On Being a Junkie

An Exploration of Stigma and Past Selves

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I remember once, in a broken-down house in rural Oregon, aiming a disposable camera and snapping a picture of a friend who’d come over to visit. She took a few pictures of me, too. My head was shaved, and I wore a yellow tank top. My face was broken out and my skin was ruddy. She wore a loose faded t-shirt and in one of the photos it was clear she was nodding off. Out of frame was the coffee table, the needle we were sharing (cleaning it after each use with bleach), a metal cap filled with a dab of water, and the ubiquitous spoon, its curved bottom burned black, a tiny fleck of cotton soaked and resoaked, sticky with black residue. We were both twenty-one.

The house surrounding us was half-built, its walls gaping to reveal fuzzy pink insulation. My room was a mattress on the floor, no closet, a hanging lightbulb. It wasn’t up to code. I didn’t keep food in the refrigerator because I didn’t eat much. It was my friend’s first time visiting me out there— she’d driven from Eugene. She was, perhaps, my girlfriend, because we both took comfort in each other when our mutual lover had died of an overdose months earlier. I’d bounced around, struggled to stay employed, and eventually ended up at a local strip club, dancing. I don’t know what she was doing. She’d tried and failed to get a job at the club. Perhaps she continued to live off the giant baggies of drugs our lover had left in his safe, which she had found before dialing 911, after finding his dead body in his loft.

I don’t have those pictures anymore, but I can still remember the rough texture of my tank top, the way I’d been surprised to see myself looking so unhealthy when I got them developed seven months later, after I’d moved to Red Hook, New York to work as a live-in nanny. After I’d gotten clean while driving across the country, stopping every once in a while to vomit or lay back in my seat, unable to drive. I told myself I’d never do heroin again, though I did, just once, after a drunken night out, snorting it with a friend in the bathroom. But that was all.

Not that I was sober; I got two DUI’s that winter, one in New York and on in Vermont, both of them involving an astronomical BAC, the second one even more unbelievable because, as the cop said to the person I was dating, it seemed like they were sober.

“You’ve got a bad drinking problem,” my partner said when he picked me up after a few days in jail. “That’s what the cop said.” I shrugged, hating him in that moment for chastising me after I’d spent days staring out of a single window trying to make friends with the single crow who seemed to favor a small bush outside. I’d later find out that he had drugged my drink in a bar.

In jail I told myself I was like Thoreau. I told myself it didn’t matter if I went to prison; I could survive anything. That has proven to be true so far, but my reason for being there was not honorable. I could have killed someone.

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The first time I did heroin was in my old inherited Nissan Sentra hatchback with my friend Gretchen. I was seventeen. The sky above Olympia was bright white and overcast, the worst kind of day, bright without any sun. Oppressive. Gretchen, who’d spent the past couple years hopping trains, showed me how to wrap my upper arm and stuck me with the needle. We knew each other from alternative school. I’d spent the previous few years occasionally homeless, hitch-hiking up and down the west coast, hopping trains every once in a while. Gretchen had parents who loved her and would later end up in rehab and find sobriety. I had a mother and stepdad who liked to make fun of me and I wouldn’t get that trip to rehab. I always wanted a vacation like that. I wanted someone to save me from myself. I was doing it all to be saved, or to die. Whichever came first.

Gretchen stuck me with the needle but I was the bad influence. Heroin was a deeper expression of the succession of drugs I’d tried since I was twelve. First weed, then methamphetamine (at thirteen), coke, more weed, acid, mushrooms, more coke, more methamphetamine, more weed, acid, acid, acid. Before meeting Gretchen, when I was at Capitol High School, I carried sheets of acid with me or baggies of microdots and tripped every day at school. The previous summer, in between hitch-hiking trips, I’d roller skated around downtown Olympia with the supply.

The alternate reality of hallucinogens helped me dissociate. At home were my mom and stepdad, often drunk, accusatory, sometimes abusive. At school were the girls who called me slut and whore and the boys who had raped me at a party, who walked the halls without any derogatory names attached to them. Inside myself was the belief that somehow every bad thing that happened to me was my fault— a manifestation of my own inherent badness, which I had been systematically convinced of throughout my life. The absence of my father, my mother’s abuse growing up, the way my peers ridiculed me for my cheap clothes and cigarette-smell, the constant moving from school to school until I learned that it didn’t matter who I was, it was my appearance that was the most important both to the teachers and students I came into contact with.

When my mom married my stepdad I was thirteen, and knew things would get worse. They did.

After shooting up, Gretchen and I went to The Spar to meet some friends and I didn’t try to hide my high— I scratched at my face, its skin suddenly tingly and itchy, and let my eyes hang at half-mast. It felt good to be high. It felt good not to give a fuck about myself, like saying to the world this is how you treat me, fine. I’ll live this way.

Sometimes you can get far enough away from a way of being that looking at yourself in the past can feel like looking at a stranger. This is how it feels to look at my younger self. Then something shifts, and instead of looking, I am feeling into that self. That sense of absolute hopelessness and isolation, knowing that the people meant to care for me had systematically abused and hurt me, and were categorically untrustworthy (and yet still trying, trying so hard to connect with them).

I was not a mean addict or alcoholic— unless one counts the way I abused myself. I lied to people with whom I could have developed authentic relationships, because being seen, truly seen, felt like annihilation (and sometimes still does). When I needed to process the self-hatred that continually flowed through me I ate and threw up. I did this almost every day. When I needed to feel loved I slept with strangers, who provided me with a spark of feeling and emotion without needing anything but my body. When I needed to erase myself and feel into a sense of worthiness simultaneously, I drank. A lot. There are times in my life, months and years, where nearly every night is a patchwork of memories or a blank space of nothing. I have irrevocably lost parts of my life.

But mostly, I lost my childhood. I didn’t get one. I didn’t get to feel nurtured or safe or held or unconditionally loved.

Instead, I learned to watch my caregivers and model my movements, facial expressions, and behaviors in order to keep myself safe. One microexpression from my mother could foretell an oncoming storm, and when one was signaled I rearranged myself accordingly, thinking that the problem must be me. It was too frightening to think the problem could be her. She was meant to take care of me. If only I could be better, maybe things would be okay.

I was raised to think that everyone’s behavior was my responsibility.

Here in Seattle I often see someone who looks like me when I was younger. They wear no shoes, and their long hair hangs bedraggled from their head. Once, when I was driving home, they were standing at an intersection waving a blonde wig around.

For a while, after I got my BFA and MFA, I experienced constant cognitive dissonance. Listening to peers and professors speak about homeless people or addicts as if they lived lives that were untouchable. As if their lives weren’t parallel with ours. As if we weren’t the same as them, and they the same as us. One professor spoke about a homeless encampment he’d written about for a story and seemed incredulous that the people there were just like us. Yet in his writing they felt like caricatures, impossibly far away from the realm of “got it together” humans.

Maybe I just haven’t gotten it together yet? Or maybe I never will. Because no matter how much distance lives between me and the self I was when I shared needles with friends and passed out in bathrooms and slept on the sides of highways and under bridges and awnings, I will always live with the possibility inside me. The knowledge that I could be anyone. That under the right circumstances, I could have nothing. My therapist tells me this isn’t true. You’re incredibly resourceful, she says. But that doesn’t change my lived experiences. It already is true. I’ve already done it. I’ve lost everything more than once.

Time is not linear, as we are convinced to believe it is. In every moment of my life I am also living those moments, and the moments of my childhood, and the moments after my mother’s suicide, and everything I have done to myself and others. To pretend otherwise is to lie to myself. To think that we get over things is ridiculous. It’s not true. They become part of us. And we live with them however we can.

Photograph by Raf Maes

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Links and Stuff I Like:

• I adore these moody photos of the Los Angeles coast by Raf Maes. I always want to take photos like this but clearly I need some lessons in order to do that (and even then…).

• This piece on memory, imagination, and the things we believe are “real” is fascinating.

• Before I quit social media I came upon this piece by Sarah Smarsh about teeth and poverty. As someone who got made fun of for my teeth when I was younger, this really resonated, and its also just an incredible piece of writing.

• My current apartment is in the middle of two flight paths, above a main freeway, and faces the street. Lately I’ve really begun noticing the level of noise I’m exposed to every day. Last March, when I was in Montana, I experienced a near-shock when I was at the cabin because it was so quiet. This piece has some interesting things to say about city noise and the effects it has on our daily lives, especially given that we are also now exposed to more delivery vehicles.

• So, I’ve been off social media for a few days and am creeping into my year away slowly, with lots of feelings. This essay in Time explains evidence that social media, specifically Instagram, has negative effects on mental (and physical!) health that outweigh its positive benefits.

• Right now I am reading the Yamas and Niyamas for my Yoga Nidra study with Tracee Stanley. I’ve been teaching lots of yoga and have a Monday class you’re welcome to join!

Dear friends, I put my heart and soul into this newsletter. If this has resonated with you, please share it and/or leave a comment, and please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

photo by me, Green Lakes, New York.