Tag Archives: recovery

Ashamed of Ashamed

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ANNE

Did you know it’s possible to feel ashamed of feeling ashamed?

Well it is. A couple times, Vince and his friends came to St. Paul for the weekend and stayed with me. They brought everything one needs for an overnight:

BoozeCigs

And since I live in a nonsmoking building, they smoked out in front of the building, or took their home-rolled cigarettes and a cooler full of beer up to the roof and played poker up there. I would bring up a platter of food—hard boiled eggs, olive tapenade, crackers, some fruit—up to them but they wouldn’t touch it.   Once I bought four kinds of sausages at Whole Foods, figuring they were meat eaters, but they wouldn’t touch them–too froo froo.

Vince took his shoes off inside my door, as he had been trained to do from childhood:

Shoes

This is where the shame came in. Here I was, living in what was billed as a “luxury” apartment building, and my son wore shoes like this. And then I felt ashamed of feeling ashamed.  Of being such a snob.

Whoa! Time for a cute kitten photo!

kitten

(Did I mention I do kitten fostering for the humane society?)

Anyway, another time we all went for sushi—Vince’s and my all-time favorite food. And he couldn’t eat it. He had to leave the table to be sick, and then I noticed that his abdomen was distended and my bubble of denial that he was “just drinking” was burst.

I had attended the family program at Hazelden, I knew the medical symptoms of chronic alcoholism, including liver disease.

—

A number of people have said to me that it must be kind of relief that Vince is in prison. At least I know where he is, he can’t drink or smoke, yatta yatta. Yeah, these things are true and they are good, although drugs and alcohol can be had, even in prison.

All I can do is keep my focus on myself—examining my embarrassment and guilt over that embarrassment, forgiving myself for being human, for having feelings, for having mixed feelings.

Lauren, Ralph Lauren

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ANNE

In some of Vince’s posts it sounds like I abandoned him.

But during the seven “fun” years, as he calls them, when he was “only drinking,” I did visit him every couple of months.  Remember, it’s a two-hour drive to Fountain / Lanesboro, so each visit meant a six- to eight-hour day or staying overnight. Mondays were his only days off, so a visit usually involved taking a day off work, too.

I hope I don’t sound defensive. It’s just interesting, and very common in families, that our emotional impression of events is so different.

At first, right after his relapse, visiting him was so emotion-laden that I might weep in the car most of the way home. The first time I saw him after six months of not knowing where he was, after his meth bender, I was shocked by his appearance. Gaunt, hollow eyes—they even appeared to have changed color from brown to almost black. His clothes looked as though he had just survived a ship wreck—torn and filthy. He was 27 but he looked 10 years older. Someone passing by asked him, “Hey Vince, who’s your date?” He didn’t like that.

I asked him if I could buy him a pair of jeans and he said, “Sure mom, but they have to be Lauren—Ralph Lauren.”

It was always the same routine. He didn’t use email or Facebook or talk on the phone; communications was solely by text. So I would text and ask if such-and-such a weekend would be good for me to come visit. Half the time he wouldn’t reply. Then I would text again a few days later, and a few days later, until finally I’d get a text back with him saying he’d dropped his phone in the river but he would love to see me.

When I arrived in town it was always awkward. He was usually working so I would have a burger and a beer. I always had the impression that he wished he could escape from me—to go use? I don’t know. He didn’t want money from me; he never asked for money and, after all, he was working full-time. When he lost his job I might take him shopping for clothes or buy him a contact lenses refill so he could see, but I never gave him money.

Wrench

We would go agate hunting. He would show me the home-made raft he and Seth had built out of empty industrial-sized ketchup tubs and duct tape. We’d go to the Amish market and make fun of their eye glasses, which were all the same steel-rimmed, round, and always smeary. We camped on Seth’s land with their group of friends. Vince would toss a ball for his dog, Willie, or play catch with one of his friends. One time someone had won a meat raffle and Vince roasted it all over the campfire and I gorged myself.

Bluebell

I would show up in my Mini with my Emporio Armani bags and my Murano glass beer bottle opener I’d bought in Venice.  These were almost like protective shields, as if they declared (again), “I’m not one of you hillbillies!”  (A friend in London works there and is my source for these sturdy plastic bags which are great for camping.  I am way too cheap to actually buy anything there.).

Seth talked nonstop, but Vince would say barely 20 words.  There was never any animosity, just an elusiveness. Who was he? What did he want in life? Was this it? Did he ever date? Did he wish he had kids? Would he ever go back and finish his degree? Did he ever think about buying a house?

BeardedOne

If I couldn’t contain myself and asked one of these questions, he would deflect it with a joke. When I left, he would hug me and say, “I love you mom.”

It got easier as time went by. And, I have to admit, once I gave up my vow to never drink in front of him, we all loosened up a bit.  Alcohol, such a time-honored stress reliever.

I came to feel proud of Vince.  He worked, paid his bills, paid taxes, had friends, had fun.  He seemed to have overcome the drug demons and was only drinking moderately.  Well, moderately for him.  For the umpteenth time, I was lulled into thinking it would stay this way forever.

VnMe

Solitary, Still

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VINCE

It wasn’t always the hard stuff.

Shortly after I lost my job at the ice cream plant, one of my close friends wore a wire into my apartment and attempted to buy some meth from me.  Fortunately, I had been tipped off that his house had been raided not even an hour before he showed up.  I slammed the door in his face, and started thinking.  I had a standing offer to move to Fountain with an old friend and his girlfriend, and I took them up on it.  The first night there I started back up with my heavy drinking, and I didn’t stop until seven years later when I got into the hard stuff again.  But it was a fun seven years!

After one very trying month living in a trailer in Fountain with a man that couldn’t control his anger while drunk, which was all day every day, I moved a short distance to the town I was working in, Lanesboro.  **Pause**  If you ever get a chance to get a copy of the book, Inadmissible Evidence by Phillip Friedman, do it.  But before you read it, just go ahead and burn it.  Or if you want to know what it’s like in prison isolation, read it.  Thank you for your time.  **Play**

One Battle Won

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ANNE

As Vince has written, the tourist trade in Lanesboro dies off in winter, so he goes on seasonal unemployment. The State loads his weekly payment onto a debit card which is managed by Mega Bank. When he was arrested, he was no longer eligible to receive additional payments; fair enough. However, he still had a balance in his account, which he couldn’t access.

So I started calling Mega Bank. I will not bore you with the details of how much time I spent on hold, making copies, faxing and mailing and emailing the Power of Attorney form Vince had painstakingly found in the prison library, and doing it all over again because Mega Bank claimed they never received it, and so on. Months passed.

My friend Stephanie, who came with me to visit Vince, works for a big consulting firm. I said to her, “I feel so cynical! I wonder if big corporations ignore people like me until we give up, and then they keep the money, and all those tiny accounts add up …” She laughed and said I wasn’t being cynical at all, that that’s exactly what they do. They wait you out. They do nothing. They make a nice profit.

But I am a fighter. Hearing Stephanie’s take on it made me mad, which energized me. I called the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. When a real person answered the phone and asked me to describe my complaint, I was tongue tied for a moment. “I…I wasn’t ready to talk … I’m not used to a government agency or company that actually answers the phone.”

The AG sent a letter to the CEO of Mega Bank, asking him to respond within five business days. Mega Bank ignored the letter. I don’t know what transpired after that but I received a check for $154.03 within a couple weeks. In particular, I’d like to recognize Joao Halab in the AG’s office for pursuing this on my and Vince’s behalf.

A hundred and fifty bucks may not sound like a lot of money, but it meant coffee and ramen and pens and paper to Vince. And to give Vince credit, he told me to keep $50 for m effort, which I did.

—

I’ve got other battles going as well. They are mostly internal ones; I am choosing not to expend my energy on them because I know I cannot win them.

I wrote that I have to move because I am being priced out of my apartment. I haven’t found a new place yet. It seems there are either spacious penthouses with doormen and champagne happy hours for $2,000 a month, or dark cramped rat holes for $800 a month, and not much in between.

My landlord has started showing my apartment, which amps up the pressure. I called a friend who lives in the building and asked, “Should I make a point of being home when they come in with the potential renters, so I can make sarcastic remarks about how they’re taking advantage of the economy to jack up rents?” She said NO without hesitation. I knew that was the right answer, but I needed to hear it.

But when I came home from seeing yet another “no-go” apartment, there were people in my living room. These potential new renters gushed about what a beautiful apartment I have. I kept my mouth shut.

The poor leasing agent is also being priced out of his apartment, which he’s been receiving as a benefit of being an employee, so he’s very sympathetic. He called me a couple hours later to say that a corporation had rented my apartment sight unseen but would be sending someone the next day just to verify the square footage. They’ll be using it to house MBA interns. I asked which company it was a company that makes industrial chemicals.

This is me a couple years ago reveling in the view from my apartment:

740View

—

My other internal battle is a February work trip to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I can’t say much except that it adds inherent complicated stress and additional pressure to find a new apartment by the time I leave, because I’ll come back and need to move five days later.

 

Happy New Life

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ANNE

I am tempted to rebut each of Vince’s “clarifications” in his last post. But one of my favorite self-help slogans is: “How important is it?”

I’m glad to leave 2014 behind and hopeful that 2015 will better, or at least not worse.

I spent Christmas Eve in an emergency room with my poor sister, who has stage four colon cancer. She was feeling pressure in her chest. Apparently chemo can cause blood clots. They administered nitro by pill and patch, did an EKG to rule out a heart attack, and killed her pain with Dilaudid, which is seven times stronger than morphine.

Her worst fear is that she will die alone in the hospital. I stayed until they admitted her and she fell asleep, about seven hours later.

—

Three years ago, I hit bottom. I had lived with depression for as long as I could remember, but then….  I had to have a tooth pulled—boy, will that make you feel old! Then during a Christmas Day blizzard my car was towed and I spent four hours waiting in line outside at the impound lot to pay $300 to get it back. I then drove to Fountain to visit Vince. The trailer he shared with Seth was full of guns, beer cans, and smoke. I figured what the heck, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so after he assured me that none of the guns was loaded, we posed for photos that became my holiday cards to my friends in the UK, where they had a good laugh over us gun-crazy Americans.

Vince (7)Vince (11)

Due to the blizzard I spent the night in Seth’s 5-year-old daughter’s bedroom; she was at her mom’s. Here’s a tip for parents who smoke: Keeping your kid’s door closed doesn’t keep smoke out. I couldn’t open the window and after tossing and turning until 5am I slipped out and drove home. On the way I started itching. Great—now I had bedbugs!

—

I contemplated suicide. I leaned my forehead against the screen of my 20th floor window. I had turned 50 the year before. Thinking about being depressed every day for another 30-40 years wasn’t real appealing.

—

Here are the things I had tried to manage depression and anxiety:

Meditation

Medication

Prayer (including begging, pleading, and bargaining)

Acting normal

Abstaining from drinking

Cutting down on coffee

Self-help books

Alanon

Exercise

Getting outside every day

Appreciating beauty, be it fine art, nature, music, babies, or kittens

Gratitude lists

Avoiding negative people / avoiding unnaturally happy people

Running away to other countries

Denial

Journaling

Telling myself, “At least I’m not a refugee / amputee / blind / fill-in-the-blank.”

Psychotherapy

Retail therapy

Sleeping, drinking, and movie binges

Reaching out to friends, even when that was the last thing I wanted to do

—

I thought that jumping out of my window would be exhilarating, until I hit the ground. I had some leftover pain killers from the dentist, and my prescription for Restless Legs. I googled an overdose of the two and learned that they wouldn’t kill me, but that I would likely need a liver transplant. I decided to keep living.

—

That spring, I visited Vince again and this time, made a reservation at a B&B.  On the free-book-shelf there, I picked up a tattered copy of, “Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy”, by David Burns, MD. I read it and did what it told me to do, and I stopped being depressed. For good.

The book was about Cognitive Therapy. I had been instructed to use it at least twice in the past, but I’d been too stressed out to do it. Basically, you write down your negative thoughts and then argue with them rationally until you’ve de-fanged them. Writing it down is important; if you try to do it in your head you’ll end up down a rabbit hole.

So was a lifetime of depression cured overnight by one book? No. I think it was all the other things I had tried over the years—the good things, anyway—and then I added this on top of them and together they all added up to a breakthrough.

I still feel sad sometimes–there’s plenty to feel sad about–but I’m not depressed and I’m committed to living.

Sorry for the long post but, if you’re struggling, I want to encourage you to keep an open mind, keep plugging away, and keep trying new things.

PS: I didn’t have bedbugs after all.  I think I was just itchy from the smoke and dry air.  Living with addiction can turn you into a drama addict.