a life sentence meted out in one’s genes.
According to the biopsychosocial approach to addiction, just because something is highly pleasurable, illegal, or dangerous doesn’t mean anyone who uses it will fall prey to addiction. Addiction is far more complex, and results from an individual combination of an experience feeling immediately rewarding, of biological predisposition, of availability of the pleasurable substance, of our relationships with other people, and of physical or emotional suffering that may be relieved by the behaviour or substance.
Addiction problems tend to be accompanied by mental health issues,” he tells me. “For example, people with anxiety may find relief in drinking alcohol or smoking pot, while those suffering with attention deficit disorders may turn to stimulants, including cocaine, to self-medicate their symptoms.”
He also mentions that conflict avoidance is an issue for many opioid users. I file that one away to worry about later.
It’s equally analogous to the notion of “flow” as described by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: the time-suspending feeling that comes from total absorption in an activity.
Book buying, in fact, was the most compulsive of De Quincey’s various addictive behaviours. He would spend money he couldn’t afford on books, let his rooms pile up with papers, and then, overwhelmed at the task of cleaning them out, actually move out and rent new lodgings, sometimes for himself and his family, sometimes just for him to quietly live and work.
WHEN THE PAIN is too grinding, I sometimes find that if I can go deeply enough into depressive words and music, no longer trying to be upbeat, I at least feel in sync.
When I wake up to the morning alarm it’s with the distinct feeling that I’ve been hit by a truck.
