Search Results for: dad

Keeping My Promise to Popo

Ada Wong / Getty

Anne Liu Kellor | Longreads | September 2019 | #of minutes (2,604 words)

No one can agree on how old my grandmother is. Because she was born in wartime China, because they use the lunar calendar, because she immigrated from the mainland to Taiwan to America and declared her own birthdate, or because she’s always been vain and told people she is younger. Is she 98, 100, 102? Her sister claims one age, Popo another, her Social Security card yet something else. How can there be such a range of unknown?

Regardless, now she is finally, undeniably, old. I watch as Popo rests in the hospital bed in Monterey Park, her body thin, dressed in a pale green gown. Oxygen tube in her nose and around her neck, short greasy hair flattened, black with white roots. Mouth curved into a frown. Hearing aid, glasses, wig, glittery rings, all removed. Fingers no longer able to scrawl characters on her erasable black board with the pointed stick. Eyes no longer able to watch Chinese soap operas on TV. Mouth involuntarily moving, like she’s chewing, or rooting. Voice involuntarily making sounds, eh, eh, eh, eh. Sleep coming in short intervals, drifting off for an hour here and there, in between nurses coming to check on her.

The nurses are Filipino, Chinese, East African. They come in and open her curtain every hour or two, glance at her vitals, rotate her body, write things down on a chart and leave. On the white board beside her bed it says “Mandarin,” so sometimes they speak to Popo in Mandarin, but the white board does not say that she is basically deaf, and that in the last many years she’s reverted to speaking Cantonese, her childhood language. They might as well be whispering to her in Tagalog or Somali. She does not hear a thing they say.
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Tramp Like Us

Photo by Alia Smith, courtesy of the author / Little, Brown and Company

Dan Kois | excerpted from How to Be a Family | Little, Brown and Company | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,373 words)

 

“Is there a way I could chaperone,” I asked my daughter’s teacher, “that doesn’t include snorkeling in freezing-cold water?”

We were in New Zealand to learn how the lives of Kiwi families differed from our own east coast suburban bubble. One way, it turned out, was that my 9-year-old was taking a school field trip to snorkel in the little bay by our house in Wellington. It was an example of EOTC, education outside the classroom, a crucial part of Kiwi schooling, ranging from day trips like this to secondary-school tramps across the Tongoriro Alpine Crossing.

When I’d volunteered to chaperone, I hadn’t known that chaperones were expected to bring their own wet suits in order to get in the water with the kids. Now, I like snorkeling, but the very idea of owning my own wet suit was patently absurd. So that’s why I asked if there was some other way I could help.

“On the snorkeling trip?” she replied dubiously. “Errr . . . we do need a few people to stand at the shore keeping an eye on everyone. Perhaps you could do that?”
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McDreamy, McSteamy, and McConnell

Illustration by Jason Raish

Samuel Ashworth| Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,389 words)

 

Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) are nestled in one another’s arms, sweat glistening on their muscled chests. They kiss softly and tenderly. It’s the middle of the night in a hotel somewhere on the campaign trail, and they are in love.

“So, if you were an animal, which would you be?” asks Ted.

“Let me think,” says Marco. “A manatee.”

Welcome, friends, to the glorious world of congressional fan fiction. If you’ve always associated fan fiction with the kind of people who hand-sew their own Star Trek jumpsuits, think again. Since going online in the late ’90s, fan fiction — a fan-created spinoff (sometimes way, way off) of an already-existing pop culture presence — has exploded. Its protagonists range from fictional, like Han Solo, to real, like Ariana Grande or members of the British Parliament. Published stories, which can range from a few hundred words to a few hundred thousand, number in the tens of millions, and boast an immense readership. The genre also remains one of the few resolutely not-for-profit corners of the internet: Since the work often involves trademarked intellectual property, fair use rules forbid fanfic authors from making money off their writing, unless they change all recognizable details, as E.L. James did with her BDSM Twilight fanfic story, Fifty Shades of Grey. Stories about congress fall under the penumbra of “Real-person fiction,” which isn’t bound by copyright laws in the same way.
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What’s Happening to My Body?

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Devorah Heitner | Longreads | September 2019 | 15 minutes (3,869 words)

My mother always said she had thunder thighs. On one visit home, I found a picture of little Cindy at about age 10, long before she was my mother. In the picture, her thighs, solid like mine, are turned outward, in first position. I studied the picture, noting how the blue costume cast a pallor on her pale skin. Her arms made an oval above her head. Her brown eyes looked big and nervous. She was not smiling. Maybe all the girls took ballet in the ’50s, in Little Neck, Long Island. The picture doesn’t give the impression that she was begging to do this.

The huge breasts that would later try to kill her hadn’t emerged yet. Just a small rise underneath her leotard. Holding the photo made me recall the sensation of my own breasts budding, stretching me from the inside, my nipples constantly sore, and rubbing, and wrong.
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Fugitive Justice

Illustration by Lily Padula

Jennifer Lunden | Longreads | September 2019 | 25 minutes (6,331 words)

Our fuchsia had vanished. The empty pot lay broken on the front porch where just the previous day the fully flowered plant had hung, splendid and cheery. I found one lone tendril in the driveway — its three pink and purple blossoms still miraculously attached, its roots still flecked with soil. I tried to piece together the mystery, but I could not.

Later, I got an email from our tenant, Annie:

Someone absconded with one of the hanging fuchsia! Because I am a person with a strong sense of justice, I tracked a trail of blossoms and stems up to Cumberland Ave this morning, where I found the pot smashed and the tendrils scattered.

She had reclaimed our busted pot and left it on the porch. Annie chalked it up to a drunken lark, a random act of vandalism. But somebody had climbed our front steps, unhooked our hanging fuchsia, and left a trail of uprooted stems all the way around the block. Who would do such a thing? I wondered. Why?
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Paul Clarke Wants to Live

Photos courtesy of the Clarke family

Rebecca Tan | LongreadsAugust 2019 | 13 minutes (3,006 words)

I. “A death sentence”

On May 16, 2016, scores of adoring parents gathered at Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, beaming as 2,225 undergraduates threw their mortarboards into the air, colorful graduation cords swinging from their necks. Paul Clarke, a 22-year-old with brown hair and pale skin, was meant to be on that field. He was meant to have his name emblazoned in black under the list of economics majors, his portrait sitting snugly in the yearbook among the rest of the class of 2016. Instead, the young man was seven miles away, alone, in a dimly lit house littered with half-burned joints, beer cans, and hidden bags of opioids.

In the months following that bright Monday, as Clarke’s classmates settled into high-paying jobs in New York City and San Francisco, he overdosed on heroin three times.

When he was admitted to Penn in 2012, Clarke was a precocious, first-generation, low-income 18-year-old plucked from Kensington, Philadelphia — a neighborhood where heroin is sold often and openly in public — and ushered into the ivy-cloaked buildings of a storied campus. Despite a history of drug use in high school, Clarke stumbled along for his first three years there. He slipped into intense bouts of drug use during his summer breaks, but would always return to school in August, earning a near-perfect GPA. Between joining a fraternity and picking up a binge-drinking habit, he managed to make the dean’s list twice. Then, over the course of Clarke’s senior year, undiagnosed mental health problems sent him spiraling into addiction. As the summer turned into fall of that year, he switched his beers out for painkillers, stopped attending classes, and started crying himself to sleep.

Soon, Clarke was placed on academic probation, kicked out of his fraternity house, and forced to move back home to Kensington — a decision Penn officials said was based entirely on his poor academic performance that semester. He had failed two of his courses and had either failed or taken an incomplete in another, which according to university policy, meant he had to be “dropped from the rolls” and required to take time away from school. As he struggled to keep his spot at Penn, he found little in the way of support.

His friends and family spent months protesting his suspension, arguing that sending the 23-year-old back to Kensington was not only going to worsen his addiction, but could very likely kill him. In one of multiple emails sent to five of the university’s top administrators, Clarke’s half brother John Foley wrote, “I’m not convinced Paul will survive this time away.” In another, he stated plainly: “For Paul, a year away is a death sentence.” Aside from some contact with administrators focused on student wellness, who claimed to have no control over the situation, Foley’s emails went almost entirely unanswered.

The story of how an Ivy League student goes from the dean’s list to overdosing half a dozen times before his 25th birthday exposes a question at the heart of how universities respond when students face addiction: Allow them to stay on campus or send them away? Clarke’s efforts to claw his way back into school, to graduate, and just to survive, are a stark reminder of the stakes for students like him.

***

From the day he arrived at Penn, Clarke stood out from his peers. (Disclaimer: I went to Penn as well, and was enrolled at the same time as Clarke, although we never crossed paths socially or academically.) A 2017 study by the Equality of Opportunity Project found that 71 percent of Penn students come from the top 20 percent of the income scale, the second highest figure in the Ivy League. Outside the confines of what students call the “Penn bubble,” 26 percent of Philadelphia residents, including Clarke’s family, live below the poverty line.

But Kensington, the neighborhood where Clarke grew up, isn’t just poor. In October 2018, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on the area by Jennifer Percy, dubbing it the “Walmart of heroin.” Alongside a photograph of drug users shooting up underneath the Kensington Avenue underpass, the magazine describes the area as “the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast.”

In his admissions essay to Penn, Clarke wrote about the moment he learned that his home was different: “I found my mom’s coke straw after a tip from a friend who was asked to buy her a 20-bag,” he wrote. “I found out how my dad really died. I found out my house was always cockroach-filled and disgusting. I found out none of the things going on in my house were normal.”

When he arrived as a freshman in the fall of 2012, Clarke lacked some of the skills his classmates took for granted. He didn’t know he could email professors if he had problems, for example, and he found it hard to maintain eye contact with anyone, said a former girlfriend of his, Lody Friedman. In addition, Friedman said, Clarke’s “post-traumatic stress was very, bleedingly obvious.”

“And I’m not surprised,” she continued. “He experienced acute trauma his entire life.”

Clarke was 14 when he first took drugs. It was the summer; he stole a bag of marijuana from his stepfather and smoked it in his bedroom. Later that year, he asked one of his stepfather’s buddies for cocaine, but mistakenly got a bag of heroin. By the time he was in high school, Clarke was sampling from an extensive menu of substances. When he turned 15, he started taking Xanax, and at 16, picked up Klonopin. His preferred cocktail was a combination of cocaine and benzodiazepines.

“This behemoth of an institution brought him in like, ‘Look who we found from Kensington.’ But when he encountered the problems that they probably could have predicted, they sent him back.”

The summer after his freshman year of college, Clarke overdosed at his grandmother’s house in Port Richmond, a neighborhood bordering Kensington. When Foley, who lives in Washington, D.C., contacted Penn about the incident, Student Intervention Services, the department in charge of crisis situations, assured him that there would be a dedicated administrator monitoring Clarke in the coming semesters. This worked for a couple of months, until Clarke stopped responding to administrators and they stopped reaching out.

Two years later, Clarke found himself battling a major depressive episode more or less alone. Foley, who watched from afar, believes this was when the university failed his younger brother.

“This behemoth of an institution brought him in like, ‘Look who we found from Kensington.’ But when he encountered the problems that they probably could have predicted, they sent him back,” he said.

Friedman, who is now a teacher in Boston, feels similarly: “Students are expected to advocate for themselves, which is fine for those coming from affluent families, but it’s not fine for someone who has raised himself. If you knew Paul and understood his background, it’s pretty fucking obvious why he wouldn’t respond.”

 

II. To Reset or Derail?

It’s common practice at colleges and universities to encourage students struggling with severe addiction to take time off from their studies. At first blush, this policy seems reasonable: College campuses, rife with substance-fueled social events, can often be hostile to recovery. But this policy rests on some assumptions that, with students like Clarke, don’t apply.

At Penn, administrators are eager to emphasize that students struggling with their academics or health are urged to take a leave of absence in order to “reset.”

“We’ve tried to destigmatize the idea that a leave is failure,” said Rob Nelson, the former executive director for education and academic planning at the university. “The actual idea is that something is going wrong and you need to take time off. … Any kind of separation from the university usually has the effect of helping students succeed.”

For Clarke, this wasn’t the case. Sending him back to Kensington, by his own account, exacerbated his problems with addiction not just because his environment offered a steady stream of drugs, but because sending him away robbed him of one of the most important anchors in his life: being a Penn student.

Clarke spent four months at a recovery house in Collingswood, New Jersey, while participating  in a now-defunct recovery program called Life of Purpose in nearby Cherry Hill. There, trained mentors guided residents through recovery with the aim of transitioning them back to school. Similar collegiate recovery programs have existed since the 1970s, though they remained relatively unknown within higher education until about five years ago. According to the Hechinger Report, there were only several dozen collegiate recovery programs in 2013; today, there are around 200.

At Penn, the central resource for students struggling with addiction is the Office of Alcohol and Other Drugs, housed under the office of the vice provost for university life. The office’s director, Noelle Melartin, said in an email that they offer a program called First Step, “a brief intervention for students whose alcohol or substance use is at a lower level of severity.” Students like Clarke, with more severe cases of addiction, are referred to “appropriate outside services,” she wrote.

By the time it became clear to Penn that Clarke was struggling with addiction, he had already overdosed once and secured a steady supply of drugs from Kensington.

At elite universities, collegiate recovery programs can sometimes be seen as bad PR, experts say. James Winnefeld, a cochair of the nonprofit SAFE Project lost his college-age son to fentanyl-laden heroin in 2017. He told the Hechinger Report, “[Universities] don’t want parents walking around campus seeing posters that imply there is any kind of a substance abuse problem on campus.”

And yet, substance use among college-age Americans is clearly an issue. Figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation show that in 2017, more than 4,760 people ages 0 to 24 died from opioid overdose. According to a 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control, the number of drug overdose deaths of people ages 18 to 25 increased 411 percent from 1995 to 2015 — the greatest increase of any age group.

Despite this, a 2018 report found that fewer than 5 percent of universities in the United States have in-house recovery programs. Penn, in other words, is not the exception but the rule.

In December 2018, the Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on disability inclusion, released a report that concluded that Ivy League institutions are effectively using leaves of absence to push students off campus in order to avoid legal liability and bad press.  Read more…

Anaphylaxis of the Mind

Azurhino / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Alyson Pomerantz | Longreads | September 2019 | 21 minutes (5,316 words)

About 12 years ago, at my law firm’s holiday lunch, something strange happened when I took a bite of the crab appetizer. There was a tickling sensation in my throat. I say tickle, which makes it sound playful, but it was uncomfortable. I tried to clear it with a sip of wine, but the tickle stayed put. I went to the bathroom because the privacy of a small toilet seemed a better place for me to investigate what was wrong, despite the fact that it was poorly lit and I couldn’t open the door without it hitting the sink.

Of course, I could divine nothing in the tiny bathroom about what was causing the tickle deep in my throat. I sat on the toilet and tried to breathe, but my breathing only grew more labored.

I decided to call my doctor, who also happens to be my father. Though he worries about his children, he has that doctor way of being calm and cool in an emergency. Reciting some figures about anaphylaxis, he told me I should get to a hospital right away.

One of my co-workers helped me find a cab. The driver reminded me that he was not an ambulance, but I didn’t have a lot of experience with emergencies, and so I pleaded with him to take me to the hospital. At New York Presbyterian I stumbled toward the front desk, gesturing at my throat. I could barely whisper my name when the attendant asked.

They ushered me to a curtained-off space where I was given a huge dose of Benadryl. I was examined, but the doctor saw and felt nothing, which she said didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. She implored me to breathe and told me she would be back to check on me. This was in 2007, before smartphones could entertain us, and so I eavesdropped. The curtains were thin, and apparently everyone else there knew enough not to come to the emergency room by themselves. A woman on the other side of the curtain pleaded with the person she was with to stop touching “it.”

Eventually the doctor told me I was stable and could leave. My orders were to get an allergy test as soon as possible to sort out what had happened. I didn’t yet know that the allergy test was going to raise more questions than it would answer.

After the doctor left, I weighed whether I should splurge on another cab. The thought of riding the subway seemed daunting after what I had just been through, but I was fine, wasn’t I? The woman next to me urge her loved one to stop doing whatever he was doing again. The attentive badgering made me suddenly desperate for my own mother, who had been gone six years at that point. My mother was the one who always told my sister and me to treat ourselves after we’d been through something hard, but my father’s voice, the practical one, also loomed large in my head. I was 30 years old, wishing my mother were alive to give me permission to take a cab.

At that moment, nothing seemed sadder to me than sitting in that hospital, alone, convinced that but for a dose of Benadryl, I would be dead.

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The Geography of Risk

AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray

Gilbert M. Gaul The Geography of Risk | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 24 minutes (4,833 words)

 

It is the peculiar nature of hurricanes that they are both uncommon and utterly predictable. Depending on an island’s geography, it may have a one-in-ten chance of being hit, or a one-in-a-thousand chance. Those are only odds, of course, but they are important because hurricanes are best understood as numbers and probabilities. Some areas are simply more vulnerable than others — Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, the Florida Panhandle, and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. While you may reassure yourself that you have only a one-in-a-hundred chance of being leveled by a devastating storm in a given year, it’s highly likely that there will be a hurricane in one of these geographies, and someone’s house will be destroyed.

Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.

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The Story of Country Music’s Great Songwriting Duo

Jared Brainerd, Faber & Faber Social

Dylan Jones | Wichita Lineman | Faber & Faber | September 2019 | 26 minutes (5,155 words)

 

In 1961, like most fourteen-year-old boys Jimmy Webb was obsessed with three things: music, cars, and girls. In an effort to curb these distractions, his Baptist minister father got his son a part-time job ploughing wheat fields near Laverne, Oklahoma. One day, while listening to music on the green plastic transistor radio that hung from the tractor’s wing mirror, the young Jimmy Webb heard a song called “Turn Around, Look at Me,” sung by a new artist called Glen Campbell.

Webb loved that record, not just because of the tune, but mainly for the voice, which he thought was sweet and true.

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Addiction, Disorder, Disease, Call It What You Want: A Reading List on Alcoholism

Getty Images

No one sets out to become an alcoholic. Life happens. And then life happens some more, and one day one drink is eight drinks is you get the idea.

I never got to meet my dad’s dad. He died just after my older sister was born, when my dad was 21 and became a dad for the first time. Even though Grandpa was an alcoholic — to the point Grandma divorced him over it — that’s not what ultimately killed him. That’s just what I’m afraid will happen to my dad.

Alcoholism falls into two categories: alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence. Growing up, my dad’s drinking habit fell into the “week or weekend, 12-packs of Bud Light don’t judge” kind of dependence. He drank socially, but his specialty was drinking alone in the garage late into the night. Sometimes my mom would become so frustrated with his drinking that she’d go off to her parents’ house to avoid it altogether, leaving my sisters and me behind.

On one of these nights I needed a ride to stay over at a friend’s house and opened the door to the garage. I found Dad in the drunken state I expected and asked him for a ride. After reminding him Mom had left a couple hours earlier, he stared at me with bloodshot eyes, eventually slurring out, “Can you drive?” Not legally.

It took him more tries to get into the passenger seat than it did for me to start the car (one), and he passed out not long after that. When I pulled up to a stop light, an empty bottle rolled from under the seat and hit the back of my foot on the brake. The person in the passenger seat looked like my dad but wasn’t my dad. He wasn’t the person who loved me, who I loved back. He wasn’t the person who went to work every day to support his family. He wasn’t the person who told the best stories and made everyone laugh. He wasn’t my dad. The person next to me was this thing — addiction, disorder, disease, call it what you want — that manifested itself when the sun went down.

I was 17 when he got his first DUI. Attempts at sobriety started piling up after that, with nights of seeing him shake and sweat under blankets. I was 23 when my younger sister died in a car accident. Dad got his second DUI soon after that. Life happens.

There are days when I hope there’s still time for sobriety to stick to him. But I admit, there are more days when I’m a cynic, a realist. I know his body has been conditioned over decades to depend on alcohol in order to function and no one is meant to live forever.

For both the hopeful and the cynical, what follows is a reading list on how alcoholism has been experienced by real people who have struggled and managed to survive. Cheers.

1. For Leslie Jamison, Running and Drinking Were The Two Quickest Ways to Escape (Leslie Jamison, April 2018, Vogue)

For Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, running and drinking became her escape from shyness when she left junior high.

Jamison describes how she trained to be a long-distance runner and drank her way through high school, literally drinking to the point of passing out the night before her graduation ceremony. She “finally stopped drinking entirely” at 27 and it was at that point when she learned she “needed to be released from that defining sense of self,” created by running and drinking, so that she could “meet the other selves that were in there, waiting.”

If running and drinking both offered a sense of release from myself, they offered it in very different—nearly opposite—ways: Drinking felt like transportation out of myself, while running transformed my sense of who I was. If drinking loosened me from the cloister of my body, then running involved inhabiting that body fully: sweat pooling in my collarbone, flattening my hair to my skull, coating my shins in layers of dust and grime.

2. Distress Tolerance (Kaveh Akbar, April 2018, Gay Mag)

Psychologists refer to “distress tolerance” as our ability as individuals to endure negative or painful experiences. “Alcoholics and addicts, whose lives are often spent lurching from one painful crisis to another,” Kaveh Akbar writes, “tend to display distress tolerances that are significantly higher than those of their sober peers.”

Akbar uses his own experience with drinking as a remarkable case study for this assertion. He describes how he once got into a bike accident while drunk, resulting in a shattered pelvis and a cracked vertebra, but also the discovery by doctors that Akbar had a two-month-old fracture on a different vertebra that he didn’t know he had. Possibly more remarkable is that this wasn’t the turning point for Akbar to get sober. That “took another couple years.”

The more you drink, the more you become defined by the drink, the more you look like a drink and smell like a drink and behave like a drink. In a blackout, this effect reaches its apex — you leave your body completely, and the drink is finally left to move unaccompanied through the world.

3. For Years, Alcohol Was My Only Comfort. Then It Nearly Killed Me. (Heather King, July 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

Heather King, a former aircraft maintenance technician in the Air Force, writes about her history of drinking and how she “felt as if [she] had to drink in order to function, or at least appear to function, as a normal human being.” Alcohol was her “lifeline.” When she nearly dies in a drunk driving car crash, and after her mother bails her out of jail, King realizes she not only wants to get sober, she wants to live “[f]or the first time in many years.” And her desire to live, after nearly 20 years of drinking, finally outweighs the desire to drink.

Related reading: Jane Brody writes about functional alcoholism in a 2009 piece at The New York Times.

What I appreciate most about King’s piece is that she’s a realist. She acknowledges the “struggle” she “fought” to become sober, admitting that “[t]he decision to get sober and stay sober, by no means easy, was the single most important decision” she has made in life. She’s honest that she couldn’t get sober for anyone else, not even her children — she had to want it for herself for it to last.

Alcohol became my solution to everything. I justified it by saying, ‘If you lived my life, you would drink, too.’ I convinced myself I could stop. After all, quitting was simply a matter of will. The Air Force had taught me resiliency and strength. What other tools did I need? But alcohol had me beat; I just didn’t know it.

4. I Hadn’t Seen My Addict Father in Years — Then I Ran Into Him on the Street (Jordan Foisy, August 2019, Vice)

In this intimate and matter-of-fact glimpse of what it’s like to grow up with an addict parent, Jordan Foisy shares what it’s like to finally meet the person they may have been all along.

After not seeing his dad for three years — as the title suggests — Foisy runs into his dad and the two make plans to have lunch the following day. What unfolds is hours of hanging out together and Foisy getting to see that while his dad has a coke problem and lives on the margins of society “garbed in clothes that look like a donations box sneezed on him,” his dad is also “funny, opinionated, hypocritical, charming, strange, and loving.” At the end of the day, though, Foisy is left realizing his dad is “committed to his drugs, and letting them kill him. He doesn’t want to get better because what kind of life is waiting for him on the other side?”

This piece begs the question: Does someone have to get sober in order to live?

A lifetime of movies had left me with these fantasies of The Great Conversation: If I had enough courage, I could engage my dad in a way that would save him, and by saving him, save myself. It would end in great heaving sobs between the two of us, our arms wrapped around each other; him committing to getting clean and apologizing for all his misdeeds; and myself, born anew, filled with confidence, serenity, and, inexplicably, newfound athletic prowess.

5. Chasing Drinks with Lies, and Lies with Drinks (Katie MacBride, April 2018, Longreads)

Before getting sober, Katie MacBride was a blackout drinker who told lies about drinking and, when holes were poked in her lies, doubled down on those lies. She writes about her period of reckoning that started after waking up on a hospital gurney with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .4 (blackouts start at .2-.29 BAC), a box cutter and, in her words, “A suicide note I vaguely remembered writing on a Post-it just in case I ever needed it.”

MacBride’s story illustrates how the lies we tell ourselves only take us so far and then we have to start being honest with ourselves.

When there were no clues, I had no story — none of my own anyhow. My life belonged to witnesses, unwilling participants who might know the things that I did not. This is the scariest part of being a blackout drinker: not the inability to remember, the fear that someone else does. The worst thing you can do to a blackout drinker is tell them the truth.

6. The End Of Alcohol: One Writer On Going Sober (Billie JD Porter, April 2019, Elle)

Billie JD Porter writes about being an all-or-nothing kind of drinker since the age of 13 and growing up “relatively used to the idea of hitting the self-destruct button, and the fallout that went with it” as a result of having parents addicted to heroin. When her parents’ struggles with various substances became a mirror for her own alcohol dependency, Porter decided to take a year off drinking to discover the root of why she drinks.

By taking a break, to discover what that may be, I was strengthening my own foundations, so the past doesn’t grow into an even bigger, scarier monster that I’m unable to confront, like it has done for my parents.

At the time of my hiatus, I was only 23; I don’t think my days of cry-laughing into Tyskies and obnoxiously shouting my way through an evening into the early hours are behind me just yet, but I wanted to learn to be able to drink and have fun, in a manner that doesn’t see me descend into a downward spiral, taking me and everything I’ve worked so hard for, with it.

* * *

Alison Fishburn is a writer and recovering Floridian living in Ontario. She’s working on a memoir about the sudden death of her younger sister while learning to grieve. You can find her on Twitter @AlisonFishburn.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands