The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart.

The grass shimmered with mosquitoes, and fireflies blinked on and off like the eyes of some coy, elusive god.

I sent them into suffering because I was sure that suffering was gravity, and gravity was all I wanted.

It seemed like living, to be someone who inspired gossip in black marker.

a diplomat from the bleakest reaches of his own wrecked life.

It was selfishness disguised as self-deprecation, claiming all the loneliness in the world for myself, a stingy refusal to share the state of insecurity with others.

I recognized a woman trying to write an origin myth for her own despair, trying to build a house in which it might live, a logic or a narrative by which it might be justified.

a would-be writer who can’t summon enough sobriety to tell the story of his own intoxication.

From the beginning, however, Holiday’s legend was similarly tied up in the gloss and heat of her hurt, as if the beauty of her singing rose off her pain like steam off boiling water.

the glimmering constellation points of a life told as anecdotes

Years later, I interviewed a clinician who described addiction as a “narrowing of repertoire.” For me, that meant my whole life contracting around booze: not just the hours I spent drinking, but the hours I spent anticipating drinking, regretting drinking, apologizing for drinking, figuring out when and how to drink again.

I wanted to turn my body inside out and wring myself free of everything, like a piece of wet laundry.

There is no simple key to turn the lock of why.

just a man among men, or a woman among women, with nothing extraordinary about your flaws or your mistakes—that was the hardest thing to accept.

After a blackout, memory deals out bits of the night before like a partial poker hand. You get pieces of the picture, but never find out exactly what hand you played.

watched lightning crack in sharp sudden knife blades over the water.

imagining my nights unfolding as a row of sparkling question marks,

“Look at these flakes of sunlight,” I wrote about some painting, “falling from wrong-colored suns.”

It was exhausting to be around anyone, because I didn’t have much inside—much energy or interest—so I had to portion it carefully across the day.

syrupy light

crackling fingers of electricity across the sky,

Her distillations weren’t reductions. They captured something it was useful for me to see starkly, without the webbing of so much language.

My insecurity had convinced me I didn’t have the power to hurt anyone.

At the bottom of the list, he wrote instructions to himself: “Be careful how you live. You may be the only copy of the Big Book other people ever read.”

The fantasy that brilliant writing might redeem a flawed life—If I can do this book, it won’t matter so much will it?—

There’s no objective metric for how much brilliance might be required to redeem a lifetime of damage—and no ratio that justifies the conversion. Whatever beauty comes from pain can’t usually be traded back for happiness. Rhys kept hoping anyway, not for relief but for the possibility of an assuaging beauty—that by voicing her thirst well enough, she could redeem the damage it had caused.

swirling its legs like scarves in the water, purple and pearl-white,

I’d come to believe that life happened every hour, every minute; that it wasn’t made of dramatic climaxes so much as quiet effort and continuous presence.

Doing something without knowing if you believed it—that was proof of sincerity, rather than its absence.

What community was made possible by a shared confrontation with pain?

Whenever someone shared, you had to look at her—so that if she ever locked eyes with you, you could give what she was saying a place to land.

Frey sought the objective correlatives of high drama—prison time, violence, even dental work without Novocain—because he was clutching at things that could communicate the huge stakes of how it felt to need drugs like he did.

“subterranean passageways connecting one life to another”

When Nixon called for the “reclamation” of the addict, he made him a victim and a sinner at once.

Many addiction researchers predict that we’ll eventually be able to track the impact of meetings on the brain itself. The sheer fact of putting your body in a room—a hundred rooms, a thousand times—and listening hard, or hard enough, can neurally reconfigure what addiction has unraveled.

the claustrophobic crawl space of the self.

he felt like a dressed-up garbage can.

The world vibrated under her gaze.

But this was something that kept happening in sobriety, understanding that everyone—your boss, your bank teller, your baker, even your partner—was waking up every fucking day and dealing with shit you couldn’t even imagine.

“I came in to save my ass and found my soul was attached.”

collectivity itself had started to seem purposeful—

I was seeking company in pretty much every story I encountered.

However small its doses, grace comes with stealth and arrives from unexpected corners—incomplete, imperfect, important.

sustained a fierce and opaque ecosystem of ancient feuds and intimacies.

I read Wallace with my psychic highlighter always at the ready.

When does ordinary craving become pathology? Now I think: When it becomes tyrannical enough to summon shame. When it stops constituting the self, and begins to construe it as lack.

Recovery didn’t say: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. It said: We tell others our stories in order to help them live, too.

But she also wasn’t sure what was left of her without drinking. “If you carve me out,” she wondered, “will there be enough here to be a person?”

Recovery means giving what you need yourself, not what you already possess. Your own fragility isn’t a liability but a gift.

watching dawn spread like a murky juice