On Addiction
Author's Note: This essay was previously published on Wordpress.com on August 20, 2019.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a soft spot for those who are addicted to something. I’ve been and still am addicted to picking at a certain part of one of my fingers since I was about 4 years old. I find myself picking at that same spot on my finger subconsciously; my brain remembers how to pick my finger like it remembers how to make me breathe and how to wake me up. I remember when it started too: I was watching Thomas and Friends in my mom’s room and there was a piece of dead skin on the inside of my left index finger. I started picking at that dead skin that day and never really stopped. The longest I’ve ever gone without picking at my skin is just a few months, and it is a form of self-harm that I didn’t consider self-harm until relatively recently.
A little over a year ago, my mom sent me an article about Dermotillamania (also known as Excoriation or chronic skin-picking), a compulsive habit associated with anxiety, in which the sufferer repeatedly picks at their skin, potentially causing bleeding, scarring, and/or sores. Self-harm is usually thought of and depicted as deliberately cutting and/or burning oneself, typically in an effort to feel in control and/or experience a feeling of release, and since I hadn’t ever deliberately hurt myself, I hadn’t thought of my skin-picking addiction as self-harm. It was just something I did and had always done. It wasn’t a big deal to me and I admit that it still isn’t. It’s been my new year’s resolution to stop several times, but I haven’t ever quite gotten there. I don’t stress it too much anymore because the addiction doesn’t impact my life significantly, except that I have a less than perfect left index finger. I’ve gone through my life kind of hiding that finger from some friends and lovers alike. I know that there are more severe addictions. Seriously trying to stop completely is something I plan on revisiting at some point in my life.
I know that some addiction recovery processes cannot be tabled.
I think that drug addiction—and addictions of any sort, but mainly drug addiction—is so vilified because American society puts great value on productivity and self-control. The general idea is that if you are addicted to drugs, or anything, you have continuously failed to control yourself, and if you can’t control yourself, you can’t be productive, because to be constantly productive is to have a lot of self-control. If you aren’t productive, you can’t produce anything of use to provide to the world, and if you aren’t providing anything of use to the world, then what is the point of your life? Why are you alive? It sounds harsh, but this is the dehumanizing way in which American society views people (mostly Black) who are addicted to drugs. We joke about “crackheads,” a highly racialized term— and simultaneously reduce the entire existences of other humans to their addiction to a substance. We forget that they are people with real lives—people who love and are loved, people with hopes and dreams, those of which are likely being delayed because of a struggle at which we choose to laugh and of which we choose to make light.
I’ve always felt that I had at least a base-level understanding of the feeling that those who are addicted to drugs are trying to escape, as well as the feeling that they are chasing. Rue, the main character of Euphoria, a new show on HBO, directed by Sam Levinson and starring Zendaya, describes it as a pleasurable, temporary feeling of “nothing.” Rue is a 17-year-old girl who recently got out of rehab for drug addiction and is trying to stay sober and afloat in a sea of unrequited love, sex, drugs, and other teen staples. Rue is privileged in that she has supportive family and friends to help her with her recovery. She has people in her corner who genuinely want to see her beat her addiction, and who would be adversely and significantly impacted if she does not. This isn’t the case for every person who is addicted to drugs. Rue is cute—attractive according to societal standards—light-skinned, long-haired, thin, with access to trendy clothing, and a nice home. The Black people who I see in the NYC subways who look and act like they may be struggling with a drug addiction look nothing like Rue. They aren’t as polished. They aren’t as supported. They are not as privileged. Hollywood can make drug addiction look relatively pretty because of power and access. Although watching Rue spiral in certain scenes can be triggering and absolutely heart-wrenching, at the end of the day, Rue is Zendaya—a millionaire—and there is someone who is addicted to the same drugs as her character who has no food, no money, and no home, on any given day.
At one point Rue laments to her friend Lexi, “I’m a burden, it is what it is and it’s embarrassing…” Lexi quickly hugs Rue and reassures her that she is not a burden. Rue has people to shoot down her negative beliefs about herself immediately, people to assure her she is not a burden and that she is loved. Aside from the occasional sly comment from her peers (At one point, Rue’s friend, Fez says to her, “You’re a drug addict. I don’t take anything a drug addict says personally because I don’t believe anything a drug addict says.”), and explosive fights with her mom, Rue doesn’t really face any harsh treatment or ridicule at all. Rue is protected, loved on. Hollywood makes drug addiction sort of hauntingly attractive, or at least not as horrifying as it actually is. Rue represents drug addiction tied in a nice, big box, with a pretty pink bow. All of her immediate needs are met and if one is struggling with a drug addiction, I’d argue that Rue’s circumstances are the best within which to do so.
A Black person with no home or family may think that they are a burden every day of their lives, but unfortunately, they may not have anyone to help dispel these negative thoughts. We, as a society, make the situations of those who are addicted to drugs worse by totally ignoring/avoiding them or recording them. People who are addicted to drugs are ridiculed, recorded without their consent (people have to be sober to give consent), and often degraded—especially if they are Black and impoverished. We laugh at, like, and retweet the humiliation.
I’d argue that those behind the phone camera are addicted to attention—the dopamine that comes with mass online approval. This is an addiction that we can’t physically see, though, so we enable others in feeding it by liking and sharing their videos of a person struggling with drug addiction acting out in public. We do it because this person is deemed a “crackhead,” rather than a human being worthy of respect and dignity. During slavery, white people needed a way to justify and rationalize their savage treatment of Black people, so they dehumanized us. There were studies and conferences geared toward analyzing the shapes of our heads and brains, with the sole purpose of proving that we were less intelligent than white people, and therefore needed them to enslave us. We were deemed unusually strong and more capable of working long hours in the hot sun than white people. We needed less sleep. We were at once incapable and capable. In present day, we rationalize the dehumanization and ridicule of people who are addicted to drugs by way of the tacit, but ever-present, societal agreement that they have failed at life. The tacit societal agreement that to be Black, poor, and addicted to drugs is to have failed at life. And to have failed in this sense is to be unworthy of love and respect. It’s now safe to record. It’s safe to dehumanize. It’s deserved.
Like my finger-picking addiction, many addictions start out innocently. Becoming addicted to drugs is not a choice; the mind is too complex for that. I don’t think that anyone has tried a drug with the full knowledge that they will become addicted to it. The full knowledge that there is a possibility that they could become addicted to it? Sure, maybe. But with the full knowledge that they will become addicted? No.
It is not those with a drug addiction who are failing, but those of us who laugh and record. Maybe we do it to make ourselves feel better about our own short-comings, our own addictions, our own failures.
I hope that those with more severe addictions than picking at their skin eventually find peace outside of their addiction and I hope that we, as a society, have more empathy for them.
After all, I suspect that we are all probably a little bit addicted to something.