THE ADDICTION MONSTER
As early as I can remember I knew that my parents were recovered alcoholics. I didn’t know what that meant until near adulthood. I knew it meant that my mom didn’t love my sisters and I being around my extended family that drank semi-heavily. I knew it meant my grandma wasn’t very happy with my mom because of that. I knew it meant my dad drank Busch N.A. I knew it meant that they were happier than they used to be. At some point I learned it meant my sisters and I were possibly more susceptible to alcoholism or addiction.
My sisters, who are both older than me, didn’t expose me to any drinking while they were in high school. My friends weren’t the type to drink, so they also didn’t expose me to it. Towards the end of middle school though, I had my first encounter with the addiction monster.
I can’t remember how it all started but for a stretch of my preteen life my sister Rachel and my parents were screaming at each other consistently. That’s what I associated our home with: them screaming at each other. It happened in the usual way. My sister had fell in to friendships and relationships with the wrong people and had been using cocaine for a number of months. All I knew was it was a drug and that drugs were bad and that drugs were especially bad for our family. And now I knew that it also meant I had to endure my family screaming while I sat in my room alone.
Once my sister burst into my room, amidst the screaming, crying and jumped in bed next to me. My mom was standing in the doorframe the next instant, yelling at her to get out and come back to talk to them. My sister cried, “I just want to be alone with my brother!” I couldn’t move or say anything. My mom continued to yell at her to leave until she conceded. “Never let them tell you who you can love,” she said right before she left. Ironic, since she didn’t know I was gay.
The addiction monster left me alone for a couple of years as my sister was put on a tighter leash, finished high school and moved out to go to college. Sophomore and junior year of high school I was thrust into a new social situation. And it gave me much anxiety. I was socializing with all the kids I had deemed as the “cool” ones since middle and elementary school. The pressure was always on to fit in, to impress, to be liked.
In biology class one day a friend outside of that social circle had said something offhand about her dad having all kinds of prescription drugs lying around. I asked what kind of drugs. She said one magic word that struck a cord: hydrocodone. I had gotten teeth pulled once and was prescribed them. I remember them making me feel carefree and happy and I made my family laugh a lot. I told her all of this to lead her in to offering them to me. She took the bait.
I was supplied half a bottle of painkillers and saw them as my deliverance. I hadn’t totally lost my mind. I knew they were dangerous. I knew they were bad for me. I just wanted them to ease some of the higher peaks of my anxiety. So right before the first social outing since acquiring them, a birthday party, I took one. And I was on fire. I was talking to everyone. I was making people laugh. I was dancing all over. And I got invited to another outing the next weekend by a pretty cheerleader who said, “You have to come!”
So nearly every weekend there was something else to go to and every time I popped a pill before getting in my mom’s car to get dropped off. In short time I had doubled my friend group. Everyone thought I was hilarious. It was a bit of a dream come true.
Eventually I ran out of pills and had to socialize sober. Eventually I fessed up to some of those friends and they were disappointed in me. Eventually my parents found out and living in their house became very stressful. I had to deal with the aftermath of making friends while extremely high. It was a blow to my self-esteem. They all fell for the free spirited, liberated, uninhibited Tyler and that’s not who I was in the harsh light of day.
That’s when I learned that addiction is more multifaceted than I thought. I wasn’t taking near enough hydrocodone to develop a physical dependency on it, but was I addicted to the feeling? I think so. I thought I was saving myself from addiction, physical addiction, by not taking too many too frequently, but I got psychologically addicted to them. There were times I felt as if I needed to be high to go do something. Being sober could be very hard for me.
The addiction monster retreated back to his cave or wherever for several years. I turned 21. My friends took me to a bar. I was not intending to get drunk but if it happened it happened. I had never been drunk before. Seriously. I didn’t drink until I was 21. It’s insane, I know. People can change, okay? I didn’t drink for several reasons: I was terrified of the police element, it didn’t taste good and I didn’t care to acquire the taste, I had no real desire to know what being drunk felt like and I was afraid of our good ole friend, the addiction monster.
My friends did get me drunk that night. It was fine. We had fun. My best friend, Sussanne, DDed and took me through a drive thru for chicken nuggets before putting me to bed. Drinking socially became a thing. I was still hesitant so I drank cautiously. I got my feet wet for a few years before becoming an avid drinker. Me and said best friend from my birthday started living together and drinking became a hobby in our household.
Sussanne became my closest friend. She became my person. She was really the person I had waited my whole life for. I always wanted one friend who I would choose over everyone that would also choose me over everyone. I wanted the unrealistic friendships I saw on TV: Meredith and Cristina, JD and Turk, Buffy and Willow, Will and Grace. It was something I never had. I had gotten my feelings hurt countless times by people who didn’t choose me. I was never someone’s first pick. Sussanne fixed that.
When I left Tennessee to go back home to Louisville, it was sad for us. We took pride in being #FriendGoals from a distance though. We texted constantly. We called when needed. We visited when we could. We weren’t seeing each other every day anymore but our friendship didn’t deter.
I refused to move in with my parents when I went back to Kentucky. I instead moved into my sister’s house, two minutes down the road from their house. It was me, my sister Rachel, her dog and my infant niece. It was less than ideal. My bedroom was the living room. The door into the house was the door into my bedroom. I didn’t have another door. I got a dog gate between my room and the kitchen. But it was a house.
My sister said I could live there free of charge. She was already affording the house before I got there. I didn’t want to live like that though, so she agreed that I could help pay for utilities and such. Twice a month I gave her a hundred or so dollars. When some expenses went up I helped accordingly. I had the money. I saved a lot since my expenses were so low.
In the six months that I lived with my sister the electricity was cut off twice. Both times, I was in the house when it happened. The Dish Network went off twice too. I had to learn how to pay the bill on the TV. Every time Rachel had excuses as to why she forgot or the due date changed or why her money was temporarily locked up elsewhere. One night I came home after work to an empty house and pulled out my cash savings envelope I kept in my desk. After every shift I put half of what I made in that envelope. I only pulled money out of it for bills or larger expenses. This night, the envelope was empty, except for a note. Rachel was behind on bills and needed the money and was too embarrassed to ask and was so sorry and didn’t want me to tell mom.
Her behavior had been getting more erratic. On nights where she didn’t have the baby, her whereabouts were mostly unknown. And now, she was having money problems. My family knew what it looked like. We sat down one night and I don’t know who exactly I thought I was at this moment in time, but I asked her if she was on drugs. She burst into tears. She talked about how she hated that that’s where I minds went, because she had been a drug user we always assumed problems meant drugs. She said she had actually quit bartending at a place because she knew drugs were there and didn’t want the temptation. She told me she hadn’t been using.
I had made plans to move in with some friends of mine though. It was better located. I loved these friends. It was affordable. I was going to have more space. So I left Rachel’s house. Life became better. Part of that was distance from Rachel’s chaotic lifestyle. I didn’t see or talk to her very much. She eventually subleased the house and her and her creatures (her daughter and dog) moved into my parents’. I heard a lot from my mom about her behavior and the like getting worse. I actively kept my distance.
Sussanne and I’s long distance bestfriendship was still going strong when I moved into the new house. It’s hard for me to pinpoint when exactly things started to go wrong. I remember she started to lie to me about being drunk. On the phone or on text, I could always tell when she was drunk. It started out as me jokingly calling her out for it: “bitch shut up, you’re drunk.” Then when she kept denying it every time, it got more serious: “why’d you get so drunk?” We never used to lie about being drunk to each other. It could be 3PM on a Wednesday and we would own that shit. That perplexed me.
Then shit in her life kept going tragically wrong. She was always either fairly depressed or very drunk. Some of the shit was happening because of her drinking. We were talking more frequently. Our conversations were always either her drunkenly talking complete nonsense or her crying uncontrollably. And either way, there wasn’t anything I could do to help her. She would just talk and talk and talk or cry and cry and cry. Anything I said to help was futile. This went on for months.
Things with Rachel had gotten so bad that my parents had asked her point blank if she was on drugs. She said she wasn’t. So they drug tested her. Then she admitted to using. She had been for six months. I was in line at a Taco Bell drive through when my mom called me and told me all of this. I got out of my slow moving line, drove home and cried in my driveway.
Sussanne was the first person I called to talk to. She was drunk. She was repeating herself, which was one of her tells. All she could say was something about how Rachel was selfish for doing this. I cried about this, that, the other: my guilt, my mistakes, my options. All she could say was something about how Rachel was selfish for doing this. I think that was the first time I really knew my person wasn’t there any more. She was gone. This was someone else.
Rachel detoxed on my mom’s couch. I got the play by plays. I never came to visit. I was either working or saying I was working. My guilt added up. I partially blamed myself. I left her. I distanced myself. I wasn’t her friend when she was going down that path, even though she tried and tried to have a better relationship with me. I knew she was lonely. I knew she didn’t have many friends. She always tried to spend time with me but I avoided her because she was so chaotic or spazzy or stressful or whatever. Then she got addicted to shit that made her more chaotic and spazzy and stressful. I didn’t go to the house until I completely ran out of excuses to stay away. I didn’t say much. She put on a brave face but she was honest about how shitty she felt. She was optimistic though. I can’t say I was.
Things with Sussanne continued as usual until I started to discover her making things up. Some of them were small, inconsequential; others were massive, tragic, awe-inducing tales that I would later find were completely fabricated. She would just get drunk and make things up or confuse details. I was in contact with her mom and friends enough to learn the truths.
Her mom called me one day to tell me they had taken her to rehab. Sussanne and I didn’t talk for a month while she was in there. She didn’t tell me when she got out. She didn’t tell me anything about where she had been. She seemed normal for a while. Then her drunk tells started resurfacing. Wash, rinse, and repeat. She went back to rehab, didn’t stay as long, got back out, and started drinking again. I was exhausted. I further distanced myself.
Our communication had been broken down for months before we ever addressed it. She left me drunken voice mails saying we needed to talk, she was better now. She would also always say she was worried about me, worried about things I was posting and that people would ask her if I was okay. That infuriated me a tad. She knew my parents were alcoholics and that I was always afraid to end up the same way. We had become so codependent that I figured a part of her would find it comforting if I had become an alcoholic as well.
So I told her I was done. I wished her the best. I wanted her to get better and figure her shit out. But I couldn’t be around for the process. Everything had gotten so dark. Every time her name lit up on my phone, I was dragged down into a dark, cold, depressing hole. And even best case scenario, if she could stay sober, I’d always be afraid she’d fall back off and take me with her. I felt hopeless. I didn’t see any way for us to ever have anything happy or positive. She was drunk when I told her all of this. That was the last time we talked.
She was everything I ever thought I wanted. The one person I’d pick that would also pick me. Yet, I walked away when I felt I needed to. My sister however, will always be with me. Her sobriety will always be a question. It has been since her most recent recovery. And I still watch from an arm’s distance. I still don’t befriend her to save myself.
I hate myself for these things. I am cold, yet I call it independent. I am selfish, yet I call it protective. I point out flaws in these people and let them dictate our relationships. And I have hurt these people. I say I’ve been attacked by the addiction monster, but now I think I am the monster.