jennipenni's Open Salon Blog

The Usefulness of Cliches

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 20:11:27 -0500

One instant can change a person's life forever. It's a cliche, but if you are addicted to drugs and alcohol, cliches begin to define your life. Easy does it. One day at a time. Live and let live. Let go and let God.

I hit rock bottom.

Arizona has some of the toughest DUI laws in the country. I now have three. After my first two DUI's, a multitude of fines and two twenty-four hour jail sentences, I somehow managed to scrape together five years of continued sobriety. I quit going to meetings and white knuckled the last year, just holding on for that five year chip. I got the chip, but life continued. My relationship with my husband still felt strained to the breaking point and, though I love my son dearly, I still felt ill-equipped and overwhelmed as a mother. I started graduate school again (I had dropped out from a previous graduate program due to a mental breakdown, culminating in my second DUI), thinking that the prestige of a degree might help take the edge off of my inferiority complex-but it only added fuel to the fire. So I started to drink, just a couple at first, along with a marijuana maintenace program that evolved into a twenty-four hour high.

I continued to drink a measured amount and really thought that this time I could control it-another cliche. I vowed to never, ever drink and drive again. I vowed to never get blackout drunk again. I vowed to control myself. I just stopped vowing to stay sober. And with the two to three drinks I was allowing myself I stopped getting buzzed. I started to become miserable in my attempt at controlled abstinence. I did not drink for the taste; I drank for the effect and now the effect was simply a bitter aftertaste.

I did not set out to get a third DUI. No one ever does. I cannot describe the incomprehensible demoralization of having a police officer haul you off to jail-the shame of making a decision that you would never have made while sober. This time I drank to get drunk. This time I drove in a black out. This time I went up on the sidewalk at just the wrong time. This time I narrowly missed hitting a pedestrian and when the cop pulled me over, I didn't even know it.

Everyone finds God in jail-another cliche. I found my Higher Power again. I started to pray. It had taken one year since my initial relapse to hit a bottom I had never dreamed possible. I missed my son. I had called the babysitter at exactly eight-thirty the night before to make sure that he was safe in bed. I had taken the babysitter's reassurances that he was sleeping soundly and to enjoy myself as an exuse to drink more than three drinks, an excuse to persue alcohol's original purpose for me, an excuse to get buzzed and then downright drunk. I was charged with a felony and had no idea if I would ever see him again.

My prayers were foxhole prayers. "God, get me out of this, and I'll never drink again..." The difference was this time I really meant them. This time I felt the depths of dispair and the only solution was to stop everything.

Why did I drink? I drank to relieve intense boredom and lonliness, isolation and the persistant feeling that I was different from those around me. I'm the one standing in a crowd who feels like an outsider, who feels all alone in a room full of people. For me, alcohol was a magic elixir, a tonic to make me at ease with others and with myself. For a while it served its purpose. Then the blackouts started. Then the DUI's and promises to myself and God that I was done with drinking forever. That I had had my fill and this time was the last time. Till now.

Now my drinking has finally caught up with me...

Anomie

Tue, 7 Aug 2012 16:08:00 -0400

Anomie: A lack of communal values or standards to help an individual define his or her place within society.

I know this definition--not because I have a BS in sociology, and it is one of the main elements of Durkheim's contributions to the field--no, I know this because a professor asked me what it meant in a political journalism class as I was embarking on, yet, another quest for my place in American society--this time, in the form of graduate school.

Guess what? I didn't know the answer even though I had speant my undergraduate years in a state of anomie, myself, searching for where I fit in--grunge; goth; bisexual; hippie--all involving copious amounts of alcohol and drugs.

My undergraduate education consisted of cramming for tests the night before and spewing out papers on topics that were immediately forgotten after they had been turned in. More than once, I have wondered if that's one of the reasons the acronym for a bachelor of science is also the acronym for bullshit.

However, I came out of college a devout socialist, so I can honestly say not all was lost.

The inquiring professor had served as a campaign advisor to Nixon and was a fan of Ayn Rand. In all honesty, I hated him, but after the initial humiliation of not knowing the defnition to a basic tenant in sociological theory, I began to see how much my own life echoed the very anomie Durkheim described.

Significant social bonds no longer seemed to exist for me. My family lived an hour and a half away; the closest friend that I had was also in the process of searching for her place in society, moving states every year until we lost touch altogether. I had bar acquaintences, and when I drink I change, so they never stuck around to become more than acquaintences.

I felt empty much of the time, and so I consumed to fill the emptiness: alcohol; cigarettes; drugs; sex; fast food; make up; clothes; stupid plastic things made in China that seemed like necessities at the time that I bought them. For as often as I consumed at Walmart and Walgreens, the cashiers still did not know me by name, and I returned the favor. Eventually, I gave in and used the self check-out line, cursing the machine for its inhumanity each time it told me that I had not placed an item inside of the plastic bag, even though I had.

I wonder if for all our material wealth--America becomes a part of the 1% when we look at ourselves globally-we haven't lost something crucial, something necessary for the well being of our collective psyche?

Our communal values. Our communal standards. We've lost our community. It's been replaced by reality tv; Walmarts; and Quick Trips.

Russian Roulette and the Velveteen Rabbit

Wed, 1 Aug 2012 03:08:01 -0400

My uncle owns a gun store. In front of his store stands a large sign in the shape of a heart with the phrase, "guns save lives" written in red letters and lit up from within the giant organ for all to see.

When I was seven, a neighbor boy shot himself with his stepfather's pistol playing Russian roulette with a friend. That gun did not save his life, nor did it save the life of the ones he left behind, his grieving parents and friends. At the time, when I heard the news of the neighbor boy's demise, I didn't understand.

I didn't understand what sort of a game Russian roulette was until I watched The Deer Hunter at a much later age, when Christopher Walken placed the pistol against his temple again and again, his psyche undone by the horrors of war, but by that time, I was already against the use of guns.

I think it was my mother's story that did it. Her horrified recollection of the first hunting trip she was allowed to go on with her older brother, and the rabbit, so velveteen and full of life as it shot past them that it caused her to squeal out in wonder and glee when they sighted it, then the crack of her brother's rifle as the lead pumped into the rabbit's body and it fell to the ground, dead instantly--so stark; so real; so permanent: the velveteen rabbit, limp and lifeless forever.

My mother recalls her grief, the grief of witnessing the death of a living animal alive no more. As a living animal she had wanted to stroke its warm fur, now a carcass, she couldn't bare the thought of touching, much less consuming the prey before her.

I don't understand this right. I want to. Academically, I can allow for the possibility that in a state where only police have fire arms, there arises the potential for a police state. But in a country where all weapons, including semi-automatic and automatic weapons, are fair game, only anarchy can ensue, such as the ones that have occurred in Aurora, CO and elsewhere. Accidents, such as the one that afflicted the neighbor boy happen every day to approximately five children from negligence on the part of hand gun owners in unloading and locking up firearms.

I love my uncle. He is not an evil man. He is a man of conviction-just as my mother and I are convicted. We do not talk about politics at family get togethers. Religion is actually safer, but movies and television are the main staple of family conversation. Much like this nation, my family stands on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and rather than risk our relationship in other areas, we choose to ignore this particular topic, each of us biding our time and hoping that eventually we will have the government and laws that will suit our vision of society the best.

Crazy?????

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 01:07:10 -0400

I have bipolar disorder. I have borderline personality disorder. I have an eating disorder. I have whatever psychiatric diagnosis someone with a doctorate in the field of head shrinking can write on my chart.

My question--are we really all that mentally ill, or nothing more than individuals with a plethora of personality quirks, some similar, some different? Together, are we simply less capable of concealing our quirks while interacting with our more "normal peers"-- but perhaps their normalcy is nothing more than a more successful endeavor to conceal the very same emotions and personality flaws haunting the rest of us. Perhaps, we are just more self-aware.

But then what about the geniuses of society....the highly creative-the ones who left us with artifacts of their mental illness in the form of paintings, books, poetry, music...Rather then trying to conceal their emotions, they expressed them through various artistic mediums. Van Gogh is one of our greatest painters, even minus an ear. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven after suffering from decades of depression. Anne Sexton also turned to carbon monoxide: this time from the exhaust fumes of the car running in her garage.

Fame allows for mental illness. Wealth allows for mental illness. Poverty, the lower and middle classes do not. This is best observed in the differences from rehab to rehab, clinic to clinic, etc....

I wish I could focus solely on the contributions of those historical figures suffering from various brain disorders with limited options of medication: Isaac Newton; Beethoven; Virginia Woolf and Van Gogh all suffered from bipolar disorder--Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill from debilitating depression. John Nash, the famous mathematician, best known because of the film, A Beautiful Mind, suffered from schizophrenia.

Now, James Holmes has committed the largest mass shooting in U.S. history, and the debate over a pre-existing mental illness ensues. It seems that in the wake of such a horrendous tragedy, too much emphasis has been placed on why Holmes could possibly conceive of such a heinous plan; and not enough emphasis on how Holmes could possibly find such a plan so easy to carry out, due to inadequate regulations and lack of government oversight towards the gun and ammunition industry.

Unfortunately, Holmes' mental condition takes precedence over the strong influence of the NRA, which repeatedly moves to prevent the passing of life-saving legislation in the form of longer waiting periods and a ban on semi-automatic and automatic weapons.

The Psychology of My Junior High Bully

Mon, 21 May 2012 17:05:06 -0400

"Bitch!"

That word, directed at me in the middle of a crowded hall at my junior high, made my face hot while simultaneously turning the rest of my body to ice. I darted into class, my heart racing, fumbling to find my place in the latest Stephen King novel, a sanctuary from the pitfalls of social interaction within the public school system--until now.

Cora Lang. I remember her name to this day, just as I remember the fear she instilled within me, and my absolute bewilderment at just how this girl had gone from being a semi-friend--someone I had once had over to my house in the fourth grade--to my mortal enemy in the sixth.

Cora Lang had a port wine birthmark that spread across her chin. I remember this. I remember not thinking too much about it when she came to my house. But my father also has a birthmark on the left side of his face, and he took it upon himself to try to talk to Cora about their shared birthright while she was visiting.

At the time, even I didn't understand. In all honesty, I was jeaulous. What the hell did Cora have that made her so much more interesting to my father than me? In hindsight, I see what my father was trying to do; just as I see Cora's reaction, her dislike towards me, which kindled into a kind of hatred that simmered in the halls of our junior high and came to a boil every time I had the misfortune of crossing her path. My father had pointed something out to her. Something I was missing. Something she shared with him that I should have had. I understand the psychology behind it now.

I didn't then.

My parents took me out of school at the beginning of the sixth grade. I had developed an eating disorder, and would go into the hospital shortly thereafter.

Once, while walking to the store with my mother, we passed Cora on the other side of the street.

"Bitch!"

My face burned.

"Hey, Cora...Fuck you!"

Having my mother by my side made me bolder, but she scolded me for my language and went across the street to try to reason with my tormentor as I stood there--embarrassed, alone, and cold.