I don’t think that the majority of us have the full ability to comprehend what addiction is. We use that word carelessly, as we do most words in our life. We claim to be addicted to that new song by Kanye or the guacamole at Chipotle but as obliviously as we may insist otherwise we do not need these things for survival or for some semblance of peace in our mind. True addiction is a clawing need inside of your skin that breathes with a life of its own. It is the desperate longing for something so intense that nothing but the object of your addiction exists. It is a hunger so deep you can feel it in every crevice of your mind. While we may never understand what it truly means to go through something like that, words left behind by others can show us a rare glimpse into the mental battle addiction entails.
“Alcohol was an escalating madness, and the blackout issue was the juncture separating two kinds of drinking. One kind was a comet in your veins. The other kind left you sunken and cratered, drained of all light.” These words come from “Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget,” the searing memoir written by Sarah Hepola about the dependence on alcohol that sneaks up on you. Binge drinking and drinking merely to be drunk is not a foreign concept to us on a college campus. But when does the line get drawn? Where does it get drawn? Is there perhaps a socially accepted number of blackouts we can have on consecutive weekends, after which it becomes unacceptable, or does it just provide more fodder for stories that begin with, “dude I was so fucked up.” Hepola walks us through the slow dawning of her own alcoholism while never faltering in her wit, and surprisingly relatable wisdom.
Patrick O’Neil allows us into the gritty innards of his brain and the battle with heroin addiction in his memoir, “Gun, Needle, Spoon.” What you’re immediately absorbed into is a world where O’Neil details the step-by-step process of using heroin, every little graphic detail. We’re also faced with the step-by-step process of O’Neil’s armed robberies, the business that fed the heroin habit. If someone were to ever attempt to then describe the step-by-step process of your soul dying, they’d find that O’Neil comes very close to letting us witness such a travesty. He shows you the filth inside of you when all you’re reduced to is a vessel for drugs, and he also shows you that redemption is still—shockingly—possible.
Addiction is by default always regarded as an excess of something we gorge with, but there are nevertheless still many ways to interpret that aren’t there. Depriving ourself to an extent that our dependence on it is unquestionable is the addiction Marya Hornbacher writes about in, “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia.” A 10-year journey into the sudden and inexplicable appearance of both anorexia and bulimia eating disorders is what Hornbacher shares without pomp or flourish. It is the most straightforward account of battling the need to deprive one’s self for the need to feel more. This idea is captured flawlessly in these words, “We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.”
Sometimes the tangibility of something makes it more real, easier to live with. But how does one come to grips with addiction that we cannot see? There’s no bottle to hide and no needles to stay away from. It lives inside of you, and after a while it becomes you. Such is the torment one of my favorite books of all time paints, “Requiem for a Dream” by Hubert Selby Jr. When the very dreams that define us and drive us to be able to face life every day become the source of our addiction, how does one find the strength to say no? This book tells the tail of sad souls that are chasing the American dream that has long since been dead, and then allowing themselves to be steamrolled by the million faces of addiction in the process. In the greed for our dreams, addiction here is welcomed with open arms and smiles. “I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we have the opportunity to mourn it's passing.”
