This was tough to write, and it might be tough to read
I didn't know I would go here with you, but it would mean a lot to me if you accepted the invitation
There’s a bench at my gym that I have to lay back on if I’m working out my chest that day, and the actual lifting I have a lot of fun with, but the act of laying back is a nightmare. My whole body is gripped by this primal fear that I’m going to fall off that bench, because it’s not as wide as it could be, and the almost-funny thing about this full-body terror is that the bench isn’t even that high off the ground, meaning that if, worst-case scenario, I did fall as I was leaning back (and I’m never holding dumbells if I’m in the process of leaning back) it would be one of the least-dramatic falls I’ve ever taken. But that’s not the point. The point is that my brain seizes my every synapse to say your body cannot do this you cannot lean back on this bench without falling. I talked about this with my trainer whose permission I should get to name so I don’t have to keep using that phrase — and he said, “You’re not gonna fall off that bench, it’s pretty wide, you can safely lean back, trust me.” For him, that soft command is not a verbal flourish. I can trust him, so I leaned back, and, just as he reassured me, nothing happened. But I still hate that bench for its relative narrowness, just as I hate when I’m hiking and the path narrows and I have to adjust the way I walk so that it’s one-foot-in-front-of-the-other and I feel, taken with the crutches, like I’m too wide to comfortably exist. The casual observer watching me react to a narrowing path might think I see a hungry-looking bear.
Unlike my trainer, who, admittedly, hasn’t had to live with my self-induced fears for a decade, Ian’s often gotten frustrated when he can so clearly tell the difference between what I actually can’t do because I have cerebral palsy and what I think I can’t do because I’m psyching myself out all to hell. By this point in my whatever-we’re-calling-life-at-this-second I’m probably more likely to stubbornly keep trying to do the thing my tight hamstrings won’t allow me to do than to commit to fighting those misdirected fight-or-flight impulses. From the outside, the difference between can’t and won’t, unable to and afraid to, are always strikingly, sometimes staggeringly obvious.
It’s uncomfortable to talk about the strange allure of victimhood no matter who you are, I imagine, but for me the discomfort comes from suddenly adhering to a host of unflattering stereotypes. The disabled body as victim of fate, a white female victim crushed in King Kong’s fist, and back to the disabled body as a victim of all these things you “can’t do,” without first asking yourself if you’d have any real desire to do them. (For the record, I lived on the Boston Marathon route several years ago and witnessed a man running the marathon with one leg). I guess when it comes down to it I pride myself on defying stereotypes, and an old feeling of self-loathing surges up when I can feel myself caving into any of them. And therein lies the danger of pride.
The people I’ve known who hold themselves back most aggressively are not medically disabled; they’re stuck in narratives. They’re fatalistic. I can’t know if they ever understood their sense of agency but lost that sense in decades of grief and sorrow or, as products of their much-older generations and outdated notions of what was acceptable for them, they never thought they had agency to begin with. It’s draining to talk to such people, even if they’re people you love. In my experience, such people also make assumptions about my limitations because they somehow see me as worse off than they are. They insist on the victim mantle for themselves and so they triple-down on it for me. I have to fight it almost every time I talk to them, so, you might say, maybe I shouldn’t — but they’re family members. I’m careful with the amount of energy I give to this tired battle, and that, for the moment, feels like all I can be.
What got me thinking about all this, though, was not my family, or anyone I’ve ever met: it was Matthew Perry. Ian and I happened to be reading a bizarre story in the Canadian news about a woman who helped a man annul his marriage by posing as his ex-wife and was only exposed sometime later as “an imposter” and therefore the judge’s ruling couldn’t stand because he still didn’t know who the woman was that he’d actually talked to and apparently it was several different women (over Zoom, because this was the height of the pandemic) and the official documents making the annulment possible were apparently drawn up in Mexico by anyway anyway anyway shit is weird over there in Kamloops, British Columbia. But I digress. Canadians! So did you know Matthew Perry is Canadian, because I didn’t. But I sure do now, because if there’s one thing that icons really get into both of their own accord and by encouragement of the interviewer and also from audience Q&A’s it’s Being Canadian. But that’s not what got me thinking about victimhood, etc. I’m not sure why we clicked on this interview and proceeded to watch the entire thing, it was over an hour, and Ian never watched friends growing up (except under duress courtesy of his mom) and while I did, of course I did, I rocked “The Rachel” in 7th grade and this 8th grader was like “I love your hair! Is that ‘the Rachel’?” and I said yes it was and it was literally the only moment in 7th grade I’d ever felt anything close to pretty for a second, but I had forgotten all this, because why would I go back there, to that pit of despair when the best thing that had ever happened to me is that a slightly-older boy I wasn’t even attracted to noticed my hair, and the rest of the time I was leafing through magazines and fawning over everyone and staring at posters of musicians and anyway I didn’t even watch Friends because I liked Friends, I watched Friends because that looked a lot like the life I wished I was living. And what I had forgotten, what I had long, long forgotten, was that if I had a crush on anyone in that iconic ensemble (and it couldn’t be Courtney-Cox-as-Monica because I wasn’t out as bi yet) it was Chandler. Because Chandler was the one with wit. I had no use for Joey’s dumb-and-pretty — I can overlook a lack of intelligence in a hot chick to a point, but in men? Absolutely not — and Ross, though the supposed intellectual of the group, was mostly just neurotic and constantly flying off the handle. I had forgotten the moment I drew the conclusion as a teenager that Chandler was the cute one, Chandler was the one I would.
And in no reality would I have possibly recognized him if I had seen the photo in the linked article — the one that popped up promanently after we read about the sham annulment — if the CNC hadn’t told us that this was indeed Matthew Perry. I don’t even want to link to a current photo, it’s too sad. As par the extensive interview — part of a promotion for the memoir I’m not sure if I could bear to listen to (I tend to listen to audio versions of memoirs rather than read them because they feel like conversations), he talked about what havoc his addictions wreaked on his body and ordeals that he wasn’t expected to survive. Looking at him these days, you can tell: this is a body that just barely made it out. That’s not the saddest part, though, the appearance. What’s sad is a worldview that seems to say, I am not a worthwhile human being if, by virtue of my own agency, I’ve made some big mistakes.
Before I go on to elaborate here, I’m going to say that nothing I’m about to say is intended as a screed against AA or NA, both part of the program that my father, godfather, and grandmother among other loved ones credit to saving their lives and to helping them change their lives. There’s no doubt that it’s done serious good. There’s also no doubt that, like everything, the science of addiction is deepening and expanding beyond anything that would’ve been available to us in the 1930’s, when the program’s touchstone Big Book was written.
Gabor Maté, a Canadian-Hungarian physician who writes both ground-breakingly and accessibly about the nature of addiction, does not view addiction as a disease, but as a response to trauma. The struggle to overcome addiction, according to him, is the struggle to get to the core of what the addiction is helping you to escape, and then the pain and determination it takes to face that trauma, whatever it is, and work through it at the source. In other words, alcohol or drugs, or shopping, or YouTube, or whatever one’s addiction may be (and he stresses that human beings can be addicted to anything, anything) is the symptom of a problem, not the cause.
What came up over and over in this interview was the comfort inherent in the phrase, “It’s not my fault,” which “it’s a disease” was intended to confirm. The narrative that was enforced again and again was that you can be okay, you can live your life, you can change your life, because you know this is not your fault. Now I’m certainly not saying it is. But what’s been nagging at the pit of my stomach since I happened to see this thing is the reverse implication, which appears to be, If it is my fault, then I am not worthy. Where is the room for redemption in that? Shouldn’t we be starting with, “By running from trauma in the way I did I’ve made several hurtful or maybe dire mistakes, but I’m still a worthwhile human being?”
I think about my dad and wonder if, at their core, addicts fundamentally don’t believe that, not because there’s a neurological component to “you are not worthy” but because they never worked through it, whatever it may be. My own addiction was/is/was/is a weirdly self-induced drug whereby I disassociate so severely that life itself ultimately disappears. You can call me the most degrading names you can think of at the top of your lungs and I’ll feel nothing. You can accuse me of the most villainous acts and if I say anything it will be, “maybe you’re right.” Underneath all of it is, that’s what I was afraid of. I am that bad, I knew it.
Growing up with the ultimate party culture in my veins, no one saw my dissociative responses as a problem. (They were easy to dismiss as a product of disability.) I wasn’t doing drugs, I wasn’t drinking. No one I grew up around really understood that there were other ways to destroy your life or undermine your every prospect. Gambling, sure. My dad did enough of that. But I was never a gambler. And, while I do have what I’ll generously call we’re-all-gonna-die-someday-so-live-in-the-moment-and-make-this-life-as-good-as-it-can-be taste, I’m not addicted to spending. I’m actually ultimately averse to buying things just to buy things. So: not abusing substances, not losing money. What else is there? Clearly I’m fine, clearly I’m fine, clearly I’m fine.
It’s possible that the best thing that’s ever happened to me is living the absolute nightmare months that dissociation destroyed my ability to do an important, demanding job. I couldn’t teach. I couldn’t plan lessons, I couldn’t write emails, I couldn’t explain anything. I couldn’t even form coherent questions to get help doing the things I couldn’t do. I could barely talk. I could barely move. And the whole time I felt like I was floating above my own desk, my own chaotic classroom, thinking — insomuch as I was at all able to think — can you even believe how bad I let this get. There was almost a weird masochistic high knowing that I, an adult, could let such consequential things go to shit so quickly. Not high as in “this feels good,” obviously, I can never emphasize enough how much it didn’t, but a high as in this was so bad it felt unreal. When it did feel real, I was suicidal. Shit was bad. One day, I didn’t go to work and I didn’t call in, and I poured all my blood pressure pills on my tongue at once and suddenly felt I could hear my dad say “STOP THIS!” I spat them all out, back into the bottle, and tried to forget I’d come that close. (But wait, maybe not so close — we’ve got ibuprofen in the house, after all, and I didn’t go near it.)
My boss called me because I didn’t call in and asked me if I was okay. I said no. He cared but he didn’t care. He couldn’t care, because I was working in an environment whose dysfunction ultimately knew no bounds. “Get here as soon as you can,” he said, and I said I would, but I didn’t even attempt to get dressed. By then, I had given up on existence so aggressively, so determinedly, that there was nothing anyone could do to shake me back to reality. I was gone, thoroughly gone, completely gone. And I saw no way back. (I should add, however, that the occasional check-ins I would receive from people who had no idea how bad things were went a long way toward pulling out the hidden threads of my spirit that did understand my existence as worth something.)
But healing from the upset of that period and every circle of hell that led up to it didn’t start with me saying, “This wasn’t my fault.” I tried that, because there are circumstances (like abuse) in which it’s vitally important that we start there. But in this case, “This wasn’t my fault” just made things confusing and hazy. If I didn’t fuck up my own worklife then who did? There were a slew of factors that weren’t my fault, systemic ones, but my short-lived teaching career didn’t happen to me. I didn’t fall into it, the way some people claim to have done, I literally moved to San Francisco for it. I jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops required to get into a teaching credential program, I weighed the pros and cons of going to San Francisco vs. San Jose (where I’d also gotten into a credential program), and when a full-time English teaching position remained open weeks into my student teaching I took it. I said, “Yes, absolutely I can take this on, I know I can take this on.” I didn’t stop to ask myself where that supposed knowledge was coming from, because I didn’t want to admit that what I called “career ambition” was really just, “I will collapse unrevivably from a dearth of self-worth if I don’t go to bed knowing I’m being fucking useful and not just a waste of space.”
This is not a healthy motivation to do anything. If you’re secretly convinced that the atomic cohesion that makes you up would be better off composing a different life form, you can’t…well, you can’t. You just can’t. Except, paradoxically, you also can, because the way capitalism measures success is by the things you do. Matthew Perry, while obliterating his own body, managed to be one of the most charismatic componants of one of the most iconic pop culture ensembles of all time and then publish a book about it (which he said he dissociated in response to when he read the emotionally difficult parts for the audio version). Donald Trump took his documented daddy-and-family-issues and made sure his suffering wouldn’t just ruin our already-fragile country but cause enduring upset across the globe. Is it noble, no, but is it ACTION, yes, and in America we prioritize DOING. That’s the problem with healing. Visually, it doesn’t look like you’re up to a whole lot.
“What’d you accomplish today?”
“I’ve forgiven myself for my darkest hours.”
Big deal. No way to montetize that. Healing is not a skill. It has no bottom line. It doesn’t even move in a linear fashion. Ultimately, it’s no use.
Maybe we’ve overrated usefulness.
