Arctic Blasted: Drugs & Dreams
Feeling like Charlie Brown or maybe Jack Torrance? Do the holidays make you depressed? Cheers to coping with a dreadful season.
“Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon, and all the irreparable harm it’s caused me.” — Jack Torrance, The Shining
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This will be my last post of the year! A meandering reflection about dreams, holidays, time, and recovery. See ya in 2023.
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I slept at my parents’s place outside the city over the over the holiday and I woke up early one morning from an inscrutable dream that took place entirely in my childhood bedroom. No one really knows why we dream. But my favorite directors, like Lynch and Kubrick, return again and again to dreams in their films. Movie Watchers argue about which scenes in Eyes Wide Shut or The Shining are dreams, and Twin Peaks obsessives use concepts like “dream logic” to make sense of nonsensical narratives. We dream in stories, perhaps, to make life make sense.
Scientific research has some plausible ideas about what dreams are for and what they’re made of. Long before neuroimaging technology could analyze specific brain states, electrical signals, and blood flows during sleep, there was Freud. Freud thought dreams held the key to our unconscious. Dreams—made of “the day’s residues”—could say a lot about the dreamer. Dreams today are understood as playing important cognitive functions, like helping us digest and integrate experiences and memories into our lives. Neuroscientific studies show that the brain’s dream state is similiar to the state of memory processing. So we might be sorting through and consolidating memories and experiences in our dreams, figuring out what’s important to store in long-term memory, and what’s not. After all, we have limited bandwidth and we can only hang on to so much. While dreaming we’re thought to be processing, encoding and discarding.
It’s hard for our brains to make sense of our brains. We’re sort of trapped in abstraction. I don’t love the brain-as-computer metpahor, finding it a bit too reductive. But it’s difficult to write about the brain without relying on the language of computing. Processing. Encoding. Bandwidth. Networks. Systems. Signals. Circuits.
If you’ve ever had a drug addiction of any sort, you’ve maybe had recurring dreams that revolve around using or not using, or almost using or trying and failing to use. I’ve had these dreams over the years. I think they’re about my own ambivalence about recovery. My everyday awake consciousness genuinely doesn’t like the sound of sniffing some random bag of Terminator Fentanyl bought off the street. Sounds horribly painful. The conflict lives in my dreams. In my “using dreams,” I’m in possession of some sort of drug or paraphernalia, but there is something impractical and strange that’s gets in the way of me actually using. Like all the drugs and instruments are in my hand but they’re not—for some reason—workable. It’s all right there but it doesn’t happen. I don’t really remember if I’ve ever actually used drugs in a dream. Maybe a ghostly bartender served me up some Dilaudid in an empty bar?
Christmas and (the last couple days of) Hanukkah this year had a Shining-esque setup. In the Midwest or East Coast, either you were locked inside with your family because of -30 below wind and several feet of snow; or treacherous conditions had you locked inside alone. Apparently, more and more Americans are spending holidays alone. Another signal of modern day alienation and disengagement.
Whether alone or with family—who’s to say which is worse?—it’s a time when many of us can start to get a bit… squirrely. We’re knocked off of our normal elliptical orbits. Feelings, perceptions, and interpretations of daily experience— “the day’s residue”—feels askew, thrown off axis by something powerful. The wintry storm outside mirrored the bioelectrochemical storm in our skulls. Some of us have been on full tilt well for a while.
And so we cope. We cope in whatever way we learned to cope. Addiction can be generated by coping: the self-medication hypothesis suggests we use drugs to seek relief from distressing and painful feelings. Over time, self-medication produces a new variety of pain, which requires more coping, and on and on. One of the originators of the self-medication concept in the 1980s, psychiatrist at Harvard E J Khantzian, wrote:
“Persons with substance use disorders suffer in the extreme with their feelings, either being overwhelmed with painful affects or seeming not to feel their emotions at all. Substances of abuse help such individuals to relieve painful affects or to experience or control emotions when they are absent or confusing.”
Khantzian thought the drugs people use and become addicted to are not chosen at random. People use opioids “because of their powerful muting action on the disorganizing and threatening affects of rage and aggression,” he wrote. And people use cocaine “because of its ability to relieve distress associated with depression, hypomania, and hyperactivity.”
I tend to think drug use is functional. People use certain drugs for certain reasons. I used opioids because of their “muting action” and have even referred to opioids as an internal “mute button.” Recovery, then, is about figuring out how to live with and deal with pain without pressing that mute button, without instant relief.
Readers of A.J. Daulerio’s newsletter The Small Bow, a series of detailed vignettes and meditations on recovery, send “holiday check-ins” that capture what it’s like to go through the holidays without our preferred anesthesia and numbing agents.
This one really struck me:
“I'm leaving my tree and decorations in the storage bin they've been in since last year; I am not in the mood to celebrate. Nothing has made me feel more alone than navigating this holiday season with a fake smile, as I fa-la-la my way through the rest of this horrific year that never seems to end. I am feverously swiping right on Tinder, hoping to make some connection that will give me enough of whatever it is I am looking for, to get me through the next few weeks. I've started drinking green smoothies in the morning, and waking up at 5:30AM to practice yoga; I've started to have conversations with myself, out loud, as my dogs look on, concerned or confused. I notice that I go days without getting a hug or any physical touch from another person, and I am starting to wonder how much that affects me. I am the happiest I have been, despite it all, in a long, long time.”
On being starved of connection. On finding ways to cope. On sitting with the pain. On seeking something to fill the void. On being OK despite it all. Recovering from addiction is hard anytime, but I think it’s particularly hard during a season of forced festivity and joy. It’s like trying to kick dope at Disney World, inside a fantasy where, according to Disney, “nobody ever dies.” The truth is people do die at Disney, only they’re not declared dead until after they leave the theme park. Neat trick.
I recently spoke about my own path to recovery on Dr. Carl Erik Fisher’s podcast, called “Flourishing After Addiction.” Now that I’m thinking about it more, does going on Dr. Fisher’s podcast imply that I’m indeed “flourishing” after addiction? It appears so. But appearences can be deceptive. The owls are not what they seem.
Pain in life is unavoidable and constant. But life’s pain is also dynamic, it shifts, evolves, and changes. Approaching my mid-30s isn’t painful necessarily, but the questions sprouting from life have sharp thorns. Do I get married? Have kids? How does one buy a house? Or a car? Am I stuck? How do I know if I’m moving forward, in sync with life’s motion? Where am I even going?
More specifically, how does the occasional magazine writer with a Substack—i.e. Me—do or know this stuff? A friend just told me that people who sell medical software can make $500,000 per year. “No cap,” he said. My stomach dropped to the floor, picturing the big fat bloated money bags being funneled out of America’s godforsaken health care industry.
I can’t self-medicate these existential questions away. Nor the anger and rage about the way American society seems designed to rip us off. A nation of scams, scammers, and the scammed. I’m not even sure drugs have the power to mute these feelings. They’re too strong, too felt, too at-hand.
The end of the year has me thinking about how I navigated recovery in the first place as a too lanky 22-year-old shipped off to Minnesota for a year and a half of treatment—inpatient, outpatient, recovery homes, the whole shabang. How I overcame pain. How I came to “flourish” after addiction. The other day I was listening to True Anon’s Brace Belden describe his own eight year long recovery from meth and heroin addiction on a Chapo Trap House episode titled: “Recovery Side Quest.”
After Will Menaker asked Brace what a better system of addiction treatment might look like, Brace said something that resonated with my own experience:
“This is what makes [addiction] such a difficult thing: It’s something that you really have to come through yourself…. Giving somebody some sort of purpose, and a future, something to actually kind of light the path for them—I think is really important. For me, I’m really lucky. I’ve sort of always had these intense longings and dreams that personally helped me get through a lot of this.”
Intense longings and dreams. A purpose.
That’s similar to what I said to Dr. Fisher. There was something I wanted to get out of life. Stuff I wanted to do. Dreams. There was a person I wanted to become. And I knew I was never going to get there if I stayed on the path I was on. Most importantly, for me, I believed in a future.
Addiction closed off time. It blotted out the future. Everyday was a repetition of the day before and the day before that, for about three years. There’s something safe and familiar about knowing what each day will bring. Something safe about being locked in a tight routine. I woke up with a daily mission that I pursued with vigor: find money, get a fix. People dealing with addiction don’t get enough credit. It’s a major time commitment. Longer hours than a full time job. It takes a level of ingenuity and ambition and execution and calculation to pull it all off. It’s hard work. So I seethe when I hear rich people in San Francisco describe the “lazy junkies” and the visible suffering that inconveniences their tech Utopia. These assholes sit on a computer all day and do what, write lines of code? Send emails? Talk on zoom?
Brace emphasized the importance of time and having a purpose. The importance of feeling like you have a project. We’re brimming with life-force and we need to channel and direct it. Treatment for addiction can’t solve that equation for people. Treatment and therapy and medicine can all help, but there’s a part of recovery that still comes from deep within us.
Kicking is only the beginning. Staying kicked is another thing entirely. After addiction, suddenly time comes back. A lot of time. Recovery for me early on was about trying to reorient myself in time. What am I going to do with all this time? It’s a scary proposition to let go of that safety in the sameness of everyday. Saying yes to the future suddenly injected uncertainty into life. Saying yes to the future invited risk and vulnerability. I could try and fail. I could be rejected. I could swing and miss. I had to know that all of those things could and no doubt would happen. And I had to say yes anyway.
“Drink up Mr. Torrance”
I really enjoyed your essay and related to a lot of it. I too was shipped off (from NYC) to Minnesober in my 20s, my family purchased me a one-way plane ticket and wished me the best. Nine months later, I decided to keep my warehouse job in St. Paul, find a sober roommate, and maybe not go racing back to New York City for a while. I’m 61 now, and life has worked out great for me. But you’re not wrong about the whole life purpose part.
“We’re brimming with life-force and we need to channel and direct it. Treatment for addiction can’t solve that equation for people. Treatment and therapy and medicine can all help, but there’s a part of recovery that still comes from deep within us.”
That’s basically because nobody ever really got sober in rehab. We may or may not succeed there in arresting our active addiction in that safe secluded time out from life we call treatment. That’s about all we can accomplish in a contained setting. But recovery happens afterwards... basically in community, where life is messy and distracting and the stakes are much higher. And that’s where the life-force part kicks in - for better or for worse. I was lucky, I was surrounded by others, also new in sobriety, and also brimming with energy and irreverence and looking for more out of life, seeking better futures, and so forth. I think everyone’s energy and appetite for a bigger life ignited mine; and vise versa. So yes, that part of recovery was deep inside of each of us, but accessing and bringing that part of me to the fore was impossible without others being very involved in my life. I needed others who’d messed up their lives just like me to, well, just like me.
One of your best