Voices on Addiction: The Taste Inside My Mouth
It’s never the words I remember. It’s their taste: bitter, dense, like biting into a radish. It’s how my body feels: sore.
Voices on Addiction
113 posts
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction features your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. Submit to our column editor, Kelly Thompson here.
Voices on Addiction: Self-Portrait
Mother should have told me that booze made a kind of heaven in my body, I thought the first time I felt it.
Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter
I imagine the box of obsidian flakes and chunks at home—gathered from explorations in the desert. Their edges cut through skin, draw blood.
Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation
Sometimes life is so big and so loud and being a human being in the world is so much I feel overwhelmed and need a cocoon.
Voices on Addiction: Keys
He wasn’t an alcoholic! He was just British. I was starting to think that this bullet was long past being dodged.
Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
Voices on Addiction: Twenty-Five
I know that there are those who would argue that alcoholism is a singularly extreme condition, and I get that, but I’ve always felt clear that there’s a lot of overlap between alcoholism and plain old ordinary humanity.
Voices on Addiction: Dynamite
The world is a merry-go-round, a sawed-off shotgun, a ticker tape. There's no struggle now. There's only darkness, breathlessness, exit—
Voices on Addiction: A Bad Night
Trying to protect him from himself is like trying to protect atmosphere from weather.
Voices on Addiction: The Only Thing That Has to Change Is Everything
The word rehab is short for rehabilitate, which means to restore to a former capacity. Like houses, I remember thinking. Demo the kitchen. Tear down the walls.
Voices on Addiction: 365 Days without You
The men in my family don’t live long, you foretold. Damn you. Drunks and rock stars don’t grow up.