Intervention

It's Monday night. I'm so tired on Mondays, as there always seems to be a backlog of work to get done on top of regular deadlines. I tend to come home, eat whatever is easy and flop down on the couch with a magazine or book. This past Monday, however, my brain was so fried from writing all day that I could do little else but veg in front of the t.v. Flipping through the channels, I came across the show on A & E: "Intervention." It is one of those shows that is a train wreck of gargantuan proportions, and though I continued flipping through channels, I found myself back on A & E, watching a woman in a downward spiral as she huffed inhalants from a can.

At first, the sight of her--let's call her Amy--with this can of Duster (you know, the stuff you clean keyboards and crevices with?) held to her mouth and the sound of the "sssssssssss" as she pushed the trigger and inhaled (I don't even know what's in that stuff) was damn near comical. I thought "has she ever seen how ridiculous she looks doing that?" But my laughter soon turned to pity and dismay as I watched her huff one, two, three...who knows how many cans a day. She had a sugar daddy, a married man with kids, who was providing her with money and an apartment. She was a beautiful woman, too, though the sores around her mouth and her grey pallor and bone-thin-ness made her look like a shell of herself. I cannot imagine how many brain cells she killed. She was cutting off oxygen to her brain with each inhalation, and those were coming at an increasingly fast rate, one after another after another.

At one point, Amy's mother comes to see her, brings pizza. The huffing continues unabated. "I'm going to be high when my mom comes here and I don't care," says Amy to the camera. Her mother, who had earlier said that her daughter was a 'survivor' now dreads coming to see her, even as she feels an obligation to do so. Upon arriving at Amy's apartment, she witnesses her daughter slumped on the couch, a can at her lips. Amy's mother begs her to stop. But she won't.

Amy blames her mother and father for everything. Her dad left the family when Amy and her sister were young, moved to the Middle East. Mom wasn't always very present for her daughters. Amy speaks of abandonment, how all she wanted was a father. She tells of how she cannot be alone, yet she goes through boyfriends like kleenex. Her words are venomous: wasted, she tells her mother that she hates her. The mother leaves, and is seen weeping in her car. Amy takes to her closet and pulls out a razor blade, starts cutting her arms.

It's all very intense, very ugly. She's carrying that fucking can of Duster everywhere. Eventually, after resisting treatment via the intervention, the authorities step in. At one point, the interventionist labels Amy a "queen baby." She doesn't seem to care about anything other than the drug; her sister even says that if Amy doesn't get help, she will never see or hear from her family again. It makes no impact. Until the cops come and haul her away.

60 days into rehab Amy starts talking about her issues. At the core of them is lack of self-worth. ("I didn't even know what my issues were," she says.) Her deep sense of abandonment and betrayal translated into an inability to feel anything but hatred for herself. And pain. And resentment toward her mother for not "saving" Amy, or loving her enough to see the pain she was in. (There is also alleged child molestation in Amy's past, which involved a trial, and facing her molester in court.)

I sat on my couch and watched this woman who, initially, I saw as just another selfish, whiny addict. As the show progressed, and more of her story came out, I started to feel like I was looking in the mirror. I don't huff Duster, but I'm certainly weighed down (excuse the pun) with my own addictions, food being the biggest one. My father and I have never had any kind of relationship to speak of--he may as well have moved to another country when I was a child. I rarely saw him, and I always seemed to annoy him. My mother did nothing to protect or defend me. We all lived with the spectre of my father's wildly swinging moods, and we learned early how to measure his emotional landscape, how to navigate it. When I was in high school, I tried cutting, but it didn't work for me...I guess I'm not into scars that are self-inflicted. There was no endorphin release, only pain...which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place.

At one point during the intervention, Amy keeps telling people to GO AWAY and when they don't, she sticks her fingers in her ears and does the "lalalala I can't hear you!" thing that adolescents are famous for. When yet another member of her family leaves in disgust, she looks at the camera and says "What is this, retard day?"

That was it. "That little bitch," I yelled. "I HATE that kind of attitude." I'm fuming. AT THE TELEVISION. What the hell? Perhaps this is hitting a little too close to home? Perhaps the little girl in me, the one who believed (and most days still does) that her father doesn't like her was emerging and shaking her small fist at a world she deemed unjust. I was shocked by my reaction, genuinely surprised. (It didn't help that S. was looking at me like "um, what just happened?") I could feel this knot in my stomach, an ache that was familiar yet seemed very old. I got up, went into the kitchen, started in on the dishes.

My last glimpse of Amy was of her in rehab, her hair now blond, her eyes still a little vacant. She'd gained weight, but seemed unmoved by her experience, shut down. The caption on the television reported that Amy had been sober since May, 2008. I hope she's continued down the path of sobriety. Whatever it is that keeps me from a similar fate, I'm not sure, but there are moments when I feel like it wouldn't take much for me to fall down and never get back up.

But where's the joy in that?