I gave up on sleep the second night after I heard a scuffle of squeaking and scratching from the alley and drifted into the living room, intending to read. I lingered at the window, staring out over the dark street. In the corner was the table I’d set up for Felix to work on dioramas. He’d seemed so excited about it, and had sat here for hours, working on sketches in a notebook, cutting out pieces he might want to use and collecting bits of twigs and rocks and glass from outside. But although he’d gotten inspired by each podcast I listened to, had a hundred ideas of what he could do, he hadn’t actually made a move on any of them.
It was as if he thought he only had one chance and he had to find the right idea, the perfect idea, before he began. As if he thought I might not get him another box, and another and another, until he’d created every single display he might want.
You live a diorama life, Felix had said to me.
I sat down in his chair and looked at the bits and pieces laid out on the table, curious about what he’d intended to do with them, but I didn’t open his notebook because that seemed like an invasion. For weeks, I’d thought that the box was empty, but when I leaned closer, I realized that it wasn’t. Not quite.
Inside the large box, in the back right corner, was a very small cutout of a man, sitting and looking at something no one else could see. Alone.
I stared at him for a long time. Then, when morning came, I showered and went to a meeting. But not to any of the meetings I usually went to—not the one nearest me or the three I frequented with different sponsees. I found a meeting I’d never been to before. A meeting where chances were I wouldn’t know anyone. A meeting where maybe I could get help instead of giving it.
This one was in Washington Heights, and like so many, it was in the basement of an unassuming church on an unassuming street, with nondescript folding chairs and a generic urn of coffee. I took a seat, surprised by how something could feel so familiar and so foreign at the same time. When the other attendees arrived, the meeting leader welcomed us and turned to me.
“This is your first time with us, right?”
I nodded. I knew the drill.
“I’ve been sober for ten years, two months, and sixteen days,” I said. “My name is Dane.”
A chorus of “Hi, Dane”s echoed back to me for the first time, and something inside me unknotted.
It was a speaker meeting, two people sharing for longer, rather than multiple people sharing more briefly. When the first woman said she was a psychologist, I leaned in, interested. Padmini had long, dark hair threaded through with silver and the graceful hands and perfect posture of a dancer. She had just reached the twelve-year mark of sobriety and told the story of a life of academic pressure culminating in addiction and how far she’d come since then. It was a familiar story, but the way she described both her addiction and her struggles with sobriety were new to me, and I found myself rapt with recognition.
“The biggest challenge for me,” she said, “is no longer a fear that I might use again. It’s overcoming the fear of what addiction revealed to me: that I am not safe. That I am not in control. That I am subject to something frightening that will never go away.”
This made my heart pound.
“I’ve spent a long time hearing my patients’ stories of addiction and trauma, just like I’ve heard them at meetings.” She smiled at us knowingly. “I know we’ve all heard them. And what I’ve come to believe is that addiction is a trauma.”
She paused and let that idea sink in.
“Not what we did while we were using drugs or who we hurt, ourselves included. The state of being an addict is traumatic. Being addicted is the state of not feeling in control of our lives, our decisions. It is desperately needing something that we know harms us. It is knowing, deep in our bones, that we are powerless. And being powerless is terrifying. It’s terrifying if you’re a child powerless before an abusive parent. It’s terrifying if you’re a soldier powerless in the face of martial orders. It’s terrifying if you’re the victim of sexual assault.”
I thought of the nightmares I woke from, terrified that I was using again, the fear coming from the sense that I had lost the control I’d worked so hard to gain.
“Much of getting sober is attaining a sense of control,” Padmini went on. “Control over our addictions, over our behaviors, our choices. But no amount of asserting control after the fact erases the loss of control we experienced, any more than asserting control can erase having been assaulted or attacked. It can retrain our brains and bodies to feel better, less afraid. But unless we can acknowledge the trauma we experienced, we’re not going to move past it, even if the cause for that trauma is no longer a daily struggle for us.”