The top of Lauren’s hair is blonde, but the dark roots have grown out. Her hair is pulled up into a bun that is unintentionally messy. She’s a mom to three kids but lives with her partner in their car. Lauren is a heroin addict whose story appeared on A&E’s Intervention.
At one point, I admired her. She acted how I wished I could.
My mom died fourteen years ago and my dad four years later on her birthday. After his death, the show consumed me. Some days, I’d watch three episodes a day, others just one. I often thought about the addicts when I wasn’t watching. There was something about their stories that made me feel seen.
The episodes aren’t well-made. It over-dramatizes an already dramatic circumstance, but it gives you a glimpse into addicts’ lives. “Most are too far gone to hold down jobs, so mainly we see them starting fights, crying on unmade beds, and shooting up in hard-to-spot places like the valleys between their toes. Amazing, to me, is that anyone would allow him or herself to be filmed in this condition,” David Sedaris wrote in a 2017 essay about the show.
What attracts us to reality TV? Do addicts’ stories entice us because we see a piece of ourselves in them? Or are we drawn in because we, too, have been in pain?
When I was around five years old, I remember watching shows with our nanny, Eppie, who began caring for me two weeks after I was born. Eppie had a strict afternoon routine, which involved making lunch, often fried hot dogs, and watching her favorite soap opera, The Young and the Restless.
Eppie picked me up early from preschool at least once at noon rather than at the normal pick-up time of 3 p.m.; my parents had no idea. We’d fold clothes, eat, and chat as we watched the storylines unfold. She even paid me a full-size candy bar to help.
“Hush, baby,” she often said as I tried to interject and ask questions. With time, I began to understand the characters and that no one was supposed to speak when Victor Newman—the sixty-something businessman with pepper-colored hair and a soft low-toned voice like my father—came on screen, as he was Eppie’s crush. By middle school, I could discuss the characters like friends we never met. In the summer and on days off from school, our viewing sessions expanded to The Bold and the Beautiful, One Life to Live,and sometimes General Hospital.
I didn’t mention any of this to my parents. My mom worked long hours at a law firm. Before she met my dad, she was a single mother to my oldest half-sister and one of the few female attorneys in her office. Life was measured by the number of activities on your to-do list checked off daily. There was no room for soap operas. I’d feel guilty watching those shows with Eppie when I thought about my parents. I understood that the part of myself that relished sitting beside her, listening to her laugh, watching her cry when her favorite character (unsurprisingly) died, or how her “Jesus have mercy’s” belonged only with her.
My love for reality television grew as I did. In high school, I often arrived home around 5:30 p.m., talked on the phone, and studied four hours a night, leaving no minutes for daytime shows, so Eppie and I switched to Jerry Springer. “What? Did you hear that lady?” I’d say to her when someone said something shocking like they married a horse or slept with their sister, which happened in each episode, knowing she’d want to talk about it.
When my parents went out of town for a weekend, which happened monthly by my senior year, Eppie would stay. On Friday night, we’d pay to order a Bloopers episode on DirectTV, and on Saturday, I’d have a party, which Eppie agreed to if I cleaned up after and kept it contained to the basement, which I did.
After finishing law school exams eight years later, I’d spend three days watching The Hills. After weeks of studying twelve hours a day, I’d immerse myself in the characters whose lives focused on their appearances and boyfriends, slowly allowing each detail that I memorized to exit my brain like helium escaping a balloon.
As I grew older,I tried to stop watching reality TV, quickly changing the channel when anything reality-like came on. Despite my efforts, I still watch MTV’s The Challenge once a week, which is an athletic version of The Real World. Each episode, I am quickly drawn in, unable to blink or think about anything else.
Is there something about watching other people act in a way that is socially unacceptable that makes us feel better for restraining ourselves? Are we watching other people make decisions that we’re too afraid to make? Why do we speak condescendingly about people on reality TV when we often recognize a part of ourselves in them?
Early on in Lauren’s Intervention episode, the viewer sees pictures of her as a small child, intended to conjure feelings of disbelief. In one, she appears smiling in a brown oversized sweater and hat, probably her mom’s, her blonde hair peeking from the edges and her cheeks rosy.
“Everyone is shocked,” one family member said about Lauren’s addiction, but I wasn’t.
When Lauren was eight, her father, whom she was close to, was diagnosed with a chronic digestive condition, leaving him in severe pain and unable to keep food down for many years. When she was in her teens, her father died.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through,” Lauren says. All I could think of was my father.
“I just want to be a normal person,” Lauren says. I wasn’t sure if she was referring to her grief or addiction.
Lauren is one of many addicts on the show who lose someone they love and, desperate to numb the pain, turn to drugs or alcohol.The destruction of their lives and relationships feels extreme, but I understood their desire to shut off sadness at any cost.
I’d never heard of ALS before my mom received the diagnosis when I was twenty-seven. It didn’t take long to understand that it was a death sentence. Over the following year, I watched her lose the ability to swallow, speak, and then breathe. No one could help her or those who loved her.
Prior to her illness and death, no one I loved had died. My grandparents died before I was born. The biggest dramas in my life were not getting an A or a breakup when I was twenty-six.
I don’t know if you can prepare for a loss like that, but I wasn’t. Images of her face from the morgue where I identified her body, the way her voice slurred, the depression on her face when she could no longer eat, and the sound of the machine she used to speak haunted me during the day—but mostly at night—for the next four years.
Friends and family were initially empathetic, but I felt like an alien no one understood, coming down to Earth.
“Why are you yawning so much?” friends would say when we grabbed dinner.
“Just focus on the positive. You’re so lucky you had her for so many years,” my parents’ friends would say.
“Pull yourself together,” another said while I sobbed at a dinner table, shoving happiness down my throat, trapping the sadness inside.
When my father died on my mother’s birthday four years later, I didn’t know how to survive. I couldn’t sleep through the night. I felt like I consumed ten energy drinks a day, anxiety surging through my body. I worked out, lifting heavy weights, running, but my body didn’t feel like mine.
But, by then, I understood the shoulds of grief that oversaturate our society. Generally, one should mourn in moderation. It’s okay to drink or cry or take a break, but not for too long, just enough to show that you loved the person but are also resilient and will carry on. You can share your feelings, but not too much sothat you make another person sad.
“You look like you need a break,” my dad’s best friend, whose name was also John, like my dad, said to me a month after he died. He also was of a similar age, height, and hair color to my dad. Speaking to him felt like the closest experience I had to hearing my dad’s voice again. I broke down crying. John was the first person, besides my husband, to acknowledge I was not okay.
I cruised for a while in my job, not working much, and was lucky in that I took an unpaid three-month break. But I never fell apart. I never took drugs or got one of my dad’s favorite songs tattooed on my arm with cremation ash. I never cheated on my husband, blew all my money on a bender in Las Vegas, or shouted at my family. Instead, I got dressed, exercised, saw friends, tried not to cry in public as sadness and anger festered.
I also watched one episode of Intervention after another. The addicts had the courage to act how I felt. Their pain and the help they needed were on full display while I shoved mine down.
Why don’t we acknowledge the pain we observe in others until it wreaks havoc on their lives? Do we think that if we don’t acknowledge another person’s pain, then maybe it will disappear? Why do we put down addiction as a personal mistake when so many of us have abused substances in our lives?
“I think she just wanted an escape,” Lauren’s mom said of her addiction. Lauren dropped out of high school and had her first child when she was eighteen and, not long after, two more.
Her family noticed her partying hard, using opiate-based pills and painkillers. She later graduated to heroin and crystal meth, staying in her bed for long periods of time, leaving her kids alone.
To attend her daughter’s birthday celebration, she panhandles for cash and drives to a homeless encampment to buy drugs so that she doesn’t show up in withdrawal.
“Mom, I need you,” her daughter says after she finally arrives two hours late that evening. They both cry.
I can’t remember the first time I blacked out. It happened once and then increased like a gradual drop until I couldn’t stop.
We were raised to believe that there was one path in life: excel at school, go to college and graduate school, and be successful, which equates to prestige, money, and a “good” career like the law or medicine. My parents spoke highly of people who worked long hours, attended Ivy Leagues, and pulled themselves up from a lower income bracket. My mother put people down who didn’t go to college or chose an alternative path.
“You didn’t fit the mold. You were emotional and needed to communicate,” my sister, Sarah, recently said to me.
“What a wimp,” I’d sometimes hear my parents say. Before my parents’ illnesses and deaths, I saw them each cry once or twice. Feelings weren’t discussed.
From an early age, I remember my parents drinking every evening after work, usually a gin and tonic, sometimes a glass of wine. I knew that my two older sisters drank heavily in high school and weren’t punished for that behavior.
The first time I tried alcohol, I was in sixth grade. A friend from school and I stole a beer in a green glass bottle from the fridge in our basement and sipped it. It didn’t taste good, but we didn’t drink enough to get a buzz.
When I started a new high school my freshman year, most of my friends drank. On Friday evenings, we’d convince someone to buy us alcohol from the liquor store next to the Mexican restaurant where we had our parents drop us off. Then we’d walk down to a beautiful garden next to the National Cathedral, sit outside, and drink forties or other cheap beer like Natty Light. For most of my freshman year, I drank more than any other girl I hung out with—an ability I took pride in—but I always remembered the evening.
I loved the way I felt tipsy, the way alcohol tasted. I could flirt more, dance better, tell funnier stories, and be as loud as I wanted. It silenced all the chatter, the nagging, the constant pushing to achieve more that dominated my thoughts. When others complained about the taste of cheap beer, it never bothered me.
At the end of my freshman year, a boy who’d pursued me for months and told me he loved me cheated on me the first weekend I was out of town for a soccer tournament. I broke up with him, but we got back together, only to break up again. After that, he’d talk to me about the other girls he wanted to date instead of me. Then I got mono, missed basketball season, and gained weight because of the drinking, which I never put together. In my junior year, I lost my starting position on my soccer team and got a B- in the fall semester of AP Chemistry.
When I showed my report card to my mom, she was seated in her swivel chair in her office in the basement. She turned around and lifted one side of her mouth in an expression we called the “grit” that demonstrated disgust, muttered ugh, and then turned back. I would have preferred if she shouted at me or scolded me, but she didn’t need to. It was like she didn’t have enough time to say, “Not good enough.”
Each one of those events made alcohol taste sweeter, made it feel even better when the numbness filled my body. I blacked out for the first time in my sophomore year, and it happened a couple more times that year. By my senior year, it wasn’t uncommon that it happened every other weekend. I’d wake up after blacking out, filled with shame, but like muscle memory, the next time I went out, I’d do it again.
I only ate dinner with my parents on the weekends, and no one spoke about their work or personal life except for grades or extracurricular activities. No one said anything vulnerable or self-deprecating, so I never mentioned my drinking, and they never asked.
My cheeks at my college graduation, which I almost missed due to a hangover, looked like mine now except with baseballs on each side. Even though I ran five miles every day, I was overweight. Despite completing a one-hundred-fifty-page honors thesis, I didn’t like myself. To keep up, I often cut back on sleep. Increased alcohol consumption exacerbated my anxiety but not enough to change. My friends tried to help, but I was fun to party with. My parents’ silence on the issue continued.
How many times does a person need to blackout for it to be considered a problem? Why do we put addicts down but accept drinking culture in US colleges? Why do we look away from substance abuse when a person’s life looks good on paper?
You can see Lauren’s surprised face when she walks into a room full of her family, friends, and a stranger: an addiction counselor. This is the show’s climax, when the addict gets confronted by loved ones and is forced into a decision.
“It’s supervised by a counsellor and often takes place in a sad hotel conference room with flesh-colored furniture and no windows,” writes Sedaris. “The addicts are usually in full blossom, drunk or high or on the nod.”
“It makes me hurt for you that you have turned your back on yourself,” Lauren’s mother reads from a letter to Lauren, and everyone starts to cry. Then her son reads a letter, followed by Lauren’s sister and daughter, each begging her to get the help she needs. “I want to see you healthy and happy again,” her daughter says.
“The addict is offered a spot in a rehab center. Not all of them accept, but most do,” Sedaris writes, and Lauren does. Her son smiles, and the rest of her family breathes a sigh of relief.
After graduation, I moved to Santiago, Chile, to teach English. I lived with a woman who worked as a librarian during the day and an art curator in the evenings, whom I’d lived with during my junior year of studying abroad. I started to exercise regularly again and slept consistently. I hung out with expats focused on taking twenty-plus-hour bus rides to Argentina and attending openings at the art museum. I relished the anonymity, walking for hours with my headphones on.
I continued to drink, the center of how I socialized, and over the next ten years, some blackouts occurred. But after each one, I’d focus on changing my behavior, and they’d happen with less frequency until they were years apart.
When my oldest daughter was born seven years ago, I stopped drinking. After losing my parents, I loved getting up to be with her, but hundreds of sleepless nights left me exhausted. I’d get invited to meet other moms to drink and hang with our babies, but the thought revolted me. My focus became sleep and her. I also began to see a therapist regularly and to work through my grief. My desire to burn it down dissipated but didn’t disappear.
Not long after, I walked away from my legal job. I’d spent thousands of hours studying and countless sleepless nights practicing law only to acknowledge that I hated it. When I’d said I was a lawyer and shared the name of the big firm I worked at or the well-known software company, I’d see approval in another person’s eyes. Even without knowing me, I knew they thought I was smart. Without alcohol and a legal job, I wanted to leave parties earlier, talk about myself less, and was quieter in a crowd, but I still rarely drank.
I have a couple of drinks when I want to now, but I can also go weeks without one. I socialize more but with people who can hear my grief and care less about job titles.
“My life is out there waiting to begin,” Lauren says ninety days sober at the end of the episode, which I recently rewatched. Her hair is darker, and her skin is back to life. “I have so many things I want to do.”
The outdated color of the show surprises me, and the music sounds cheesier, but tears still stream down my face. “Then again reality TV is fueled by tears,” Sedaris writes. Perhaps that was always the draw for me, a space that permits big emotions and honesty about life. There is something about watching others in pain that transports me back to the months after my dad died.
I get halfway through the show when I realize I have to pick my daughters up from school in ten minutes, and I cannot binge-watch like I used to. When my parents died, I, too, wanted to be a normal person, but my grief made me feel like an outsider. I’ve never burned my life down like Lauren, but I’m not sure I ever returned to feeling normal. As I pack apples and popcorn into a small metal container for my daughters and hop into the car, I wonder if Lauren feels normal now.
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Illustrations by Illo Design
