Reality Bites
addiction, substance abuse, perscription pills, recovery, alcoholics anonymous, fibromyalgia, memoir
Published on:
February 14, 10:30pmWord Count:
1765Work Description
A memoir piece about the years I was addicted to Perscription Pills as a result of having Fibromyalgia and other chronic diseases. The story also covers the years of recovery and the impact this had on my children.
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I promised myself I would never tell this story until my kids were grown and had no real need for me anymore. . . until the day when I became a grandmother and my secrets could be kept behind doors not as easily accessible. But I forgot there were times in life when a person is alone with herself; when there is no hiding from what is real and what you have been hiding behind for all those years. I am in such a place now – a place where my children have gone to college and my dog has died and I spend my nights staring at rerun after rerun of Law & Order hopelessly mired in my own muck. It is not as impossible a place as I believed it would be. You can be content with little. You can make do with night after night after week after month when no one hugs you, when your skin craves touch and cringes from it at the same time. I know. The existence I so feared is now the one I live within daily – and I am living proof you can live to tell about it.
I live with several medical conditions – ones I can’t hide from. They have literally taken possession of my life, hijacked it, taken it completely off course and left me with remnants of what I thought life looked like. I breathe at about 30 – 50% of normal but have no desire to complain – life could be so much worse. The constant pain of Fibromyalgia and the breathing issues put me on Disability, but I can be of service by working part-time. Nevertheless, the biggest and baddest of these health issues would be a whopper of an addictive personality. If I could get addicted to Cheese-whiz, I would, no kidding. The worst years of my life have been spent in the depths of addiction – in my late teens and early twenties it was alcohol; my forties brought with them an addiction to prescription pills
It wasn’t like I didn’t try to live a clean life. I had twenty years of sobriety before pain resulting from Fibromyalgia led me to believe my doctor that the only answer was prescription pills. After five years of literal hell in the depths of despair and addiction, I nearly died and was given a second chance. I knew I was in trouble but couldn’t get the help I needed. No rehabilitation facility or hospital program wanted to take me – I was too big a medical risk. When my system ultimately collapsed, I had a chance to get the help I needed. I have remained sober since . . . not always the easiest of tasks. Dulling the pain, checking out into numbness, fading to black, still have their lures. It can be extremely seductive to be oblivious.
The hardest part was waking up and seeing what I was doing to my children . . . I had little care for what it was doing to myself. My son moved 3,000 miles away to be with his father because I couldn’t cope with him in the way he needed. He may have been the lucky one. My daughter had to witness my decline. She was the one who tucked me into bed at night and took food out of my mouth when I fell asleep sitting up while eating. She had to call the ambulance on several occasions. She was the one who saw me in a drug-induced coma for two days while I was at home, and didn’t understand there was a problem because she was busy living her life with school, sports and work and was too young to recognize the signs. And she was the one who found me in the midst of a drug-induced grand mal seizure and sat beside me at the hospital while I went through four more. She had to live with relatives while I was at rehab. Little wonder she moved across the country to go to college – she deserved to put as much space as she needed to between us. I was blessed with the miracle
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Thank you for sharing this story with us. I really enjoyed your imagery. The imagery in the two paragraphs below really stood out to me.
There are so many, like me, who live in the folds of life, in those creases where the sides are pressed so tightly against each other there is no room to breathe. They are the ones everyone would like to forget, but can’t. They are the ones who take up too many support services, escalating medical costs. They are the ones the family hates to come home to, would love to escape, desperately want a safe place to put.
He is one such as me. The Eleanor Rigby type with hair haphazardly pulled into a pony tail, wearing a ratty bathrobe that hasn’t been cleaned in quite awhile, curled up in a corner of her couch, downing more than a half gallon of wine a night? She is my best friend. That one in handcuffs, the police are putting into the back of their car, slurring his words and swearing at the cops? . . .An intimate acquaintance
I would have to agree with Presley it is wonderful that you are so honest with your situation, but there is room for more detail.
Thanks again!
First of all, let me say I am touched by your honesty and sincerity. They flow through the writing and give it emotional power. Thank you very much for sharing.
Before you read my critique, let me say that I feel guilty writing it in that I will never have your experience, so I am not qualified to critique. A work such as this, no matter how it is written (and this is written well, mind you), has truth behind it, and tragedy. I have immense respect for the topic, and the style and form seem secondary to the message, which is important regardless. I hope you will understand my decision to limit myself to a discussion of style and form, and know that the discussion is a world apart from the most important part of the story; my critique is ONLY of these things, not your life.
I don't have a lot of work with confessional pieces, so take my ideas with a grain of salt. As usual, I'll go through the topics one by one and touch on each.
Tone/Structure
I want to tell you that I love the narrator (you!). She is personably and human. Even though I haven't had her problems, I feel like I know her, like she's a relative or a friend, and I understand her troubles. Your conversational style and casualness keep the story light in light(no pun intended) of the heaviness of the topic. On that note, good show!
I did feel, sometimes, though, that this mood was interrupted. The narrator felt like she was holding back, not telling me everything. Lots of little details were skipped; emotions were cut out in favor of description. For such an honest narrator, I wanted to see more of the person. More of the personality. I want to know what made her recover so fast and well (my experience with many folks is often that they struggle through multiple rehabs).
In short, I want to see the richness of detail and description that the truth of this story lends itself too.
Structure
I know this is kind of a stream-of-consciousness piece, but I felt slightly jumped about reading it. I think because it is such an emotional topic, it just spills out onto the page uncontrollably, and it's hard to sort out where to put all the feelings (this is why I can never write about how I feel personally, anyway. Yay projection!). It loosely follows chronological order, but I think a more rigid following would help it.
There are many cutscenes to the author's emotions, feelings, etc. It often switches perspective to the daughter/family. I have two suggestions on how to tie this in:
1) make it a short but emotion-filled piece, trading perspective changes for the author's viewpoint on her family members at the time. Don't let the narrator tell more than she knows at that point in time(ie, about the daughter's reactions) and focus in on her perceptions and feelings.
2) expand it into a much larger story, with scenes and dialog and no description, just happening. Flashes/cutscenes are extremely appropriate, given how disorderly addiction makes you. Remember that if you decide to go this way, there will be a little fiction in your story, because nobody remembers that well. Don't worry about it. If you do this, you can do some really cool stuff with reliability of the narrator and lying narrators, having the reader discover along with you the drug addiction's problems.
I feel privileged to have you read my critique and to have read your work.
Eek, I'm really sorry about the giant wall of text. That's what I get for using a terminal based web browser. Message/write/email me if you need the nice formatted version, I won't repost it because that would be Karma-spoofing.
there is beauty in that honesty
and honestly i find written beautifully
I love the honesty and think you have some great images. I've been trying to write more honestly myself. I think it could move and flow better though. This can help build up and also make it more gripping.
This is the one thing I could get in the box the right way, I just got on here tonight and don't know how to use things yet, but there are a lot of instances like this where it would be cool to see some more detail. Get descriptive of it. Another instance is where you mention family that can't understand. These types of things are great jumping off points and could be worked more.
Thanks for letting me comment.