Rock Bottom! Down, Down, Down!

Lots of trouble. LOTS OF BUBBLES.

There’s a line I’ve seen a couple times now, out there in the wild world of addiction-recovery Twitter: “Rock bottom is a narrative device.” I like this line, I think it’s true and important and it captures some things about the difficulty in communicating across the divides of active addiction, recovery/sobriety, and lol normalcy.

“Addiction,” as a contemporary umbrella term covering a huge range of distinct experiences, is a way of fitting those experiences into a narrative so that they make some kind of intelligible order. You shake the kaleidoscope of your feelings and it comes up snake eyes, and you think, Dang, I should not be mixing my metaphors so early in the night. Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath explores the ways 12-step recovery communities, especially, create their own narrative norms, teaching us to tell our stories in ways which denigrate and resist the conventions of contemporary literary fiction. From the AA perspective, she points out, a lot of what they teach you in MFA programs is just self-will.

I don’t remember if she talks about the idea of “rock bottom,” which is interesting in itself since it’s one of the rare recovery tropes that does fit a cute little my-rise-and-fall linear narrative structure. The idea that you have to “hit rock bottom” before you’re ready to change leads to further narrative encrustations: Did you have a “low bottom” or a “high bottom”? These are really epicycles. They’re added to the “rock bottom” trope in order to cram experiences which don’t really fit the trope inside. AA’s own cliches, those crunchy little corn chips of wisdom, offer reasons to be skeptical of the “rock bottom”: “Some people’s rock bottom is six feet under,” they say, meaning that addiction can punish some people far past the point where you’d think they’d just stop, but shockingly it’s not that easy, just suffering more doesn’t work. There’s also the more hopeful cliché, “You can get off the elevator at any floor.” Once you realize it only goes down, why wait?

You don’t need to lose everything before you quit drinking (or whatever it is you do). Losing everything often makes it harder to quit, because a lot of what you lose is support! A lot of what you lose is hope. Maybe get off the elevator before that happens!

But so I’m also interested in what the trope of “rock bottom” does for people. It’s easiest for me to see the bad things it does: the way “rock bottom” itself serves as a rationalization. But I suspect it also helps people articulate some partial truths. I’ll name one but I’d be interested in you all’s thoughts here as well.

The dumb obvious thing “rock bottom” offers people is a reason not to help. Or, not to keep pouring your helpless love and care and money and patience into what seems to be the black hole of somebody else’s life. You can say, “I am cutting you off for your good, not to protect myself. I’m still helping! I’m helping you reach your rock bottom.”

Idk, man. I’m not going to tell you not to protect yourself. There are a lot of times where letting someone use you, or blame you for their problems, isn’t good for them; there are a lot of times where in giving care and money and hundredth second chances to one person you endanger and deprive another.

But you can’t cure somebody’s addiction by making him suffer more. The definition of addiction which makes the most sense to me, if anything so culturally-conditioned can be defined, is persistence in a behavior in spite of negative consequences which make you desperate to stop. “You can’t cure that by making the negative consequences worse” is almost built-in to the definition. And yet the idea of “rock bottom” suggests that making somebody homeless or isolated, or jailing them, is almost a form of treatment—not a terrifying and degrading experience which risks their death.

Nonetheless, the idea of “rock bottom” wouldn’t have developed if it didn’t do some things for people with addiction too. I think one thing it helps people articulate is the feeling of lightlessness, hopelessness, which a lot of us remember from the last bad days. You reach a point where you’ve tried so many things to get out of this awful place and none of them have worked. You feel like there’s no door. And you may case the grounds from the Cascades to Puget Sound/But you are not permitted to leave….

“Rock bottom” turns that feeling into the door itself. That feeling of complete hopelessness, you can tell yourself, might actually be the start of your redemption arc. The very fact that you feel so hopeless then becomes a reason for hope. Touch the bottom. Push against it. Head upward from the lightless undersea depths, through the unbearable pressure, toward the sun.

That’s how it might work. Or the idea of “rock bottom” might be a tantalizing promise. There will come a time when you know you’re done! There will come a time when change is obvious, when it’s the only option, finally. Lol my friend, life is never the only option.

One thing I learned from reading up on motivational interviewing is that ambivalence is part of almost every story of change. And ambivalence feels awful! (They say “aversive.” They mean awful!) Nobody wants to hear that getting sober means months of cycling through hope and relapse, then months of feeling like you’re doing that even though you manage to forestall the part where you actually drink or use, and the whole time you’ll feel like you suck and all you want to do is drink, and you’ll think about it all the time and basically get through a lot of days by telling yourself, “Humiliation is good #actually, now back to bed,” which isn’t everybody’s story and in fact is a lucky story (only months???), be grateful. Everybody hopes a moment will come when you know you’ve hit rock bottom and it’s all upward and lightward from here.

This is how we are with everything! People out there waiting for the road to Damascus moment, the longed-for experience which says now you can believe in God, you’re allowed now, because something dramatic has happened, it isn’t just your thoughts and hopes and little recognitions and your best guesses. People out there waiting to know that this is the person they should marry, or that now it’s finally time to propose; with heterosexual couples you can engineer your own road-to-Damascus moment by being less diligent with your birth control, and sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not.

Anyway whatever, I shouldn’t be a jerk about this, I kind of do have a story of a moment when I came to believe in God, and if it’s a weird and satisfyingly humiliating moment for which I was prepared by argument and embarrassed experimental prayer, it’s still more than a lot of Christians get. It’s hard to know what to do and it’s hard to do it! It’s hard to get unstuck. Maybe one thing the “rock bottom” trope does is encourage you to look for the moments when you might be less stuck: when your ambivalence might tip over into determination, “No matter what it takes, I can’t stay here.”

But you can get off the elevator at any floor.

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icymi

I am still looking for readers for a novel draft! It’s two intertwined stories, one IRL and one dream, and the dreamer has to figure out what her dreams mean and whether they might save her—or what they might cost her. If you want themes, the IRL story is “about,” basically, if the American experiment and empire and compromise is collapsing, what was it? What does the autopsy reveal? And what might it look like to love and serve in the midst of that collapse? And the dream story is about whether there can be a spirituality of submission, humility, surrender, which is also a spirituality of liberation. (I am a self-parody, I know….)

This novel mistrusts democracy, science, wellness, social services, university education, and Dominicans. It evinces surprising trust in prophetic dreams, incomprehensible visions, and the things people say when they’re doing your hair.

The central character in the IRL chapters is black, and I have no idea if I can really tell that story well! So I am looking, specifically, for black readers who are intrigued by the book I’ve just described, who might be willing to read and comment on it, for money. If that’s you, email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com and we’ll talk terms. If that’s somebody you know, I’d very much appreciate your forwarding this to them.

Now Playing

Moxy Fruvous, “Drinking Song.” Ambulance flying in/I never drank again/Can’t really call that a loss or a win….