fatal progression
Recovery is a long, arduous, and often solitary road. The alternative for many, however, is death. A substantial majority of my life has been spent modulating and soothing a chaotic inner world using a wide variety of both classic and obscure psychoactive substances. After many years of well-meaning attempts to get healthy and sober, I have finally found myself firmly-rooted in clean living, nearly four months sober, in itself a miracle.
I started using at an early age, beginning with alcohol, cannabis, nicotine, caffeine and dextromethorphan (DXM—the active ingredient in cough syrup and a potent dissociative-psychedelic drug). My love affair with destructive binge-drinking and obscene partying lasted for almost a decade before I transitioned into other addictions, a means of survival as my body tethered the point of complete failure—yellowed, bloated, stretched, and aching internally. I still can recall the dull throbbing pain that plagued my daily misery, a sharply rooted point-source of agony somewhere around my liver. In spite of that, I continued to drown my insides with booze, drinking constantly to forget my very existence, waiting for my life to cease.
My transition into non-alcoholic drugs was spurred by what many in recovery circles refer to as hitting bottom. I had returned from a month-long bender through Japan, frightened to my core to even board the plane home should I need medical attention, right back into the fire—an annular Perkins’ tradition involving skiing, golfing, and a whole lot of drink-fueled debauchery. Afterwards, I sat solemnly on a bus transporting me back into my hometown, Edmonton, hungover and reeling from an inexplicably dark mushroom trip which had occurred hours prior, my guts screaming and my mind a literal cesspool, unbearable. Years of similar experience had left me in a state of pure depravity: I was done. Something deep inside me had shifted—I had found a will to live—and weeks later I was chipping away at the absolute mess which was my life and physical form. That was over seven years ago, and the journey from then to now was tortuous, spawning a depth of stories so strange and surreal that I must share them with the world.
Hitting bottom is an intriguing concept that has occupied my mind for some years since my aforementioned first, and to me relates inversely to the idea of human potential, an abstract measure of a person’s capacity to do in the world. In a bottom, demonstrable potential is quashed—one is rendered totally useless in the eyes of civilization, metaphorically gasping for air as the pressure of their very presence compresses them into a grain of lifeless matter. In my experience, bottoms often correlate with trauma, a concept wildly popular in the contemporary world that refers to the somatic and psychic imprint of a life-threatening or terrifying event on a human being. Traumatic incidents take away our basic capacity to function—the body and mind shut down their fundamental systems in order to protect us, such that we do not immediately need to feel what we ought to. Without being connected to a nourishing and stable social system following the event, trauma-information is stored away within the body until it is able to be accessed safely and resolved. While left unresolved, the imprinted data can and will surface, behaviorally and sensationally, in surprising and seemingly large ways, something often exhibited in the midst of a drug-fueled bottom.
In 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA), both of which I am a grateful member of, addiction is viewed as a disease of body and mind rather than an individual’s moral failing. Defined as a spiritual malady, it is progressive, meaning it will only get worse with continued usage, and fatal, implying that it will eventually take the life of the sufferer if not arrested, just as late-stage cancer will inevitably kill its host. Regardless of one’s belief in this description, the program offers a design for living that involves looking at past behaviors and mending broken connections, with the only requirement for membership being a desire to stop using/drinking. I myself have benefited tremendously from 12-step groups over the past two years and continue to attend them regularly in order to absorb the strength, experience and hope of others.
Intuitively, the notion of being progressive implies a gradual decline in expressible potential as one continues further into their disease, and there exists an idealistic model which captures this: the Jellinek curve, an axes-less, U-shaped, smooth function with a singular minimum, active addiction on the left side, plunging from casual into daily excessive and compulsive drinking, and recovery on the right side, rising out of a hellish rock bottom into a life actually worth living.1
Jellinek’s model is useful in a theoretical sense—it demonstrates the slippery realm of drug addiction and the inevitable descent into madness that comes with it, but in reality our lives are far more complex, at least so from my own experience. For starters, there exist local fluctuations—deviations from the ideal baseline, as humans will naturally fight back when life begins to sour and overwhelm them, even when trending towards insanity. To elucidate a more realistic perspective, I have imagined a metric, denoted as ψ, that defines one’s position temporally within their personal range of living potential, an objective spectrum that is ultimately immeasurable. I postulate that ψ is a function of the following variables: active (unresolved) trauma, external chaos, felt emotional and mental pain, life success, physical wellness, communal quality, creative output, spirituality and most importantly, time.2 This metric is unique to a particular individual—comparisons are only significant when made to prior or future values for the same person—and is normalized to output a numeric value falling within the range of [-100,100].3 Undeniably, there is overlap and cross-functionality between the variables; for example, alive trauma is inseparable from one’s emotional and mental landscapes, but for now distinction remains since there may be factors attributing to the latter which are not related to the former. Admittedly, this is a working theory, far from mathematical form, if that is even possible, which creates an interesting opportunity for self-reflection. For every quarter-year interval since I turned 14, I designated a value of ψ, based on memory of how my life was at each point in time, and created a graph showcasing up to present moment:
As you see, there have been not one, but multiple distinct and unique bottoms throughout my life’s trajectory. Apart from the first, which was far more the result of a cumulative sickness, each of these minimums correspond to a traumatic happening—some sudden and largely out of my control, others preceded by other less intense incidents, all of them catastrophic and leaving me with two options: give up and die or pick myself up, somehow, and try again to get better. This plot also serves as a predictive tool—included on it are two hypothetical progressions that could play out from here: sustained recovery (green curve), where life gradually continues to improve and my potential shines through to the world more and more, with relatively minor ups and downs, and relapse (blue curve), where I go back to using substances and begin again on the roller coaster of addiction, marked by substantial fluctuations and an eventual bottom, which may, this time, very well entail institutionalization, incarceration or death.4
It is a stark reality, but one that myself and many others have no choice in tending to. The fact that I can even see these possible outcomes is one of great fortune—many remain perpetually stuck before reaching an untimely end to their lives. Living in active addiction removes the basic capacity for choice, for free-will, and only in recovery, looking back at the roaring mouth of the beast, can one become empowered. I must remain critically vigilant for the rest of my life—the wolf is always at my door—as something happens inside of me when I take that first drug, a phenomenon known as an allergy in 12-step literature, and from there on the dopaminergic inertia will propel me into a nightmare, where I consume every psychoactive I can get my hands on regardless of the impact on my body, mind or life, until something cataclysmic inevitably happens. I have accepted this fate and know very well how lucky I am to be writing this—any one of my bottoms could have taken me out permanently—and I do believe that God and the universe have an elevated plan for me. What that is stays concealed, for now; all I can do is attempt to make right decisions in the present, to be kind and compassionate to myself through all of my imperfect moments, and to look towards the future hopefully and gratefully. I certainly do not wish to see what the next bottom would look like. It has been far too challenging to get where I am now and I would not consciously give it up for anything. But it could happen—believing it couldn’t has caused a great deal of addicts to relapse, so I have heard. It is a double-edged predicament: on one hand I am everlastingly thankful to have the support and love of 12-step communities, contingent upon my desire to stay clean, yet on the other I feel shackled—dependent upon these groups for my very survival. Such is the duality of human existence, I suppose; the metaphorical hand that feeds often does so with an iron fist.
See this link for more information on the Jellinek curve model and its designated stages of addiction and recovery.
Proportionality: ψ increases with increased life success, physical wellness, communal quality, creative output and spirituality, and decreases with increased active trauma, external chaos, and emotional/mental pain.
This metric could also, arguably, exist on a scale comparable to all people, as all of its variables are common to the human experience.
A phrase commonly heard in 12-step meeting rooms: the unstopped progression of the disease of addiction will result in jails, institutions or death. For more information about the fellowship of AA, visit this website, and for NA, this one. Help is out there—if you or a loved one struggle with substance abuse, you do not need to do so alone.