Wednesday, February 17, 2016

What I Learned from Falling in Love with Drug Addicted Men

It's a Wednesday afternoon and I have just slammed down my cellphone after yet another conversation with one of Ohio's most heavily sought-out treatment facilities for chemically dependent men. Elliott's on the other line, filling out paperwork and reading through counselors' emails. I worry that as a poly-substance addict who abuses just about anything besides benzodiazepines and alcohol, insurance will not cover the five-day detox. "Your withdrawal is not deadly," they'll say. But then again, I worry that insurance will only cover detox, and not y'know...actual treatment.

I am worried Elliott will die.

It is terrifying, yet a sensation eerily comforting in its familiarity. As a twenty year old, I have been through this before...thrice. This treatment facility, the one in which I have just spoken with, is the same one I visited Hudson at, what seems like now, so long ago. Even though Northeastern Ohio seems completely littered with addiction, I know there's more to my dating record than coincidence. After the first man, a tattoo artist I started vibin' with in high school, I cleaned myself up with the promise of never dating an addict again.

I lied.

As a recovering addict and aspiring clinician myself, friends and family repeatedly told me I fell victim to the thrill of addiction - the thrill of naively believing love can cure.

But really, I fell in love with personalities that just happened to have addiction checkered pasts...err...presents. One was actively using and dealing when we first met; another was in medical school, had been sober for years, and relapsed; and Elliott, oh Elliott, experimented with cocaine as a teenager, ran away to Europe for a couple years, and came back with a heroin addiction and baby girl. But all of them were fiercely passionate about their love for me.

I glorified such intensity - such rawness. They were hard-on-the-outside, complete mush on the inside types. Bad boys in stolen leather jackets, who said fuck a lot, drank Blatz beer, and were utterly unpredictable. They were outgoing, well-liked, fun. As a catastrophizer eager to abandon the comforts of my suburban girlhood, their adventure-seeking ways drew me in. As if experience can serve as some sort of protection from my curiosity, I sunk myself in again and again.

What I mean to suggest when I say these men were mush on the inside, is that they were well acquainted with pain. Naming him after the city in which he was conceived, Hudson's mother worked as a sex worker to support her own heroin addiction. As a child, he fell asleep to the lullaby of a steady string of men beating his mother to near death nearly every night. Liam, as an eighth grader, walked home from school to find his mother's body swaying within the grasp of a tightly wound rope. Elliott lost his father at four years old and kept a horrible secret for thirteen years. 

They prided themselves on pushing their pain away, suppressing it with swollen crack pipes and clogged syringes, but they all had such starkly peculiar insecurities that made them so goddamn sensitive - a quality I ate up greedily. So often I have been compartmentalized by lovers, burdened by conditions, aspects of my identity and reality excluded from their affection. Their love was different - overwhelming in its inclusivity. They were uncomfortable people who had mastered how to comfort others.

Friends and family said that I - a college-bound suburban-bred feminist activist with Ph.D dreams, was too good for them.

"He is not going to change," everyone told me, which only infuriated me. I don't know that. He doesn't know that. So, how are you to know that? Millions of people have changed. Heck, I am one of them. What if everyone said that about me when I was using? Wait, did you say that about me when I was using?

I cried in the shower. I cried in bed. I cried in the car driving to school. I cried in the car driving home from work. I could not find a single person who would listen. He's an addict? Dump his ass!

No one, even other recovering addicts, was willing to accept that I was in love and fighting for my partner's health, just as they would if their significant other were ill with some other less stigmatized disease. I was not better than my boyfriends and I had long known that, but what I learned was, neither were these people so eager to offer their advice. These people who disregard my relationships fail to recognize that what they have is not inherently better just because their partner's screw-ups are less stigmatized. When I think about my friends' and family's relationships, I am far from jealous. 

I never worried that these men would cheat on me or that I was just the best option at the time. I never worried about falling into routine, growing stale and becoming boring. I never worried about a lukewarm love because mine engulfed me in flames. They were addicts for Christ's sake. They knew devotion. They knew obsession. This kind of ride-or-die commitment was riveting. Goddamn, why do you think young women swoon over Lana Del Rey songs? Sometimes, this commitment was haunting. Beneath a loaded handgun, passion can quickly become a threat, "Five, four, three - are you leaving me for good? - two...."

Don't fret. I know that was not love; it was manipulation. I have since learned the distinction. 

There were other lows, like the time Liam and I went to see the Desaparecidos. Freshly out of Suboxone, he spent the night curled into fetal position on a bathroom floor. I remember driving back to school as he spewed vomit out the passenger side window. When he refused to go to an urgent care or hospital, I drove him to a shooting gallery instead. I am parking, the car is still in motion, and he is flying out the door. I recall looking in my rear-view mirror, unable to locate him. I bawled my eyes out as my imagination painted a vivid carousel of every awful thing that could have happened, only for Liam to return with a smile strewn across his face, gas station coffee (my personal favorite) in hand.

I am certain I spent more time on drug corners in my first year of recovery than during my active use. I have threatened to slaughter drug dealers, and followed men straight-up grand-theft auto style to ensure their attendance at 12-step meetings and/or counseling appointments. I have phoned mothers and sisters and parole officers. I have spent hours researching treatment facilities and Suboxone prescribers. I have looked through phone records and urinalysis screenings. I know that the real reason so many government agencies exclude former drug users from employment is not due to security risks, fear of relapse, or just general hate for addicts, but because we would be too thorough at our jobs. Our investigative skills are unbeatable and only strengthened by years of loving other addicts.

I know of no pain deeper than watching someone you love suffer with such intensity. To hold a grown man, trembling and shaking with hysteria, unable to solve the singular puzzle that was destroying their lives. The torture in loving someone who hates themselves. All I wanted was to convince them that someday, somehow, if they put in the effort, they could learn to feel okay, and with time, maybe even better than okay. You could be happy without drugs. Look at me I'd say, as if I was speaking to myself. I would light candles and play delicate dream pop, staying up for days caring for them as they detoxed.

But sometimes love is not enough (sorry 'bout the Lana references, last one I promise). They could not put the crack pipe down long enough to visit their mother's grave on mother's day or say goodbye to heroin long enough to earn the degree of their dreams or to cheer their daughter on in her school's theatrical production. They could not would not quit for their families or themselves and they certainly could not would not for me either.

I find myself in different circles these days and something tells me my pattern of romantic involvement will shift, but I have not one ounce of regret for the moments I have spent wrapped up in love with drug addicted men. Loving these men taught me how to fight for those you believe in, not to abandon something because it is not ideal, and perhaps most importantly, demonstrated the extent to which the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but human connection. 

My heart grew bigger because of them. Perhaps too big, but what a small consequence for the opportunity to love so deeply.

*All names have been changed.