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Did someone in a celebrity's inner circle just respond to my criticism of her? Follow-up on my review of Cat Marnell's memoir How to Murder Your Life based on a little controversy that went down on Reddit this morning. The Personal History: Stop Trying to Make "Fetch" Happen I wasn't always the nicest guy when I was younger. I didn't necessarily invent the nicknames Crockpot (for a girl on the cross-country team who had thunder thighs) or Cro Magnon (for a lacrosse jock with excess body hair and a room temperature IQ), but I certainly bandied them about. Okay, maybe I invented them. I could explain where I think this came from - a combination of '90s / '00s Mean Girl cultural influences, desperately wanting to fit in, and being a guy whose friends were mostly female. There was also an element of preemptive attack, for sure. I grew up in a 99.99% white, conservative small town that had more in common with much of the South and Midwest than the rest of New York State; it was a place where every single negative thing was called "gay," and people like me stayed in the closet because life tended to be miserable for anyone who was openly different (only, I was too obviously gay to stay hidden). Don't get me wrong: I had a reputation as a fairly nice guy, and I certainly wasn't openly hostile or a bully. But behind closed doors, with people who I desperately wanted to think of me as their friend, I could be vicious. I mention this because I physically cringe - like, tense every muscle that can be tensed - when I think back on those critical moments now. As soon as I hit college and began to feel more secure in my social group, that aspect of my personality was reabsorbed like a male Anglerfish after mating. I began to care less about scoring popularity points and more about leading my group in a positive direction. Over time, it wasn't just that I didn't say the mean parts out loud anymore; as love mellowed me, addiction humbled me, and life in general did my head in, I found that the negative thoughts didn't really occur to me so often anymore. The Deets This morning, I started a thread on a commentary subreddit about Cat Marnell. It's 2024; Google isn't going to serve me up a readership based on keywords alone, so I've been occasionally mentioning my blog articles in some other internet communities that I follow (*observing the key Internet etiquette of never posting for the purpose of self-promotion alone, and ensuring that every post / comment has substantive value independent of the outside content that I'm suggesting people might want to check out). I should note that the aforementioned subreddit (r/CatMarnell) has had an issue of White Knights - who some have suggested write a lot like Cat Marnell and have a certain erratic character about them - sometimes jumping down people's throats when they offer criticism of her words and actions, particularly in regard to her family relationships. My original Reddit post, entitled "Cat Marnell Is Neither the Recovery Leader We Need Nor Deserve," as well as the first comment in response and my rebuttal of that comment, can be found here, for those of you who prefer primary sources. When I replied to this comment, I admit to feeling piqued. Its author accused me of "thinly veiled promotion of my blog" before completely misrepresenting what I said about Cat's relationship with her older sister, Emily, as meaning that Cat should stay trapped in a toxic relationship with her family (I said nothing of the sort). After I finished composing my response, I sat back and reflected for a mad moment. What if it really is Cat Marnell (or someone who loves her) commenting on my post? My Conclusions (or Lack Thereof) I reconsidered the title that I had chosen: "Cat Marnell is Neither the Recovery Leader We Want Nor Deserve." I remembered the quirky, thoughtful, desperate-to-fit-in-and-do-well Cat who emerges in the memoir - a book, which, for the record, I really enjoyed reading. I have more than a little in common with this weird, chaotic girl, I realized. ("You spot it, you got it," as they say in the rooms; was there a reason for why her antics had bothered me so much?). And if my actions during my many relapses had attracted the degree of scrutiny that Cat's are now subjected to, I'd no doubt come off as equally inconsistent, entropic, and unfair. Worse, perhaps. Editor's note: Definitely worse. Especially when Xanax is involved. Worst of all, I imagined Cat Marnell waking up, running through her morning recovery routine, then checking Google Alerts for her name and finding yet another critical thread on a forum dedicated to mostly negative commentary about her life. In that moment, my heart was ash, and I considered DFE (deleting f*cking everything). I had accused Cat of missteps in her recovery, but was I acting like someone with a strong foundation myself? To be clear, being able to offer commentary on writers' work, whether autobiographical or not, is essential. In particular, there were two things about Cat that stuck in my craw as I did my research for my article: (1) A blithe comment that she made during a podcast to the effect that she was now participating in AA and was declaring that fact publicly despite the Tradition of Anonymity - because it helps people to know that high-profile, awesome people are 12-steppers; (2) A lawsuit against her older sister, Emily, who (according to Cat's book) supported Cat during the lowest points of her addiction, but who Cat then sued when Emily allegedly threatened her / came after her publicly during a mental health crisis involving Emily's divorce and inability to see her children. These elements are worthy of commentary because they provide the context for understanding how Cat's memoir fits into her (evolving) life as a whole. In the case of (1), it also provides an instructive example of why we have the Tradition of Anonymity, as I explained in my original book review. As for (2), it suggests that the family dynamics that Cat presented in her book may be evolving in dramatically new directions and provides insight into how far (or not far) along in recovery she was at the time of writing her memoir. I spent a good portion of my review discussing positive features of Cat's book. Moreover, I included playful language drawn from pop culture and the beauty world, which clearly indicated that I was providing criticism on art and persona, not Cat's private, innermost soul. But did I go too far with a title that could have hit as cruel? By mentioning family? I have witnessed a couple of writers and creators who are addicts - Jessica Kent and Ryan Leone come to mind - relapse and get absolutely eviscerated in public commentary. In these two cases, the pillorying was so persistent and sadistic, and the public figures were left in such lose-lose-lose situations, that I could understand relapse or suicide as a response. I don't ever want to contribute to that kind of torture, not even in the smallest way. I would rather have an unsuccessful blog than a blog that profits off of other people's pain. There are real people behind these words on a computer screen; real, recovering people who are dying of the same progressive, terminal (if untreated) disease that I am dying from. Recovery has taught me that I can take time to think things over; there is no deadline for arriving at the big answers, most of the time. One of the hard boundaries that I have implemented for this blog is that I won't speculate on whether a public figure has relapsed or not. Non-addictive mental health crises can look too much like relapse, at times, and constantly speculating about the authenticity of people's sobriety is toxic and repugnant. At this moment, I'm not sure whether I'll keep the original book review up on the blog, and I'm also unsure whether I'll write about public figures in recovery here again unless the commentary that I have to offer is essentially entirely positive. For now, let me end with this. Cat - you weird, cool, brilliant girl - I admire your nerve and your storytelling, and I wish you nothing but the best. Maybe you'll become the leader that we need, after all.

Even people who ultimately decide that AA and NA are not for them will often find that the maxims of the Program have burrowed deep into their psyches. These pithy expressions cut through the mental chaos and fog that addiction creates to remind us of who we really want to be. Presented without extraneous commentary or text / color fanfare because "the truth needs no adornment," as the wall of a burger joint in Hong Kong once advised me. Accompanied by some wholesome pictures from my travels in recovery to set the tone. First, the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change The courage to change the things I can And the wisdom to know the difference One day at a time / Just for today Progress, not perfection If Plan A didn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters This too shall pass Take what you can use and leave the rest Does it need to be said? By me? Right now? Messy bed, messy head Move a muscle, change a thought Resentment is drinking poison and expecting the other person to drop dead Time takes time Principles before personalities Nothing changes if nothing changes Let go and let God Misery is optional You are right where you belong Hang around the barber's shop for long enough and you'll get a haircut Two sickies don't make a wellie Keep your side of the street clean GOD = Good Orderly Direction Keep it simple (That poodle, tho...) Let go and let God Misery is optional God doesn't make junk FINE = F*cked Up, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotional Life on life's terms Humility isn't thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less You're as sick as your secrets One drink is too many and a thousand is never enough HALT = Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired First thought wrong Your best thinking got you here The best way to keep what you have is to give it away If you're alone in your head, you're in bad company Easy does it (but do it!) A smooth sea never made a good sailor *I'm aware that many of these expressions originated outside of AA and NA. If you're looking to find a 12-Step meeting in your area today, check out alcoholicsanonymous.com or search for the AA / NA intergroup website for your area ("city name + AA intergroup" will usually yield results through Google). Intherooms.com has extensive online meetings held throughout the day as well as information about how to find IRL ones in your area. It would be cool to hear from you all about what slogans get you through your roughest moments; what experiences drove home the wisdom of one or more of the above; or anything else you'd care to share that falls into the general Experience, Strength, Hope subcategory!

Any crusty old-timer in AA or NA will insist that geographical change is useless or even counterproductive. Are they wrong? Kapalua, Maui, on a blustery day. The AA and NA fellowships on the island are strong and vibrant. I was clean and sober for an extended time while living and working with my aunt and uncle on Maui; relocating to Florida and China later on in my life initiated two other periods of extended recovery without maintenance treatment. If you’re familiar with the lore around the Vietnam War, you’ve probably heard that there were many vets who became addicted to heroin during their tours of duty only to return to the United States and stop using the drug with relative ease. (It's worth noting, however, that many Vietnam vets developed debilitating alcoholism). Twelve-Step programs emphasize that there is no “geographical cure” for addiction. No matter where you go, they insist, you bring yourself. As with many of the contradictory axioms of these programs, there is truth in this statement. However, these programs also urge avoidance of old “people, places, and things” - a little hard to accomplish without geographical change, no? My longest periods of recovery without opioid maintenance (suboxone or methadone) have invariably been assisted by major geographic change. On the 17-hour flight from New York City to China, I was so ill from drug withdrawal that I contemplated calling my mom as soon as I arrived to beg for an emergency plane ticket home. However, from the time that I arrived in Shenzhen, I was drawn out of myself by the need to adjust to a new environment (where I didn't speak the language, locks and toilets worked differently, and wallets were obsolete). I was energized by the desire to explore said terra nova and grounded by my responsibilities to my students. Moreover, I began learning a new language with which to reprogram and reinvent myself. (Even today, when I speak Mandarin, I find myself expressing shorter, simpler, more confident, and more positive thoughts than I typically do in English). Under such circumstances, I was amazed to discover that - although I felt like garbage physically and was full of anxiety - my mind wasn’t torturing me with the intense, interminable cravings that would have typically besieged me; these were dampened by the subconscious knowledge that it was utterly impossible for me to get high, anyway. With the psychological hell of sudden abstinence attenuated, opioid withdrawal became little more than an atrocious, extended flu with insomnia. What's more, this was true despite my failure to practice mindfulness, attend to my spiritual or psychological health, or engage in any type of recovery program. So, yes, wherever you go, you bring yourself. And I did eventually relapse in China. But geographical change can be a powerful alley-oop towards recovery. This is supported by the neuroscientific evidence, which reveals that a novel environment can help to weaken the neural circuitry that connects environmental stimuli to deleterious thoughts / memories, emotions, and behaviors; it also supports the formation of new loops of cognition and emotion that root us in healthier ways of responding to our environments. For this reason, in my article on factors to consider when choosing an inpatient rehab, I recommended selecting a program in another area whenever possible. With all of the above in mind, returning to my home city due to the pandemic felt like a death sentence. When I visit my mom in my hometown and run the same hilly, five-mile route that I've been torturing myself with since I was 12 or 13, I say a breathless hello to Dylan at the top of the first hill; he was a close friend of my older brother, and he died of an opioid / benzo overdose not too long after I graduated from college. Further along my route, I pass Rachel (see pic), who was one of my best friends, who died during my second year in China, also of an OD. After the second turn on the rectangular route, there's Jodie, who overdosed shortly after Rachel; Jodie's son and Rachel's daughter used to play together. Next, following the second-to-last turn, there's Tom, Jodie's boyfriend, who passed away from the same cause a couple of years after Jodie. Finally, as I run by the three churches standing sentinel in the center of our village, I pass Nick, who overdosed in 2022. Fewer than five miles through a town of 5,000 residents, and I've passed the houses of five opioid addicts who died of OD, all of them high school classmates of mine. My dear friend Rachel C., who died in 2018. Rachel and I went to high school together, and she became one of my best friends when I moved back to our hometown a few years after I graduated from college. The two of us used heroin together every single day for over a year, and I doubt that I would have survived that period without Rach, who was a nurse. Rach was a desert flower that blooms at night; she showed her bravery, wit, and perspicacity most in adversity. Her mother, who was her best friend, died of a prescription drug overdose a few years before Rachel passed. Rachel left behind a wonderful daughter, and my most fervent hope is that this special little girl will break the cycle of addiction. I miss Rach like a Type 2 diabetic misses cake and cookies; she was exactly the right person to do the wrong thing with. My addictive experience is embedded into every single facet of my existence here, from my relationships with my friends and family to my educational and work histories to the places that I go for fun. I feel myself regressing into the selfish, deterministic, chaotic Brian of 10 years ago, and this cuts and repulses me. I live in almost complete isolation from friends and family, and - without my fiancé beside me to remind me of the best version of myself as well as what he has achieved - it has started to feel like the "new Brian" was nothing more than a pleasant dream (or worse, a persistent delusion). I knew what I was facing when I returned from China. Because I had relapsed on prescription opioids and benzos before I left China, I began a long, slow taper off of methadone almost as soon as I arrived home. I kept myself from using alcohol or other drugs for over a year by employing all of the tools that I had learned during years of treatment and recovery - exercise, mindfulness, writing, meetings, service to others. But in the end, after resisting the 99,999th impulse to use, a Facebook message from an old using friend pinged into my inbox at precisely the wrong time. I gave in. Even before the drugs entered my body, the relief from constant self-resistance was heavenly ("This feeling is worth dying for," I remember thinking as the fentanyl hugged me from within). The "dope" around here is garbage now - fentanyl contaminated with xylazine and probably even God doesn't know what else - and I am more conscious than ever that someone could soon be mentioning me as their deceased friend in a post like this. I'm doing somewhat better these days, and for the time being, I content myself with attending AA as a wanderer who doesn't have a home group or sponsor. AA is unequivocally the stronger 12-Step fellowship in my area, but my experience with disclosing that I am an opioid addict to AA members here is that they back away swiftly and politely because of A) how many opioid addicts are on buprenorphine (Suboxone) or methadone, which most 12-Steppers consider substances of abuse, and B) how few opioid addicts recover even when they work a strong program. The stark fact is that there are almost no recovering opioid addicts even in the NA meetings around here (West Palm Beach, by contrast, had a sizable and energetic population of young, recovering opioid addicts who were not on maintenance). For now, I am practicing mindfulness every day, and I am searching for a therapist with whom I can continue my work in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which has been the most useful of the therapeutic modalities that I have experience with. In addition, I'm trying to leverage the psychological knowledge that I referenced above. I make sure to vary my daily routine. This involves living in a different location, choosing new running routes, trying out new restaurants, and forging new friendships. Psychology supports the usefulness of these small-scale changes in disrupting deeply entrenched, negative patterns of remembering, thinking, feeling, and behaving. In effect, I am attempting to create a "place within a place" for myself, my own private hometown. These measures are temporary. I am hell-bent on getting out of dodge, hopefully by returning to China this summer. As the 17th-century English poet John Milton famously observed, the human mind can make a heaven out of hell. However, this transformative magic is more easily accomplished in some places than in others, and the body that houses the mind must remain alive for it to do so. When the cards are as staggeringly stacked against you as they are for me in my hometown, geographical change is the safe, sensible option. What about you all? Do any of you have experience with relocation as a facilitator of (or an impediment to) positive change related to addiction, depression / anxiety, problematic relationships, and other struggles in life? For those of you who do not, how have you created a "place within a place" for yourself?

Is it a fiery pit, eternal separation from God's love, or perhaps just insight into the true nature of things? I have spoke with the tongue of angels I have held the hand of a devil It was warm in the night I was cold as a stone. - “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For” by U2 Some Christians believe in the quintessential, fire-and-brimstone conception of Hell as a place of endless, gory, imaginative suffering. Because I was raised by parents who had attended Catholic universities, I grew up with a less flashy, more theologically sophisticated, but ultimately no less terrifying notion: Hell, I discovered, was simply a state of complete, permanent disconnection of the soul from God. Sometimes I think that Hell is a type of insight into the nature of things. There is a 2000-ish movie starring Ryan Gosling called The United States of Leland. In it, his character murders a developmentally disabled boy after noticing the sadness that fills the young man’s eyes while he interacts with a young woman; the implication is that the disabled young man desires this girl romantically, whereas she views him simply as someone to be aided and pitied. Despite the fact that the disabled young man recognizes this, he can neither articulate nor change it. There is a darkness to this world, Ryan Gosling’s protagonist realizes, and once you’re awakened to it, it becomes a part of you forever. Addiction opened my eyes to much that I wish I had never seen. The festering abscesses resulting from missed shots and dirty needles, some of which ate all the way down to the bone; the angry pink patches of skin caused by stimulant-induced “picking” with tweezers, razors, and knives; the robberies and beatings, sometimes senseless and sometimes chillingly calculated; the please-God-take-me-now wails of fellow patients in detox (or were they my own?). The funerals of a dozen electric, potential-filled twenty-somethings, their relatives weeping with wild abandon – giving themselves over to a keening that bears witness to the fact that their lives are irreversibly diminished. Then, of course, there is also the interminable, inexorable decay of those who somehow survived until nothing but diminished, glued-back-together-shells remained; reaching a point at which, frankly, it would’ve been much kinder to them and everyone who loved them if they were already gone. There is yet another level to this addictive blackness. Once you have injected a speedball and experienced that Dionysian splendor, nothing – and I mean nothing – can compare to that paradise. Not porn-star-orgy sex with your soulmate. Not your Grandma watching you thank her as you win an Oscar. Not even, perhaps, the birth of your first child. Nothing “normal” will ever measure up, and at that point, restoring yourself to spiritual health is as futile as trying to resurrect frostbitten flesh. My friend John D. (June 1985 - January 2021). I met John in inpatient treatment, during which his dry & pessimistic humor, his perspicacity regarding other people's characters, and his in-demand culinary skills distinguished him. Before his addiction derailed his life and he ended up serving time for an armed robbery conviction (for stealing from a drug dealer), John worked for a prestigious caterer in New York City. Shortly after we left treatment, infectious endocarditis from a reused needle damaged the valves of his heart, rendering him unable to work and restricting his lifespan to three to four additional years. I visited John several times at the nursing home where he was recuperating, only to discover that he had befriended and / or seduced most of the female staff; he never failed to pressure me to smuggle in contraband dip (chewing tobacco). Out of our cohort of eight patients who shared a bathroom with a single shower and toilet, at least five have passed away of OD's or suicides; in terms of the three who shared a bedroom with me at one point, I am the lone survivor. Rest in peace, John. I will miss your despite-yourself smile - as well as the safe, I-belong-to-someone feeling that came over me when you used to sling your arm around my shoulder - every single day until I can shed my earthly worries and join you somewhere better.

Some reflections on what a year and a half of involuntary separation due to the COVID pandemic has taught me about my relationship with my fiancé. (I'm writing this in bed at 3 a.m., so please forgive me if it's not the most polished of posts...) The two of us during a beach weekend on the South China coast (forgive the crop; Jay has a real job). Regardless of the initial strength of the relationship, entering into long-distance mode means applying an attrition model: It's not a matter of if the relationship is strained and weakened; it's a matter of when and by how much. The defining feature of romantic relationships - for me, at least - is a kind of intimacy that has very little to do with sex. It's the closeness of shared daily-ness, of synced routines; of living in an apartment filled with memories of friends, of travel, with reminders of who we are together. It thrives on touch, on smell, on proximity. When I hear the word love, I think of the two of us meeting each other's tired eyes at 7 a.m. on a Saturday as Ti Qi the Wonder Poodle (see pics below) wakes us up to let us know that he has to go to the bathroom. I can read my first thought in Jay's eyes ("God, I'm exhausted; I hope he offers to take him out"). Then, in unison, we both say, "I'll do it." The feeling that I'm grateful to be able to spare Jay the trouble as I put on my coat and walk out into a chilly, misty morning is as close as I can come to encapsulating my conception of love. I'm a selfish person, and for me to feel like I would rather have the world wound me than him has been a novel, startling experience. I guess that love is grateful sacrifice, from its most quotidian to its most profound forms. Ti Qi helping me retrieve my package from the post office in Shenzhen. We adopted Ti Qi when he was two after the puppy that Jay got me for my 30th birthday died of parvovirus that a shady breeder hadn't disclosed (Rest in Power, Raichu). Ti Qi right before the COVID pandemic forced me to return to the U.S. Looking as fed up with everything as I was after months of shelter-in-place. The stark fact is that relationships need to be fed with new, shared experience, and our current arrangement precludes this. My fondest memories with Jay involve travel all over China and the United States. He met me, a foreigner still struggling to adapt to a wildly different mode of life. And Jay unlocked the Chinese Way for me, a new language, a new country, a new philosophy and manner of moving through the world. Being forced to return to my hometown in the U.S. during the pandemic has felt like devolution, like regression, like loss. Technology has helped. Videochatting feels immeasurably better than audio-only calls. It helps me to remember Jay's quirks of expression, the way that his eyes rove over my face as I ramble, searching for evidence of things unsaid. In return, I scan his face to see how hard he's been working, if he has the wet-sand undereye shadows that mean he went out last night; I watch as the seasons add and subtract a few pounds and wrinkles. The best thing has been just "hanging out" while Facetiming, the two of us chatting idly while I cook or clean and he plays with Ti Qi. This is as close to real, quality time as we can get at the moment. Sometimes I picture Jay next to me as I fall asleep, an improbable expanse of poodle stretching between us like a tube of gray shag carpeting. I recognize that this is an opportunity to work on my weaknesses so that I am my best possible self when we reunite. There have been times during this relapse when I have thought, "God, I am so glad that Jay isn't here to see me like this." (When I first got home, I was so sick from COVID and withdrawal that I gave up trying to run from the bed to the bathroom; I bought a new mattress after several days instead). Being apart has made me realize exactly how much the pain and chaos of my addiction has impacted his life. It takes my breath away that someone could love me enough to stay with me given the leaden cross that I carry. As twisted as it sounds, the thing that has strengthened our relationship the most during this time of separation has been when one of us admits to something that he easily could've hidden. At one point more than two years into the pandemic, months after I had left China and returned home, my fiancé admitted that he had been talking to other people on the dating app that we met each other on. When I admitted to doing the same thing - using it to find friendship during a lame, lonely time, with perhaps the ghost of the shadow of the thought that friendship might grow into something more if the perfect guy presented himself flitting through the cobwebbed corners of my mind - I felt a surge of trust, of compassion, of love. Growing apart during such circumstances is a natural, inevitable development. But what grows apart can be joined together again provided that the requisite patience and commitment remain. If you asked me today whether I was worried about my relationship, I would say that I am not. There is a reason why we use the ancient words, "For better or for worse, in sickness and in health... Until death do us part." Even if I couldn't ever be with Jay in person again, I wouldn't marry anyone else. For me, it's a commitment that you can only ever make wholeheartedly once. The words wouldn't mean anything to me if I knew that I had said them before. "To have and to hold from this day forward; for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. I will love and honor you all the days of my life." It would mean a lot to me if you would share your own experiences and thoughts using the comments section below. What worked for you during times of extended physical separation? How do we hack long distance love?

Why religion might be worthwhile even if God doesn't exist... Dome of St. Sophia Cathedral, Harbin, China – one of a handful of Christian churches left in Mainland China and perhaps the only one with permission to display a cross. The muted glow of hundreds of candles; the litany of saints intoned against harmonious chords, as mellifluous as an Enya track; the burnished gold and silver of the chalice and the crucifix, set off by white lilies and yellow-green palm fronds twisted into crosses: These elements synergized into what I think of as the Easter Vigil Aesthetic, creating a feeling of comfort, community, and context. The older I get and the darker and more deconstructed our beautiful, troubled world becomes, the more I long for the transcendent peace that used to descend upon me during the weekly Catholic masses of my youth. Like so many other fallen Catholics, I am well-equipped with arguments against the existence of God as well as participation in such a fallible institution. Yes, I acknowledge the necessity of an Aristotelian "unmoved mover," but such a primal creative force is a far cry from the benevolent, anthropomorphic God of the three "O's" claimed by the Abrahamic religions. At the end of the day, perhaps it was the pragmatic proposal that participation in the Church was unnecessary that I found most compelling. Surely there had to be a better way to reap the benefits of membership in a spiritual community, the thinking went – one that didn’t involve countenancing such bigotry, abuse, and hypocrisy? As the twenty-first century ages out of adolescence, however, I am forced to ask myself and my fellow Millennials whether we have actually walked this other, less trodden spiritual path. It has been 141 years since Nietzsche declared that God is dead, and postmodernism is in full swing. Everywhere I turn, the hallowed Self reigns supreme, from the curated hells of social media, fraught with self-harm of every imaginable variety masquerading as “living our best lives”; to the halls of political power, where bad-faith actors advance Machiavellian agendas; to the institutions of higher education, where endless reexamination of self-identity in terms of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and economic class has done little except stoke grudges and widen the divides that separate us. Many of my peers have proclaimed their dedication to “energy” and “spirituality rather than religion.” Upon closer examination, however, this often means little more than choosing from a rotation of nebulous, in-fashion, and conveniently unproblematic principles like gratitude, self-love, and boundary-setting. Removed from a wider framework of specific, actionable beliefs contextualized by history and catechism, these often reveal themselves to be little more than “just so” rationalizations of what we want to believe and how we want to act. Without more rigorous spiritual systems headed by dedicated leaders to guide us, how many of us can honestly say that we sit down for an hour each week to engage in earnest, thematically guided self-examination, spiritual contemplation, and goal-setting, then systematically apply the fruits of such reflection throughout the rest of the week? What’s more, even if we do so individually, how do we achieve wider change without connection to a like-minded spiritual community? In an age of anything-goes subjectivity, I find myself gravitating back toward the enduring truths and strictures of my youth: That we are all brothers and sisters, and that from every angle our differences are vastly outweighed by our similarities That we all err, and that forgiveness of ourselves and others is crucial to a peaceful and purposeful life That physical appearance is unimportant, a distraction from our deeper purposes That professional and social recognition, as well as material possessions, are poor benchmarks by which to measure our worth, and that pursuing genuine, lasting good for ourselves and others often involves ignoring or forsaking them That addiction to instant gratification is a kind of cancer, and that very few worthwhile pursuits in life yield their fruits immediately That the good works that we perform are maximally beneficial to our spirits if they are accomplished quietly, without expectation of public acknowledgement, gratitude on the part of their recipients, or reciprocit That one day all of us will leave this earth, and that even the greatest, shZiniest lives leave no more important legacies than the powerful, mostly unrecorded impacts that we have on the lives of those around us every single day I remember a passage that I came across in the one philosophy course of my undergraduate career. The question at its heart was whether, if a broken compass guides a lost traveler out of the wilderness by pointing to a North that turns out to be another direction but that nonetheless leads him or her to safety, can it be said that the compass provided some form of truth even though its readings were false? Similarly, if religion ends up being objectively false, but it helps people to lead better lives than they would have otherwise, can it be said that it contains some truth? Having seen the peace and hope that the Catholic paradigm provided my grandparents as they raised children and grandchildren, guiding them from the time that they were born to the final moments in which they confronted their mortality, and having experienced the cultural and spiritual freefall that has resulted from an entire generation suddenly abandoning this mode of life, I am increasingly amenable to the argument that organized religion, as flawed as it is, is necessary. In this trying world, we are all in foxholes, and perhaps it can be said that among those of us who would cling to hope and meaning, there can be no true atheists at all.

A bar in Harbin, Northern China, a frigid and stunning city. 1. Anyone who says that money isn’t everything is revealing that they have lived their life in bourgeois or “better” socioeconomic circumstances. Poverty is health-annihilating and soul-sapping. It keeps you in a constant state of flight or fight, jangled nerves wondering when the next crisis is going to wipe you out. Poverty has a potent, negative effect on IQ. With protracted poverty, the connections between nerves wither, particularly in the cerebral cortex, causing the nervous tissue to appear like trees in winter. This isn’t a subtle phenomenon when you’re the one experiencing it: Sustained poverty is literally stupefying. And sometimes you have to take the shittier job simply because that first paycheck arrives earlier. 2. Hunger hurts. Not hunger for a few hours, which is the only way that many in the developed Western world have ever experienced it. Longer-term hunger hollows out areas of the body that are meant to be filled with flesh and cushioned with fat. It becomes painful to sit or to rest in almost any position; you feel bone poking through where it shouldn’t be. 3. People without much to give are the most generous in the world – a cliché, I realize, but a valid one. Steinbeck hit the nail on the head in The Grapes of Wrath: “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.” 4. As the eighth-century theologian and writer Al’Shafi’i put it: “Health is a crown that the healthy wear on their heads, but only the sick can see it.” When you have compromised your health irreversibly, the depth of loss and regret are beyond description with mere words. The nature of addiction means that you will seldom be able to predict or control when you cross the point of no return and inflict permanent damage on yourself. Please, from the bottom of my heart to those of you for whom it is not too late, get help and stop now. Today. This moment. I have seen people finally ready for recovery – only to discover that their lifespan has been reduced to a few years due to cirrhosis or damage to their heart from endocarditis. 5. Addicts are the lumpenproletariat. We receive disdain, disgust, and all too frequently, distilled hatred. Some of this negativity is grounded in the crime and chaos that active addicts leave in their wakes, but the judgment that we receive is beyond any sane proportion. We are the punching bags of a sick society, punished because we represent the worst fears of many people who struggle to contain their urges and vices in an age of supreme decadence – as well as those who wallow in the misery of self-deprivation instead of finding spiritually and physically healthy ways to feed their souls. 6. Moments of heroism are rare but real. Human beings are capable of the most profound, unexpected, and beautiful self-sacrifice. In addition to the upstanding individuals who you would “expect” this behavior from, I have witnessed it from some of the “lowest” members of society. No matter how deep you have descended into addiction or depression, please find time for the pursuits that nourish your soul. Make art – even if it’s just by keeping a journal or coloring mandalas. Find a way to be of service. For me, there is something powerfully renewing and optimism-restoring about spending time with young people. If I didn’t have teaching in my life during many of the roughest points of my addiction and recovery, I doubt that I would’ve been able to reconcile my worldview with my continued existence.

Thoughts on Japanese horror comic book writer Junji Ito's story The Enigma of Amigara Fault. A panel from the story. Check out the full version in dubbed format here. In The Enigma of Amigara Fault, a seismic event opens a seam in an ancient mountain. Embedded in the fault line are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of human silhouettes. Inexplicably, people viewing the event on the news recognize their own outlines in these silhouettes, and they travel from great distances to view these mesmerizing openings in person. Some enter the mountain through these serendipitously shaped keyholes only to discover that the further in they go, the more contorted they must make themselves to continue on. In the end, those who succumb to the strange allure of the Fault are trapped deep inside the mountain, unable to move forward or backward; they have twisted themselves beyond all recognition. A while after reading the story for the first time, I learned to wonder: Were the outlines ever there at all? What did those who entered the mountain see and hear when they answered the Fault's call? What did all the others who weren't chosen experience? Ask anyone destined to become an addict about their first experience with their substance of choice and they will tell you that -- far from feeling weird, or out of it, or out of control, or embarrassed by their actions, or a hundred other reasonable responses -- they felt an overwhelming sense of rightness, of home. Addiction beckons with the lie of chemical completion, which, chased far enough, distorts the soul beyond all recognition, until the only thing that remains is the desire for the drug - the human addict a complex organism turned into a simple vehicle for the propagation of the chemical through space and time (much as viruses can commandeer the nervous systems of much more complex organisms to replicate themselves). The future becomes a blind pouch; we cannot look back to remember the past.

Do we deserve the epidemic of addiction that's swallowing the U.S.? Dark thoughts for a dreary day. Beijing hood. I lived around the corner. There is a staggering darkness imbued in the manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs. Entire economies of violence and exploitation are built upon feeding the developed world the substances that it craves so that it can use them to escape a reality that it still finds inadequate somehow. The privileged West has exported so much of the profound yet quotidian suffering that has until very recently been a universal part of the human experience. Particularly in the United States, we live so well at the direct expense of others who are mostly invisible to us – whether it’s those who die as civilian casualties in wars to maintain our geopolitical hegemony or those who work in unsafe conditions for unlivable wages to make products available to us for cheaper than they have any right to be. In a way, drug addiction seems to be a karmic balancing act, a way in which these poor, devastated areas of the world export back some of the suffering inflicted upon them during the last few rounds of this globalized Monopoly game. After all, we’ve harmed their children; why shouldn’t they do the same to ours?

The first installment in a series of lightly fictionalized encounters with drugs and mental illness. Caves in Guilin, China. The next step in a jerky, frantic dance engineered by a sick puppeteer came hardly three weeks later, when Bryce and Jamie were sipping cheap, strongly mixed rum and cokes as they evaluated their Friday night prospects. Midterms had just ended, and neither of them felt up to the shlep to Brooklyn for the warehouse party that most of their friends would be at. Instead, they headed down the hall to visit their senior friends, Gracie and Sana. (Jamie was pining after Gracie, a waifish Jewish girl from Boston who studied econ and spoke like a sailor). “Weak,” Gracie declared contemptuously as Bryce and Jamie declined to join the tail end of the girls’ Power Hour. Instead, they watched the girls as they took a vodka shot every six minutes, plus or minus a few (mostly plus) for various prizes and penalties. “Lame,” Gracie judged half an hour later as she pulled out a small jewelry bag containing a strip of five hits of acid. She and Sana each placed one on their tongues, smiling expectantly. Bryce had agreed to accompany Jamie down the hall on the condition that his roommate would join him for an eight-a.m. gym session the next day, so he was surprised to see his stolid best friend turn to him a moment later with a supplicant look in his eye. His first thought was of the ghost soundtrack that he had been hearing of late; a frigid hand grasped his guts as he contemplated twelve hours of diesel hallucinations. His next thought, however, was that it had been a long time since Jamie was so interested in a girl. His best friend had a news anchor’s Chad-ish good looks. However, the opposite sex often misinterpreted Jamie’s distance as tantalizing aloofness, whereas Bryce knew the truth: that beneath Jamie's handsome, self-possessed façade was a gangly geek whose most prized possession had once been his botanical journal. Maybe it’ll help me to trip, lean into it rather than staying stuck in fear and denial, Bryce rationalized. Get whatever this weirdness is out of my system. “Legit!” Gracie exclaimed as Bryce and Jamie partook in the unholy communion a moment later. The four donned peacoats and scarves, prepared for a walk through campus as they waited for the drug to take effect. This wasn’t a come-up; it was a rocket launch. The withered, trampled grass of the quad rippled beneath Bryce, heaving up and down sinusoidally as his long legs stretched forward with each uncertain step. He shot his hands out in goofy confusion, a toddler mimicking an airplane (vrr) as he tried to steady himself, his limbs transformed into the same taffy that his thoughts were made of. They stretched and snapped, stretched and snapped as he ventured tremblingly forward. A few paces ahead, Gracie and Sana had collapsed into a giggling heap, Sana sipping from a silver hip flask illuminated from within, as by myth or moonlight. As Bryce drank in its ethereal glow, he became convinced that the flask held the antidote to this madness. One sip and he would be healed, not just of this chemically orchestrated madness, but also of the other, more insidious companion who had stalked a few paces behind him for weeks. They took a brief rest, during which Bryce discovered with deepest despair that the flask was empty. Then, they continued on through the Gothic passages of the humanities quad. Above them, its stone arches expanded and multiplied, soaring upward and vaulting outward like a great, heaving rib cage. The vrr of the plane reached him again as it circled back, trailing a banner with God knew what message encoded in God knew what hermetic tongue. In another instant – and never before had Bryce been so cognizant of the utter fallaciousness of linearity, the divine supremacy of the now – the sacred arches shape-shifted into charcoal renderings of themselves, the spaces between them smudged and blotted by a careless creator. Bryce froze for a moment, paralyzed by the thought that he (not He) was the Creator. What if it ended with him, that this was all there was? Bryce paused, agape. As if aware of their awed observer, the still black-and-white arches reconfigured themselves into great trees intertwining overhead. Each pillar contorted wildly as it twisted itself through a series of incarnations (chestnut, cherry, evergreen) before settling into the truest expression of its tree-self. In a moment, gentle tendrils of pea green sprouted from the ground, hundreds of them winding themselves around the trees’ thick, black trunks, climbing quickly upward into the endlessly dividing and subdividing branches of this forever forest. The vines’ serpentine progress culminated as they met overhead, interlacing from left and right, binding together hunched-backed firs and proud oaks. All sound was sucked from the scene as the color of the vines intensified and differentiated, swelling with the sacred spectrum of summer verdure as the rest of the scene, too, exploded with life (barky brown trunks clambered up by exuberant squirrels, gracefully bowed limbs adorned by chorusing technicolor songbirds that perched along the uppermost branches at scientifically precise intervals). As another interminable now arrived, the green hues disappeared into a great conflagration of brilliant oranges and yellows shooting up around the trunks and into the branches as the incandescent revolution spread down the passageway. Finally, these fiery hues smoldered, real ashes drifting down and flecking Bryce’s black coat with gray as the trees screamed and spasmed, their roar dying down into a hoarse moan as they faded into the bare, battered remnants of old age. Looking down at his hands, Bryce witnessed a parallel progression. The youthful smoothness of the skin on the back of his hands, the tight-rope tautness of the tendons that moved his fingers, waned and weakened as it gave way to graying parchment marred by the wrinkled, sallow sagginess of old age. From some scenic overlook buried deep in his innermost psyche, Bryce painted these scenes on a canvas of metamorphosing, impossible proportions, desperate to record this glory before now became then and it was lost to him forever. Next, their foursome returned to the girls’ apartment. Sana put on an Eagles record from her vinyl collection as they sat on the floor, spreading their sodden feet toward a radiator that stretched accordion-like along the living room wall. Bryce observed it shift itself from right to left, left to right in the manner of a discontented caterpillar. Jamie rested his hand on Bryce’s shoulder for a moment, grinning as he delivered a word salad containing the ingredients promise, not, Buzzy, you, fucking, stuff, man, rows, bad, tomorrow, love. Bryce asked Jamie to repeat himself, this simple “say it again” requiring a tremendous input of communicative energy. Jamie repeated himself, presumably, although this time the message was even more garbled. Struck with inspiration, Bryce asked Jamie to repeat himself a third time, focusing on his friend’s turgid, purple lips in an attempt to read what he was saying. With mounting frustration, Bryce discovered that the scene was now progressing in stop-motion, one now supplanting the next without the continuity that should have been implied by Reality’s now derelict projectionist. This rendered his attempt to understand his best friend’s message as pointless as if it had been delivered in the same language as the banner, which – now cut free from the plane that had towed it – drifted aimlessly toward the misty grime of Manhattan’s predawn streets. With a surging panic, Bryce grabbed Jamie by the shoulders, suddenly sure that it was time for them to get out of there. They would return home, he decided, to their cozy, threadbare refuge where no harm could befall them. He thought he announced this aloud as he stood up and addressed Gracie and Sana. They studied him with strange expressions. Beneath the quizzical looks that they shot first each other and then Jamie, Bryce was now aware, lurked something more sinister. Whatever had been pursuing him these past few weeks was here, now, and the girls had something to do with it, whether they knew it or were simply convenient vessels to be hijacked. He had to get Jamie out of here. Bryce attempted a smile as he pulled Jamie up, gesturing toward the coat rack. As he moved to grab his scarf, however, Gracie stepped between him and the coat rack. “The fuck is your problem,” Bryce understood her to say. He couldn’t be sure whether she spoke it aloud or not. “Not feeling well,” he muttered to deflect the dark menace concentrated in Gracie’s preternaturally dilated pupils. As she opened her mouth to reply, he noted something odd about the creases where her upper and lower lips came together, which remained peculiarly immobile as the rest of her mouth stretched into a horseshoe. Never had reality been simulated so cartoonishly; this was a clip that should have been left on the cutting room floor. He glanced toward Jamie again, jerking his head toward the door. It was time to get out, now. Why the fuck couldn’t Jamie see it? Beneath the kaleidoscopic distortions of his senses, Bryce absorbed Jamie’s confusion and irritation like UV radiation. Nevertheless, Bryce handed him his jacket and continued begging them off with a word salad comprised of vague expressions of unease. Even Gracie seemed to accept that they were leaving as Jamie mumbled his apologies and promised to meet up with her the next day. Bryce returned a perfunctory hug from Sana, cringing as he realized that he was also embracing whatever the hell was inside of her, while Jamie and Gracie said goodbye. In a moment, Gracie stood before Bryce, staring up at him thanks to their ten-inch height difference. “Take care, kid,” she said with poorly feigned concern as she wrapped her arms around his back and leaned in. Then, as Bryce rested his head on her shoulder for the briefest of moments, she moved her mouth closer to his ear. She filled it with a crass, rapid-fire whisper, promising things so darkly, deadly descriptive that they fled his mind before he could encode them into memory. Bryce jerked backward as he shoved Gracie away. She caught the push on her shoulders, tripped as she was propelled backwards into the couch. She fell just as she reached it, so that her tangled legs and awkwardly askew pelvis ended up on the ground while her head collided with the chair’s armrest, her back twisting against its base. “What the fuck!” Sana exclaimed as she rushed to Gracie, who was staring at Bryce as though really seeing him for the first time. “He’s fucking crazy!” Gracie shouted, assuming the role of the shocked victim quite convincingly as she looked back and forth between Jamie and Sana. Everyone was looking at each other, it seemed; no one paid Bryce any mind. There was another interminable series of stop-motion instants, a montage of bad feeling, as Jamie dragged Bryce out of the doorway and down the hall without another word. A comical pantomime of an endangered marriage ensued when the acid had finally worn off a few hours later and Bryce, returning partially to reality with a surge of shame and adrenaline, found his friend asleep on the couch rather than in his bed.

First Step of NA / AA: We admitted that we were powerless over drugs / alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable. I am the first one I deceive If I can make myself believe The rest is easy - "Devil in the Details" by Bright Eyes For Part I, click here. A Seemingly Straightforward Proposition For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, the Twelve Step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, as well as the spin-off behavioral modification programs, are peer-based programs of personal change rooted in character examination and spiritual development. If you’re particularly quick-witted, perhaps you’ve surmised that they involve 12 phases. The first of these, which is foundational in many ways, is worded like this: We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol / drugs; that our lives had become unmanageable. For most addicts, a morass of pain, terror, rationalization, and denial whirl around this clarion call to reality. By the time that I entered treatment for the first time, I thought that accepting the First Step would be relatively simple for me: It was obvious that I was utterly out of control. After all, my heroin use dominated every aspect of my life. It was threatening my status quo on every level - medically, legally, academically, financially, psychologically, spiritually, familially, socially. When it came to opioids and benzos, I wasn’t floating down a raft on Da Nile. I had long accepted that I was addicted – I just told myself that there was no way out, a belief ballasted by the biological determinism that I subscribed to at the time. There were still islands of reservation in the ocean of my acceptance of my addiction, I realize now. In particular, I found it hard to grok that I could never again indulge in what I considered the lighter chemical pleasures – alcohol, weed, coke, maybe an occasional Ambien – the ones that had been mostly unproblematic for me. But for the most part, I was desperate enough that I was willing to forsake those, too, if it meant an end to the suffering of my addiction. The reason that I began Part I with a description of my benzo addiction is because – even though I identify primarily as an opioid addict – it is benzos that truly epitomized addiction for me. When it came to my opioid use, I retained some ability to plan, to ration, to exercise caution to ward off withdrawal or overdose or infection or arrest. When I was using benzos, by contrast, the disinhibition was so profound that it was almost psychopathic. I once attended outpatient treatment with a bubbly blonde girl from suburban Long Island, "normal" in every way, who was there because she had stabbed her father with a kitchen knife during a Klonopin binge. It could’ve just as easily been me. In fact, I had once bitten my mom’s arm while she and my older brother were struggling to take my bottle of Xanax away from me mid-binge. On another night, I took handfuls of Xanax and Klonopin, borrowed my father’s car, and crashed it; afterward, I borrowed my uncle’s car and crashed that, too. Benzos turned me into a feral, raving monster, and the moment that the first milligram of Xanax hit, it was over; I had boarded a train to an unknown destination. (Benzos, barbiturates, and alcohol also happen to be three of the very few substances whose withdrawal syndromes can kill you. They gave me grand mal withdrawal seizures, which threatened to finish me months and years after I had stopped using them. Without getting too off track here, suffice it to say that, if someone told me that they had to take a chance with either heroin or benzos, I would tell them to go with the heroin every time. No other addiction leaves as little of the original person left as benzos do; they frequently cause dementia and are often deadly when combined with alcohol or other depressants. TL;DR is: Xanax destroys. Xanax kills.) Deeper Back to the First Step. After some time in recovery, I realized that what I had initially believed to be honest, thorough submission to the powerlessness of the First Step had, in fact, been a fairly shallow and cerebral reckoning. It wasn’t hard for me to intellectually accept the overwhelming evidence that I was addictively out-of-control, that I couldn’t use mind-altering substances healthily or in moderation. However, admitting this was really only a partial fulfillment of the First Step. Truly accepting the First Step is and should be a horrifying experience; it is a gut punch to the soul. It is understanding that you are as out of control of your behavior as if someone has a gun to your head and is dictating your next actions, as though there is an alien in control of your body. There is no refuge from this realization once it hits, no softening of it. I remember a story that my mother, a criminal defense attorney, told me about a client of hers. Her client was a stay-at-home mom from a fairly well-off suburb of our city, who had temporarily curtailed her problematic drinking after her first DWI. My mother had gone to meet her client before her arraignment the morning after her second arrest. There, she found her client mortified, fully accepting of her alcoholism, and expressing genuine readiness to change – to go to inpatient treatment, long-term treatment, whatever was necessary. “I can’t believe it happened again,” my mom’s client confessed to her in regard to the second DWI that she assumed she was facing (she had been blacked out during her arrest and in-processing, so she didn’t know for sure what she had been charged with). It was my mom’s job to explain to this woman that she hadn’t been arrested for DWI: She had hit another car head-on while driving drunk and killed the person in it, a woman of similar age who was also a mother. She was being charged with vehicular manslaughter, and even a golden plea deal would mean several years in state prison for this woman who had just spent her first night in jail. Embracing the First Step meant understanding not just that this could’ve been me, but that it would be me (I am tempted to write “will” rather than “would”; this is the profundity with which the First Step has settled in for me). It meant connecting my cognitive understanding of the extent and dangers of my addiction with a deep, visceral acceptance of my utter loss of control, an experience as terrifying as having a stranger cover your mouth and rip down your pants in a lonely stretch of alley or park. Without this intense, emotionally based response, the First Step lacks motivational potency. For now, let me close by saying that for me, the powerlessness of the First Step has never been fully supplanted by the hope or actuality of long-term recovery. I have seen too many people trying too hard who fail at it nevertheless, and too many who succeed for a while who relapse and die. I don’t believe that this was simply their fault for failing to work the program properly. For me, the enduring lesson of the First Step has been “playing the tape forward” whenever I consider relapse, remembering that the very worst outcomes of my past use, as well as even worse things experienced by my brothers and sisters in addiction, await me at the end of the next chain of events that starts with me using, which is the one point at which I might retain some control. True nightmares await me during my next relapse, and it is right of my mind and my body to remind me of that fact.