“No man comes in between me and my drugs.”
A pic of me from this era.
The woman sat across from me in the wide circle at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting. It was 1995. She was one of the only other women besides myself I’d ever seen at these meetings. They were filled with middle aged white men, men from the Santa Clarita Valley who came for solace and recovery, but couldn’t help giving me a shocked look. Even though there was a general air of acceptance, I was an oddity.
I was used to it. I was 20, head shaved, yet still looked like a pre-teen. I was student at the art school in town the townies generally disdained. I was there because I’d gotten in over my head with party drugs in my 2nd year at college - missed an important final, stopped turning in work, had erratic attendance and behavior. After a series of embarrassing events, my theater faculty had devised a plan for my probation. Attending 10 NA meetings was part of the plan. After my initial distaste, I grew into something like a respectful stranger. Yet I quickly became fascinated with the ritual, the people, and the storytelling. It took awhile for me to speak up and really feel a part of things, and this woman was part of that.
Her words sliced through the large, echoing, multipurpose room. She detailed a night with a man she’d brought home, the dance between attending to him and attending to her addiction. How she both shared and protected her stash, and the very clear and precise order of importance of these two entertainments. Which one would be with her in the morning and which one would not be. She was strident and unapologetic. She was breaking something down for a group of men that they had never heard in these words before: they would never be as important to her as her own sense of self-preservation. In fact, they were a far distant second - a toy, you might say, in the arena of her getting hers.
“No man comes in between me and my drugs,” she warned, drawing an immovable line.
A very unflattering selfie from the solo trip I took to reset after creating a big mess for myself at school.
This statement rocketed into my heart and lodged itself there. She was articulating something that seemed so taboo - a woman putting herself first, not for the good of others, but for “selfish” ends. This seemed like a peek behind the curtain of womanhood. If the men in this meeting were surprised to see in me a young woman who had not been “good,” what they needed to know is the the degree of self-serving calculations that had gone on behind the eyes of the women in their lives, and that they were clearly ignorant to the ways in which perhaps they themselves had been puppeted by a woman attending to her own addiction. If addiction can be defined as the drama with yourself, starring yourself, these men had seen themselves as the starring players, and the women as the supporting cast. To have a woman expose the ways in which men were secondary to herself, for something as morally uncouth - dare I say unladylike - as drug addiction, seemed like her telling the whole room our big, gender specific secret.
Clearly I’m making a lot of assumptions here. I should say I grew up with a mother typical of her time in her absolute subjugation of self to family. As the Feminist Survival Podcast 2020 calls it, she had “Human Giver Syndrome” - the idea that some people, very often women, are to give everything they have in terms of resources and energy to somebody who can achieve their dreams - yet the Giver’s only dream is to give to them. It was my mom’s choice to devote herself to the family, especially us kids, and a privileged choice, at that. But she was also a devoted user and later addicted to prescription drugs - and for her too, the woman in the meeting had articulated something real. There was a private relationship between her and her drugs that none of us family members, however primary to her purpose in life, could touch.
Flash forward: I was ok. I straightened up to fly right, started making my own work, graduated, and eventually moved to New York City. I no longer felt out of control around drinking and drugs, but the ongoing pressures I felt triggered my addictive impulses just the same. I tried out Al-Anon meetings, for adult children of alcoholics and addicts, in search of the root of these behaviors. My eating became disordered, addictive, and pre-bulimic. I went to meetings for that. The Program isn’t for everyone, but it helped me, and I thought a lot about addiction during that time. I gradually began to realize I’d been surrounded by addicts and addiction my entire life.
Next week: Performance