I’ll be your emergency contact

It would be simple to describe the relationship between addiction, mental illness, and hope as being one where clinging to hope is what enables one to endure their pain. But there is a powerful logic that guides your thinking when you need a substance, and that logic narrows your focus to what is immediately present and the actions that must be taken to meet the most salient of your needs. Something changed for us both when we understood escape as never being an option—though it was one we turned to habitually.

There is no specific order to how you and I came to imagine our own goals and lives as fleshed-out things. There is no simple chronology for how something which once seemed like a hopeless waste of energy, a delusion, grew into the pupal form of lifelong goals.

This will have a brute chronology because is that not how we remember things? 

You and I, a brute chronology.

***

I am fourteen. Panic disorder emerges like someone has poisoned the water supply. Something is deeply and incurably wrong, but it is beyond my ability to identify or prevent. So, I live with the fear of nearly everything I can conceptualize, and I have bouts where I feel as if the whole world is crooked—I fear I will go insane. There emerges a cure for pain, a removal from thought, the likes of which you had already found. 

June 2021

I don’t wish to flee anymore, 

as much as I wish that I could be alone again

and sink comfortably into my own fantasies,

I have more than what is necessary to make my beige walls kaleidoscope.

I will live like this

We are fifteen and sixteen-ish. Mum sees the painting that I have been working on, it’s a self-portrait. In the background of my painting are rainbows and cannabis leaves, mostly concealed by images of politically motivated vandalism cut from our local newspaper.  I wrote on this painting, “La tristesse durera toujours.” Allegedly, those were Van Gogh’s last words. Mum remarks that she felt sad to see this self-portrait where I was crying. Though I don’t recall what you say exactly, it is a tremendously blunt statement about how my sadness is blatantly apparent to you, too. At fifteen, I felt sometimes that we are like them, Van Gogh and his brother, Theo.

I spent much of my time for a few years not worrying about you, as it was too hard to think about how much danger you were in. I hoped sometimes you would create something, like you did occasionally before you turned twelve and found the escape which has grown with you. There was an immobility and eerie stillness to my sobriety and psychological withdrawal. My consciousness had shadows and colours, evidence of fear’s physical grips, just at the edges. 

September 2021

And once, I asked another to relish in the suffering caused by a venom, by a sting,

and the other did not seem so willing to drink up their own suffering

To refuse the preached state of things, 

allowing ambiguity to swathe its blanket-like weight upon all that is just a sense, just a feeling,

Of what importance is the separation?

You and I have grown into something strange, where currently hope doesn’t inspire a clear goal. It instead emerged simultaneously with the understanding that we only have two options as people. We either cope or die. Once we knew that we would not choose to die, we lamented and walked in circles until we understood that we must cope. Hope is the revelation—one hardly spontaneous—that an existence focused on its own destruction is no existence at all. We had to see the struggle as being evidence of a body of things both equal and opposite; we had to believe that this could not be all.

You need their name, number, and relation on the front page of most intake forms. Describe someone who would come see you, someone you can trust to make choices on your behalf. 

Through a thick haze, you always saw me clearly. If the time comes, you can trust me to decide again. 

December 2024

In the passenger seat of your car, you showed me an old video of you falling down the stairs face-first

I thought that in the video, you looked younger,

But really, you looked like someone I didn’t recognize

And I’m not sure now if it was because I was too embedded in my own addiction or if you just weren’t around.

You laughed hard, I didn’t.

There is this soft movement, emphasized by the lengthening of time that comes with sobriety and depression. The movement is defined by understanding escape is not an option. We move from a space of hoping for one’s own undoing into hoping for the strength to choose, into hoping for the strength to keep going. Eventually, the things of our desires become more abstract and intricate. First, we want to want things. Eventually, we believe in a future where what we want is not a substance, not escapism, not sleep, not forgetting. And we are here, further than we have ever been before.

I think you and I initially hated the idea of hope. Or at least we hated what we understood hope to be. Hope, to us back then, was surrendering to foolish helplessness, wishing to be preyed upon. 

I think we had already learned that nobody was going to devour us. 

I think we had already learned that we were our own undoing.

I think we have a biased understanding of surrender. 

The actual ability to hope requires a real degree of knowing your pain to be acute and temporary. Everything within a young mind feels eternal. To hope, in our sense, is to know. It is to believe. It is to think of recovery and actualization no longer as choices but as necessities, where it was only ever an illusion that we could turn away. 

Tomorrow is the most dangerous day in addiction, but tomorrow is something that we are all constantly ill-equipped to face. My hope for myself has changed, as has my hope for you. It manifests as my persistent belief that things will continue to be okay. Because we must cope.

Sitting on the asphalt outside my local grocery store, 

I identify that each time,   

drab skyline descends into the quiet of night.

I will be your emergency contact, if things are ever to be like they were before. I will be your emergency contact, because things will get better than they are now.