From the Archives: Voices on Addiction: None of This Is Bullshit
I was fine. No one and nothing could hurt me.
...moreBecome a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!I was fine. No one and nothing could hurt me.
...more. . .this house is not the right place for children either and yet, here you are day after day.
...moreD— was dreamy in the precise manner of Neil Young circa 1974. Long, dark hair; green eyes; great butt; nice smile. He was sweet, funny, just tall enough. Wore a felt hat with a hatband he’d beaded himself, and a feather. Drove a forty-year-old turquoise-and-white Ford pickup with a broom and shovel in the gun […]
...moreDad quit smoking via a hypnotist shortly before my sister Margaret was born. When I was eight or nine, he liked telling me the story of the hypnosis, sitting together on the green sofa in the living room, parallelograms of sunlight on the brown carpet.
...moreThis could be a way out.
...moreI wished I knew a word for the green of moss right when it starts up freshly in spring. I would lie down on it and roll around. I would pray to it. I would sing its name.
...moreShe’s still somehow always thirsty . . . At least none of these drinks will kill her, even if the hunt for mood and mind-altering, for distraction, for something out there to help, may follow her to the grave.
...moreThe hardwired need, the uncontrollable craving people described, manifested for me primarily with my bulimia. Alcohol played second string in the quartet.
...moreThe unspoken family sentiment: If everyone worked hard and the bills were paid, that was all that mattered. There was no room for emotions.
...moreWe don’t talk, for instance, about wine at dinner parties, or wine at house warmings, or boxed wine on the front stoop, or beers at the game, or mommy juice in sippy cups, about open bars or happy hours, champagne toasts or cakes drenched in rum, about all the gatherings—the celebrations—where we drink water, […]
...moreYou’ll look back and you’ll think the scars seem almost invisible, like maybe they’ll be gone one day. But then you’ll realize you’re just looking at the smaller ones, and yes, the bigger one is still right there.
...moreI wanted to write about opioids because I didn’t have an opioid problem.
...moreI am sick with grief, triggered by my mother’s death, in turn triggered by Chardonnay.
...moreThen the road less traveled by diverged in a wood and took him in the night.
...moreWe both can disappear in our own ways, can’t we?
...moreFinding joy in the now, even as death and difficulty mark the days, is possible, a choice, and a practice.
...moreThis was a reconnaissance mission. My intention was to save her, not alienate her.
...more“Was it vodka?” Mama said. Her voice had cracks in it. Why ask? She knew.
...moreJames Brown and Patrick O’Neil discuss WRITING YOUR WAY TO RECOVERY.
...moreTelevision babysat our family—our thirteen-channel set, reception via a rooftop antenna.
...moreI grieve my father’s disembodiment. It is my grief inheritance.
...moreIt hadn’t felt like teasing. It felt the way it always did these days—that I had disappointed her.
...moreLilly Dancyger discusses her debut memoir, NEGATIVE SPACE.
...moreThe toll I took on people I love can’t be measured. But I want to know.
...moreAddiction steals your integrity. Your freedom, too.
...moreFor years, decades even, my father tried to escape meth’s hold.
...moreShe introduced me to the ugly of religion and to the beauty of the world.
...moreI want to see myself as a whole person.
...moreI always thought I was too smart to be one of those girls.
...moreThere is no finality to this grief. Only a series of losses, compounded.
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