Recipes from the Loony Bin:  On the Psychiatric Survivor as

the Third Class Citizen and the Addict as the Fourth Class Citizen

This is a piece I have been trying to write for a while. Where to start?  Start, I suppose, where I am with myself, as I would with any of you.  I was watching a video today.  The video was of a person I know.  She was being interviewed about her recovery from substance abuse.  “What did your last day of using look like?”  A typical twelve-step interview, with none of the questions probing anything beyond what could be answered with standard, twelve-step bullshit.  

She, the person I know, prattled on about how dirty she was, and how desperate, and how badly she felt.  So, she asked god for help.  That’s right.  It’s such a fucking surprise.  And, an even bigger surprise that god sent the police.  And, from that point forward “my life got better than I ever thought it could be.”  Deep.

So, where I was with myself today, well, I was wondering when all of this horrible and marvelous stuff happened since the last time she matched me drink for drink and, well, other stuff, too.  It occurred to me that it set a horrible precedent for the “peer” community because she was speaking as a member of same. Destructive.  It was a slick little video that lied as many times as someone waved a dollar bill in front of the liar.  

This video is one of the (smaller) building blocks within that community It is constructing the same hierarchy of disdain that we ought to be dismantling.  She was, essentially, saying, “Listen to me.  Even if I am lying, what I have to teach you can elevate you from your fourth class existence to my third.  You don’t really need to get clean.  You just need to learn what to say.  And not say.” Then, you might qualify for exploitation level work that will allow you, possibly, to someday, own another vehicle. 

Prescription

Confession

I wonder if the sanctimonious mansplainers know

that the memes they display about 

addiction being a disease and 

about addiction not being a disease

kill women like me as dead as breast cancer.

My last “real” job in “the system” was as a drug counselor.  A drug counselor who got to work on a Tall American with a double shot and 2 mg of Ativan.  Always a cocktail at lunch.  Opiate is the lunch of the masses.  Professing, the entire time my glorious recovery from Opiate and Benzo addiction. “I don’t know, Daryl.  I don’t feel so good.  I think I need a meeting.  Maybe a 13th step.”  What male supervisor in his right mind would think to question the integrity and sobriety of a female subordinate when it was presented just like that?  Yeah, I learned a lot as a drug counselor.  One day, I was sent to Columbus for the State Opiate Summit.  I learned how to make a new cocktail:

Scioto County Cocktail

1 part SSRI

1 part Soma

1 part Benzodiazepine

Crush.

Inhale and chase with peppermint oil

Possibly, it will kill you.  Otherwise, it will send you on your next vacation.  This was, by the way, at a conference that focused largely on medication-assisted treatment modalities as the shining future of substance abuse treatment.  So, you go from seeing a heroin junkie to seeing a methadone junkie.  The are not appreciably different, given that they are the same person and they are still using opiates.  But, what they are is billable into perpetuity.  

So, I ask myself, which system was more worth gaming?  Hers, or mine.  Yeah, she claims sobriety she doesn’t have, and so did I, but I got recipes. 

 

I don’t wonder if they know

when they pay my professional consultation fees

that my morning minimum includes

an over-the-counter-analgesic

two milligrams of  Ativan

and some kind of SSRI, my preference being to 

chase it with a Tall American double shot

and morning sex.  

The definition of a spiral is that it begins at a certain point and ends, presumably, at a point that is somewhat, or quite, or a lot farther below the point where it began.  By this definition, there is, in fact a high point in the spiral.  The point where I am high.  Still using this definition, we can see that the spiral turns in pulled out circles as it descends, somewhat like the tornado slides we went down as kids.  An addiction spiral.  A shame spiral.  Those who are sharing their wisdom, strength and hope would have us think it is a terrifying ride.  A burning, skin ripping, sub-dimensional ride to the rock bottom that will smash my bones when it collides with me.  Maybe some people feel it that way.  For me, it is really just like the tornado slides.  Mildly frightening, yet not all unpleasant; and, something I am willing to climb up a few steps to do again and again.  Relief is in a bottle.  It’s not a needle anymore, but I still have needles in case I run out of bottles.  It is early September; and, I am scrambling through my drawers for all the bottles I can find.  

Most days, my hands shake by 1.

I’m done counting the milligrams of Ativan and am earnestly

sticking them under my tongue.  One, two,

three or four, depending on how much

I shake.  More analgesics.  Some Benadryl, 

just in case it does something.   If there is Morphine,

I might even feel happy and smile

for our afternoon meeting.  If not then,

half of an Ambien?  Why not?

It is to be taken before bed, which is only

a few hours away.

I rode the high part of the spiral for most of the summer in Washington D.C. and on the East Coast.  Mostly, I was just a little Benzo high, with the hard stuff saved for really special occasions.  Morphine for two days, motionless, on the beach at Kennebunkport, chilly cerulean blue water still in July, wrapped up in an enormous towel with one of the four men of that summer, my favorite, a few hundred yards away being serious, as he is. There was no pain in my brain or my body.  Morphine and my friends don’t really get me high.  They take away my pain in such a way that I lie on the beach in Kennebunkport astounded and speechless at the fact I don’t hurt anywhere for hours at a time, only aware of the soft towel in which I am wrapped and the close-by nature of a man I can truly embrace.

There is really a lot of shit out there about addiction. And most of it is just that—shit. I don’t know what kind of conspiracy or mind control it is a part of; but, it is certainly a part of one of them. Every community has its pariahs. Recently, the government has been trying to combine “mental health” and “substance abuse” under one umbrella.  This idea has trickled its way down to the states and the counties, where there is often just one board for both, depending upon where you live.  People who are differently abled cognitively still get their own board in most counties. That is because their Medicaid waiver is expanded to include all kinds of expensive services that numerous predatory agencies pay the most disenfranchised of low end care workers starvation wages to provide.  It is not unusual, though, for many individuals who are differently abled cognitively to receive services from both boards.  It is quite common, in fact, for an individual with an identified “intellectual/developmental disability” to be given one or more psychiatric labels in order for their services to be simplified even more by the additions of a cocktail of powerful tranquilizers known in the field as “behavioral control medications”.  

Some days, I overmedicate and accidentally sleep away

four or five hours of the afternoon

pretending I am busily working away on your “project”

in my mercifully over-air-conditioned and anonymous

hotel room.

The accidental over-medication is worse

if I have recently offended someone I respect, 

or been blown off by someone with whom I really ache to connect.   

I still hear voices, you know.  You might like to pretend that I am better.  You don’t know how right you are.  I never have any way of knowing whose voice is going to shake loose or what it is going to say.  And, any significant event with an emotional component, positive or negative, can knock any random one out of the rafters where my best ideas build their nests and hatch their Easter eggs.  Only overmedication and a long siesta under a comfortable blanket can keep them in their respective cages.  I still hear voices.  I didn’t know if you knew.

The last hour before cocktails

may be for solitude,

or to find out who is directly upstairs

or a few floors down

and if they want to stay over,

what they are into, chemical-and-bed-wise.

My over apped phone is on speaker.

My voice is the soundtrack of many someone’s dreams

(so I have been told)

and I confess just enough

to get through cocktails and dinner,

into the night where,

if I am lucky (I am often lucky)

there is no pain in my body or my mind

and my favorite lover is at arm’s length,

would but that it could be endless.