Hiding
Hello again,
This week I wanted to write about addiction, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year. And actually for a lot longer than that, even if I wouldn’t really have used that word until fairly recently. I have a few close friends who have been in alcoholics and narcotics anonymous since last year and I’ve been very interested in their thoughts and reflections on the process.
I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to have nuanced, in depth conversations about this because it’s a topic which is still fairly taboo and isn’t often discussed openly. Or is discussed mainly in terms of old fashioned, reductive narratives.
Actually I think I had sort of forgotten how taboo addiction still is over the course of this year because of these conversations. And then I saw an advice column in the Guardian over the weekend where a woman in her 50s had written in about her heroin use. She said it was recreational and she seemed to be trying to figure out whether her relationship with heroin should be a source of angst to her or not.
I thought she seemed very self aware and that she had an impressive level of insight into the aspects of her life and background which may make her more likely to develop a dependent relationship with substances in general. I was surprised to see that the response to the piece seemed to be mostly making fun of her and implying it was a sort of ridiculous question to ask, or that she was a silly posh drug user and so on.
I could understand why she was asking the question, and why she was asking an agony aunt. I can imagine there are some people who would have the sort of relationship with their doctor where they could talk to them about something like this, but most people don’t. And actually I read her question more as a slightly roundabout way to talk about her background.
I have written before about how much I like reading agony aunt columns, and one reason is that I think the people who write in are broadly honest about their experience (as they perceive it) because they are anonymous and everyone else involved in the story is too. So I thought it was interesting that she was so quick to declare herself as privileged before saying her parents had both died by suicide:
My upbringing, although privileged, was very unhappy and pretty messed up. My parents both had major mental health problems and alcohol dependency, and both eventually died by suicide.
I’m guessing she means that her family were wealthy and she mentioned boarding schools too, which likely means that, in the UK context, they were very, very wealthy. But I was interested in the fact she used the word “privileged” rather than simply “wealthy” or “rich”.
To me “privileged” infers a more all encompassing kind of benefit or positive experience than either of those words do. And a far more positive experience than the life she seems to have had. And so I read her as a person who can tend to be dismissive of the bad things that have happened to them. Perhaps that is reading too much into the subtext of her letter, but to me it read like someone who was asking about heroin to avoid asking directly for permission to go therapy. To me she seemed like a very sympathetic person because she seemed to have no sympathy for herself.
Her letter made me think of this recent post by Shon Faye, which I thought was great and addressed the emotional pain which sits underneath addiction in a necessarily confronting manner. I detected an instinct to minimise emotional pain in the woman’s letter which reminded me of the drive to bury it described in Shon’s post.
I’ve been interested in the relationship between substance abuse and pain for a long time. Partly this is because a lot of my writing is about thinking through moral grey areas and the messier elements of the human condition (I say, as if it’s not all messy). If you’ve read even one other thing I’ve written I imagine you’d probably have guessed that this is a sort of textbook example of something I’d take an interest in. And partly because of growing up in Belfast, where you can see substance abuse as a trauma and pain response all around. Actually maybe it’s all because of that. Observing that messiness may be why I find it interesting to explore in my work too.
But, as I said, I wouldn’t have used labels like “addiction” or “substance abuse” until fairly recently, except in the most extreme examples. I used to think of it as “hiding” because I thought of it as a tendency some people have to want to go away somewhere else sometimes. Now I write that down, it strikes me as a childlike phrase to use. But I like the softness of it too. I like the softness of it because this is a conversation which often strikes me as very harsh and judgmental.
I have written here before about the way our culture demands vulnerability be performed in a palatable way, and about how sceptical I feel about this. And I think we still tend to treat addiction broadly as a sign of malevolence or delinquency rather than vulnerability. I don’t think that everyone who has experienced a lot of pain and trauma will struggle with substance abuse issues and I think we all define pain and trauma very differently. Even two people who have had virtually the same experiences can respond completely differently. (Think of the families of siblings you know, for example).
I’m interested in why we all have different tolerances, but I have come to see it as a form of privilege (and I know this doesn’t fit with how we use this word now) to have a higher tolerance. For the simple reason that your life will be easier if you do. I think that’s something to feel grateful for, rather than triumphant about, but I feel the mainstream conversation around addiction tends to take the opposite view.
Till next time xxxx
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