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Like any culture, like basketball or politics or Hollywood, the world of drug addiction has
its own language, a parlance that is specialized and exclusive. But to be an insider in the drug world, to be
in the know, in the mix of it, is not necessarily desirable, or something you want to admit to. So before you
actually commit, you start off using your own words, your old words. "Let’s go buy drugs," you say to
your new friends, or "Let’s get something for tonight," though they all say, "Let’s cop," or "Let’s score."
But these sound strange to you, as if you’re trying too hard, as if you’re mimicking the natives. So you stay
with "Let’s go buy drugs" for a couple of months, until even to yourself you sound awkward and amateur.
Then you give in-to "cop," let’s say-but you put quotation marks around it, you give it a little spin, lest
anyone think you are unaware of how it sounds for you, who is still new at this, to be using the lingo like an
old hand, like a pro, like a seasoned addict.
Except everyone around you uses this lingo regularly, and the irony goes unnoticed,
unappreciated; this is a crowd that cops every day, a crowd that’s so high from the drugs they are copping
that they’re often unsure what month it is, what year, who’s the president. And if you’re going to be part
of this world, if you’re going to join, you might as well get rid of the quotation marks and the efforts at
distance; you might as well accept that this is your language now, too. You’re going to "cop" or you’re
going to cop, you’re going to "score" or you’re going to score-it’s all the same anyway, quotation marks
or not, the same drugs, the same risk, the same high. The energy it takes to stay apart is wasteful, in that it is
draining: it undermines your primary goal, which is to lose consciousness, to blast your mind into oblivion,
and for this you must cooperate, you must capitulate. A hundred percent; or else why bother in the first
place?
But then one day-months, years, later, when you’re a thousand miles past irony and
detachment, when you’re tightening a belt around your arm or handing another cup of urine to the nurse at
the methadone clinic-you realize that your drug life is over; you’re exhausted; you’re finished. That’s
when you stumble into a twelve-step program, something Anonymous, and discover that there’s a whole
new language to learn, a whole new vocabulary that sounds alien and a bit absurd, but you have to learn it
to understand what others are talking about, to be understood if you decide to speak. For instance: every
day you will "make" a meeting. You won’t go to a meeting, or attend a meeting. You make a meeting
because that’s what everyone else does, because you hear it over and over-"if you don’t know what else
to do, make a meeting," and "meeting makers make it." And if you decide to speak at the meeting that you
make, you’ll "share." You may not feel as if you’re sharing, you may feel selfish and stingy, but that’s
what it will be called. People you respect, people with ten or twelve years off drugs, will say, "Thank you
for sharing" after you’ve spoken; soon you’ll find yourself, without thinking, without paying attention,
saying, "Thank you for letting me share."
It’s a language you’ve read in self-help books, that you’ve heard on television talk shows,
that you’ve laughed at and rolled your eyes over, but now it’s your language; and just as with "copping"
and copping, "scoring" and scoring, the only one who will know that you’re separate, the only one who will
notice, is you. The effort will soon become wearying, and you’ll need all your energy to get through the
day, your blood spiked with panic as you try to face your family, the office, the subway. This panic, this
terror, that makes you yearn for chemical release-in meetings they tell you this is your "disease." You
may not believe addiction is a disease. You call it a disorder, an illness, even an affliction, but after a while
your tenacity starts to feel fanatic, or at least superfluous, since everyone else is saying it some other way.
They are all, in fact, saying it the same other way, all except you.
The thing about recovery, about the language of recovery, about the very nature of
recovery, is this: you feel, on the one hand, ridiculous-maybe you’re a teacher or an architect, maybe
you’re fluent in plate tectonics or Impressionist art or constitutional law. Now you’ve wound up in a place
where people speak in aphorisms, many of which actually rhyme-"show up to grow up," "put some
gratitude in your attitude," "fake it ‘til you make it." They grab your arm after a meeting and tell you that
the committee in your head wants you dead; the brain, they insist, is dangerous terrain. Yet they all, every
one of them, must know something that you don’t, because in the middle of the night they’re asleep in their
beds, while you’re out alone, in truly dangerous terrain, trading your watch or your VCR for a $5 vial of
crack.
Which is what gets you, finally, what got everyone else and what gets you, too: not the
watch or the VCR, not the police or the paranoia, but the fact that you’re out there by yourself. The old
crowd is gone, dispersed, done in; and a lot can be overlooked in the name of companionship, in the name
of a hand on your arm. So when the day comes that you hear yourself say "I’m an addict"-a grateful
addict, a grateful recovering addict, who came for the drugs but stayed for the hugs-well, if you’re going
to say it, you might as well mean it.
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in
the
rooms
cynthia
weiner |