My senior year of high school I opted out of health class. I wanted a free period, and there was another way to get the required credit. I dreamed this free period would be the first of the day so I could sleep in, but instead I was given the last period of the day to myself. What I did with this free time is now a mystery. I was painfully well behaved, so I was not smoking weed behind a tall oak tree in the Grant High School park or making out with someone in their car (I wish!). I played sports so I was probably, in all honesty, in the girl’s locker room, a cold cement dungeon, doing my homework until practice.
I wasn’t a righteous goody two shoes. My behavior was a simplistic reaction to my very loose and free childhood. My mom and dad were always open with me about their drug use. I knew marijuana was not the Bogeyman health teachers and the DARE program in middle school made it out to be. I was taught that the war on drugs was a racist ploy to uphold a racist, classist power structure. I didn’t believe weed was a gateway to hard drugs or hard living; as far as I could tell, it was a necessary balm for my high energy mom. All that said, when I was around 14, my mom and I had a heart to heart. She told me that I could take any drug in the world so long as she was the dealer. Nothing was off-limits, but she had to supply it and she had to know where I was and who I was with when I took it. I’m not sure how other people would feel hearing that offer from their parents, but I told her, “I don’t think so, momma. I’m not really interested. That’s your thing.”
When I try to understand this impulse now, what I remember was the sensation in my body. I did not want to escape my reality, to unhinge the rigid bits of my brain and expand outward. I wanted to clamp down harder. I wanted to control every impulse, to go more deeply inside. Mine was like a spirit that craved being zipped into a bag, tighter and higher, contracting inward into a dense, perfect diamond; mine was a teenage girl’s brain circling itself, seeking a kind of perfection that manifested as a whittling knife. I have seen this in other girls. It is a road to eating disorders. It is a demonic riddle that no amount of intelligence or rationalizing seems to be able to outsmart.
I doubt health class would have helped. At the time, Portland Public Schools had a defined set of requirements that let you bypass the class. First, you had to pass a test proving you knew the basic contents of the textbook. This I could do easily because test taking and short term memorization were skills I understood. I read the entire textbook in a sprint and took the test bleary eyed. Second, you had to get your first aid and CPR certification for which I attended a few night classes at the Red Cross on North Vancouver the week before graduation. I kissed a plastic dummy (had it been sanitized?) and ate some cookies I found on the ground that some blood donor had left behind. These I would call poor health behaviors.
The final requirement was that I had to attend three AA meetings. I did not question this because I didn’t really question school at all. This was a requirement so I would fulfill it.
I procrastinated and had exactly two days—Thursday and Friday until 3 pm—remaining to submit my signatures showing I’d attended three AA sessions. I didn’t have a license or a car (another sign of my unwillingness to exit childhood), but my dad who cared enormously that I graduate from high school, offered to drive me around. I didn’t know how to find AA meetings, but he stepped in to help too, and we opened up the Yellow Pages at home to find a phone number we could call. I remember a recording at the end of the line listing local sessions—day, time, name, focus, location—one after the next. Thursdays, 5 to 6 pm, Fruits of Burden, Cocaine Anonymous for Gays and Lesbians, 15 North Morris Street. I scribbled down all the sessions I could find in our neighborhood as the voice read them off.
That Thursday session from 5 to 6 pm was in fact the first one I tried to attend. My dad drove me to a building right across from the Red Cross. I raced in, harried, and found a room full of people dressed nicely in suits sitting around a board room table. I was late! They were deep in conversation. I opened the door, and they all grew silent and looked my way.
“Is this Fruits of Burden, Cocaine Anonymous for Gays and Lesbians,” I asked nervously.
“No,” a dapper man replied. “We’re the board of directors of the Nara Indian Health Clinic.”
The red hot embarrassment that sprung to my cheeks could have toasted a piece of bread. I apologized, closed the door, and tiptoed out of the building where I had to wait an hour on the curb until my dad returned to pick me up. Zero of three AA meetings down. Something like 21 hours to go.
The next meeting near our home was at ten pm in the basement of a commercial building on North Dekum Street. Dekum has become more commercial (and gentrified) than it was in 2003. At the time, the area was not filled with places to eat or drink, so the street was fairly silent, especially late at night. My dad dropped me off a little early so I wouldn’t barge in late. He promised to wait outside this time. I don’t know if he felt nervous—neither of my parents had very strong stranger-danger and I was taught to be trusting first, although never without judgement. But I’m sure I felt anxious, having just burst into the wrong meeting with what was now less than 24 hours to attend three AA sessions in order to graduate from high school, with no idea what I was walking into in the dark, sleep deprived and manic.
The room was dim except for candlelight. A few chairs were placed in a circle. I nervously introduced myself to a man who seemed like the host and asked if it was appropriate for me to join the meeting. He said I was welcome to be there, but that I should introduce myself to the group before we started. Slowly, a few other men joined. At ten, there were six men and me. We sat in a circle in the candlelight. All of them were dressed for blue collar jobs—sturdy work pants and coats, sweatshirts, rough boots. I think they were from their thirties to their sixties. I introduced myself with the voice of a mouse, as briefly as I could, and they told me I was welcome to join them. After the host welcomed us and set the ground rules, each man spoke. The tone was very personal, unmitigated by the need to impress or contextualize or shape a narrative. One man talked about how he had been driving to a bar but at the last moment veered to come here instead. He had been sober for a few weeks but today he didn’t think he could continue. But now he was here, with us, instead of at the bar, and he was glad he had come. Another man talked about his family and how much they relied on him, how removed he felt from them, and how little he thought they knew him. He alluded to his work as physically brutalizing and sometimes scary, but stable and inescapable. He thanked us all for being there with him. One by one, each man spoke. We listened attentively. No one seemed distracted. Several must have felt rattled but I remember feeling like their whole presence was in the room, not elsewhere. I felt incredibly honored to have someone share something so real and personal with me. I felt my heart leap out to them, like I wanted to wrap it around them so they knew I cared about how they were.
At some point everyone had spoken except me. They looked my way. The host asked me to please share. I tried to decline, but he said it didn’t matter that I wasn’t there because of alcoholism; I was invited to share with them anyway, whatever I needed to get off my chest. I began to speak, surprising myself as the words stumbled out of my mouth. I told them that I was supposed to graduate from high school in a matter of days, but I didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment. I was rattled by fear about what was ahead—so many things unknown. Instead of feeling excited I felt terrified. I was going to move really far away to go to college, which is what I had wanted, but I was overwhelmed by the black curtain that seemed to separate my present from my future. I felt inept, pathetic, completely and totally uncertain about the things some people seemed to know, like what I wanted to “be,” what I wanted to study. These men listened to me. I did not feel judged. I felt strangely held, as though their hearts too had stretched from their bodies to mine to soothe me. I had not expressed these fears aloud before. I’m not sure if I’d ever honestly expressed them to myself. I hadn’t expected to speak at all. If anything, I had been feeling guilty for doing this voyeuristic thing at the request of unknown public school administrators. But here, heading towards 11 pm, I felt included in this small group of strangers. I registered the differences in scale of what they had shared and what I was sharing—that sensation never left me—but I also felt welcomed to crack myself open and see what came out. Suddenly, in the middle of speaking, I started crying hard. I cried without speaking for some time, and when my tears let up, I thanked them for letting me share and grew silent. I cannot know what they honestly felt, but they treated me as though they cared about my mental health, too. I found that I cared enormously about theirs.
The next morning I skipped school and attended two AA sessions, both in NW Portland at a church in a large carpeted gathering room in the basement with light coming in just at the ceiling. Both were attended by 50-plus people so there was only time for a few people to share. This time I did feel like a voyeur, a trespasser, in a way I hadn’t felt the night before. I remember one woman who described sitting on the number 6 bus, which I rode almost everyday, and staring at her veins. She so badly wanted to shoot up, and she couldn’t stop staring at her veins, which were talking to her, almost like they were not part of her own body. I imagined myself on the bus sitting next to this woman. Would I know how she was feeling? I imagined myself as this woman. I thought about my own veins, which had not turned against me. I felt awash in an almost out of body empathy like I were seeing my own veins for the first time and their potential for betrayal. I got my two remaining signatures and submitted my requirements to my high school just in time.
These memories are clouded by the distance of 18 years. I am now 36, twice as old, exactly, as I was then. I have lived as long as an “adult” as I had then lived as a minor; I have walked through that first black curtain and then others.
I hadn’t thought about these experiences in years, but a few nights ago I was reading Meghan O’Gieblyn’s essay “The Insane Idea,” first published by The Point and now included in her wonderful collection Interior States, and the memories came rushing back. O’Gieblyn’s essay is a thorough and generous rebuttal to other journalists who seek to tear down AA as “unscientific.” Other journalists argue that there are more effective ways to deal with alcoholism, namely medications and programs that focus more on free will and self-control. O’Gieblyn points out that though alcoholism may be a disease, the treatment is so profoundly wrapped up in the psyche without a single origin point that for centuries the “cure” has eluded medicine and science. Everything being proposed now has been proposed in the past. She tells the story of AA founder, Bill Wilson, “a stockbroker whose personal nadir coincided with the crash of the market, and in his autobiographical writings he often conflated the failure of this national ideology with his inability to master his own drinking. ‘A morning paper told me the market had gone to hell again,’ he wrote of a relapse in 1932. ‘Well, so had I.’ ” After years and countless attempts to become sober, Wilson had an epiphany: He found he no longer craved drinking when he was working with other alcoholics. All his previous attempts had been inward facing, about personal willpower. They had always eventually failed. “To be an alcoholic, Wilson argues, is to confront the essentially irrational side of one’s nature. Looking deeply into the self only draws one further into the realm of the absurd,” O’Gieblyn explains.
I had never known much about AA, besides this experience as a teen and knowing a few friends who attend regularly. I’d heard about its vaguely Christian underpinnings, although that left no impression on me during my attendance. I suppose from movies and popular narratives I had assumed that the center was the act of confession—telling your story. But we can warp our stories; we can tell lies.
“Those who complain that the program is run by ‘nonprofessionals’ often miss the fact that, according to Wilson’s model, the primary beneficiary is the provider of aid, not its receiver,” O’Gieblyn writes. “AA has often been labeled a ‘self-help group,’ but it is in fact the opposite: a fellowship for people who have utterly failed in their attempts to help themselves.”
She continues that the Higher Power called upon in AA is less about a Christian God than about surrender and service. The Higher Power can be the group itself. It is less a destination than an action: moving the focus outside yourself to someplace or someone else.
AA doesn’t help everyone escape alcoholism. Nothing so complex can have a single cure. But in reading O’Gieblyn’s essay, I loved the way its central premise refutes the idea of a bootstrap mentality, of personal ultimate control. It is not blaming the individual, because then the load of guilt and self-loathing would be too high. It does empower that person to see their situation as shared. This is a tricky thing that I believe the English language robs us of the ability to understand: That we may not be in control of our circumstances, and we do not need to take personal responsibility for cultural failings as a whole, but that this is not a green light for fatalism or apathy. We have enormous power over others, for good and bad. We have the ability to sway and be swayed, to love and be loved.
I forget this lesson all the time. I also remember it all the time. We become our fullest selves through the quality of our interactions and care for others. How well do we listen? How honestly do we empathize? How willing are we to extend ourselves beyond our bodies to be present with another? Many of us are taught to protect ourselves, to not give too much, and that is important. One can lose oneself in others. But sometimes self-preservation acts as armor, a hardness that transfigures our hearts into something less pliable, both for others and for ourselves. The only way to learn what is safe and what is too much is through experience. This is the dance of growing up, out, old, in.
I do not know who created this alternate curricula for health class in 2003. I suspect it has long since been removed from Portland Public Schools. Ethically, I cannot tell if I think it’s appropriate for a high schooler with no context to enter these spaces. But I honestly believe that in those 24 hours I learned more about health—and here I mean taking care of yourself—than a semester on protein, regular exercise, and the dangers of drugs would have taught me. Health begins in our relationships to both ourselves and others. When we tend to our heads and hearts, in all the complex interpersonal ways that requires, our bodies often follow.
Lola, you continue to amaze me as a writer, a thinker, an explorer and giver of the gifts emerging from your explorations. Thanks for sharing them. AA has helped many many people, including me. Finding a place to speak and listen without judgment or cross talk was not part of my experience until then. What a life!
This was great. Can't wait to read more - especially after your trip.