Unremarkable Obstinate Tremors

on being young and sober, still

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. First off, I rarely speak publicly about the specific details of my recovery. I will never know enough about life to make that story worthwhile in print, even now. This is not a memoir. This is not journalism. My only hope is that one of you finds your sweater caught on some off-hand remark of mine, that my writing yanks out a string for you to twist around your knuckle.

2. I will probably never rid myself of this nagging rawness. The exhaustion is more romantic than anything, really. The calcified cortisol between my tendons is a luxury. I get sick easily; I overextend myself. This is all proof of some devotion. I am 25 years-old and as of April 9th, it’s been seven years since I last got fucked up. It is still hard to rest.

3. Any discussions surrounding substance use inevitably grow defensive. People take a person’s recovery as a judgement against them; it sparks paranoia about acceptable behavior, reflection without confrontation. The former user becomes an errant particle. Suboxone, similarly, confounds those who have taken solace in a false binary. They discount something beautiful - that a person stands in front of them, that their eyes twitch in response to sudden flashes of light.

4. On a broader scale, we understand that there is something abstractly incorrect about how we discuss substances, though most are unable to move past false notions of the addict as the martyr of spiritual depravity. It is hard to reframe use in a productive way, when all commonplace narratives about dependency - as a heretical disease, a moral failing, a cosmic punishment - define the disenfranchised exclusively by their predisposition to “sin.” In the absence of a truly oppositional perspective, grifters continue to write variations on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Prozac Nation. Such trite observations as “recreational drugs can produce positive experiences,” or “psychiatric medication is over-prescribed as a cudgel against societal ills” are poor substitutes for honest interface with reality. Most assertions around the “drug trade” quietly mimic DEA talking points that focus on personal responsibility (and therefore, personal failing). Across the political spectrum, many fail to shake the subtle implication that drugs themselves exacerbate crime, or imperialism, or unrest, rather than prohibition itself. Institutional avenues for recovery,¹ their carceral affiliates, and even supposedly radical soapboxes on free will all skirt the heart of the issue: Every user deserves to keep living. Nobody has to die, no matter what.

5. But they do die, though. They die a lot.

6. So how does one make sense of all this? There has yet to be an empirically sound assessment of substance use beyond a physical dependency, which even scientists understand to be an inadequate (though not incorrect) explanation. Just because quantitative measurements have faltered, though, does not mean it is incomprehensible. There are clear material forces and systemic violences that routinely endanger active users. The government and the pharmaceutical industry have both weaponized access to substances for profit, gerrymandering, and political incapacitation. These facts are often obfuscated or rhetorically misappropriated because they directly refute the aforementioned notions of the addict.

7. My understanding, then - which is purely anecdotal and internal rationale for my personal experience - is that “addiction” is a type of bonding. As a teenager, having been failed by my family and broader support systems, in place of difficult relationships with myself and my peers which I was incapable of maintaining, I turned to drugs as an external method of emotional regulation. If I wanted to feel good, or if I wanted to feel nothing, I got fucked up instead of self-stabilizing. I became scared, selfish, and manipulative. I abused plenty of people in that time and was abused by even more, though I was so depersonalized at that point that nothing really registered. It wasn’t just that my body became accustomed to drugs; at the height of my use, I was totally baffled by the prospect of emotional presence and self-reflection. This helplessness made me want to die. The one relationship in my life was fundamentally inhuman and unsustainable. I did not want for anything else. I longed for it to kill me.

8. The worst part about getting sober was the clock. I loved acting out, I did not mind my world being turned upside down, I liked being told what to do; I thrived in the chaos and compensatory self-flagellation. But the waiting, that was hard. During active use, I would duplicate hours at will, regularly evaporate entire weeks. I was not required to be awake. I could play dead days at a time. But six weeks after I’d gotten high for the last time, I found myself with an afternoon to kill in the halfway house, alone. It was the day of my high school graduation ceremony but I was several hundred miles away and I was pretty sure my life was over. I sat on the couch, chain-smoking² out the window, blasting this song on loop. It played 32 times. I could not stop shaking.

9. When I tell people I’ve been sober since I was 18, they do a kind of mental math. To my new friends, any sense that I am a person with a past is only distantly acknowledged. I am young enough, I have been sober long enough, that I have to remind them that I have not always been this way. I spent the past seven years working to make sure the past two years were as boring as possible. I’ve made it such that my history of drug use is not my defining characteristic. In a way this is true. In more ways, though, it is a lie.

10. I lied a lot in early sobriety. I pretended I never bought pressed pills. I told my counselor I was a pack-a-day smoker so I’d get more nicotine patches. I insisted that I had only ever hurt myself with my habits. I figured everybody would recoil from the truth. I clung to dozens of little deceits, so core was this apparently inherent, exceptional evil to my sense of self.

11. I never meant to find community with other people in recovery. I figured I could never be worthy of a real, fallible love like that. But strangers let me collapse into them anyway. I did not actually tell anyone my secrets; people just told me theirs and I realized they were the same. Even now, I have often gone weeks or months into a friendship before learning of our joint past. Somewhere along the line I started believing I was worth it. I think it started when I realized I would never have to do it alone again.

12. So no, being sober is not the most important thing about me, but my relationships to my fellow users will forever be the foundation of my life. If addiction is a bonding pattern, then routine self-improvement is not enough to heal it. Moderation or abstinence will not suffice. Even basic material security, something that users have been consistently denied, would not on its own solve the problem. It requires real community - bonds with not just a handful of people but hundreds, all of whom see you as a whole, messy person deserving of care, and safety, and pleasure. We have a collective responsibility, as current and former users, to be there for one another. I would not be here without my network. More importantly, it is the great honor of my life to know that my loved ones have put their trust in a community of which I am a small part. That would be enough.

13. Over the past seven years I have gotten better about time. I like that I cannot misplace an hour the way I used to. I wouldn’t want to if I could. But the shakes haven’t gone away. I thought they were withdrawal symptoms at first, but I am not sure anymore. Reassurances from doctors that they are, in all likelihood, psychosomatic have done little to quell their frequency or intensity. Sometimes I do not notice them. Other days they make me nauseous.

14. The arc of my use was ordinary. My PTSD, too, is unexceptional. It is hard to mourn loved ones who died from the very thing that should have, by any statistical measures, also killed me.³ I do not just carry the dead in spirit; I carry them in heart palpitations and night terrors and shin splints. The past seven years have a tendency of recompiling without warning. I recoil at involuntary distortions of my past. It is too much. I am happy to have survived. I would have preferred to survived less.

15. I like to think I have done what I can. I have held someone’s hand as their nails dug into my palm. I have lost sleep to make sure someone does not have a seizure from the pills they took. I have been slapped, kicked, spit on, and screamed at by the people I love most for simply refusing to let them suffer alone. I don’t mind, really. They would have done the same for me.

16. But it gets to me, that I don’t know if I should count certain deaths as suicides or overdoses. It is hard not to feel guilty for sticking around. It’s hard not to attempt resurrection through full-body panic.

17. It’s been 14 months since somebody I knew well has passed away; that’s the longest I have gone in a decade by a factor of four. This is on purpose. In my early 20s, I was involved with harm reduction movements, Narcan trainings, and local organizing. In recent years, though, I’ve drifted away from the work. I was selfish, I got scared. I wanted fewer funeral invitations.

18. It didn’t work, of course. The only thing that’s different now is that when somebody gets got, I have six unread texts from them in my phone. Time has not ceased doubling back on itself. I am still 18. My friends are still dying.

19. I can stay sober for myself just fine. But I cannot be the person who I want to be if I do not show up for others. I refuse to let drug death rule the rest of my life. I refuse to let it get in the way of love.

20. Harm reduction is a practice rooted in hope and unconditional acceptance. I am young and I don’t do drugs anymore. I have watched sober people die and I have watched active users carry on living and I am grateful to have known all of them. I have lived a lot of life already and I will live plenty more. The shakes will never go away. But if I can be there for the people I care about for as long as they let me, staying alive will have been worth it.

    love ya lots,

    helmet girl xx

1. Any discussion re: particular programs or rehab facilities are absent from this piece, deliberately so. If anybody confesses their feelings on such things outside a private conversation, I promise you, they do not know what the fuck they are talking about.

2. My one actual piece of advice: You should definitely quit smoking, unless you just quit anything else.

3. Conventional wisdom is that the younger you are, the harder it is to recover from heavy drug use. There is no real way of proving this out, but that didn’t stop me from believing it for years. I got sober to spite a few people and the person who told me that was one of them.