by Naomi Jacobs
She took me through the services provided and how best they could help me. I thought we were going to have to explore the reasons I had started smoking weed in the first place, as I had done with Maria, and how it had led to speed, LSD, ecstasy and cocaine. But as much as my drug-taking past mattered, she kept bringing the conversation to the here and now and what we could do to stop me from smoking. The need to snort coke or drop a bomb of speed wasn’t strong anymore, but the first thing I had to do, she instructed me, was to go home and carry on smoking and keep to my usual routine of a joint or two a night. Except this time, I needed to write down exactly when I was starting to want one and how I felt before I did. Then I was to write down how I felt while stoned and then write down how I felt and what I thought once it had worn off.
I did this for several days and then began to see a pattern. The ‘negative-internal-dialogue-creates-anxiety-and-results-in-panic’ pattern. It would hit at a certain time in the day – around four p.m. – and I would start to grow inexplicably anxious. That anxiety would sit like a small ball of wool at the bottom of my stomach, and by the time Leo was in bed, I would be so tense from trying to stop that ball unravelling that I would start to panic and need something to make it go away. Trying to see where the ball came from filled me with a terrible dread and the only thing that had the power to push it down as far as it would go was weed. For the time the weed lasted, I felt calm and relaxed, and the fear dissipated. As it began to wear off the panic would come back again and I would smoke another. And so the cycle went.
After about two weeks of writing this down, I realized I wasn’t actually dealing with the issue that made me start in the first place. I was just dumbing it down, tranquillizing it until it stopped. I needed to address it head-on. But this was easier said than done, so eventually, after a couple of nights of observing my feelings before going through the ritual of smoking and not understanding the anxiety, I turned to Teen Nay, who was watching quietly from her room in the house.
Me: What shall I do? I am a nervous wreck.
Her: Remember when things were tense at home or we felt stressed with school?
Me: Yeah.
Her: What did we do?
Me: Errr . . .
Her: We went for a walk.
It was a simple thing but the thought was surprising to me because it had not entered my head before. Exercise had always been a way to lose weight or keep healthy, never to deal with my emotions.
Her: Go for a walk, dude! Oh, and one more thing, Adult Naomi, I know it’s all slush puppies, but . . . thank you and . . . I kinda love you.
Me: I kinda love you too, Teen Nay, and, no, thank you.
So, I started walking. An hour or so after Leo had fallen asleep, I would leave the house and walk up and down my street, sometimes thinking about Teen Nay, sometimes listening to music, but most importantly, not thinking about getting high. The first few times I smoked after walking, but felt good because I had delayed the smoking so was therefore smoking less. I also noticed the feelings of anxiety and nervous tension were slowly subsiding and, after a power walk, I felt exhilarated, powerful. My head was clearer and one night the source of the negative thoughts became apparent.
It was all about feeling safe. The key to being at ease once I was on my own was to create feelings of safety and stability, which in turn made me feel secure. Moving home so much as a child, the expectation of abuse during the night, the lack of reliable emotional attachments, all created a constant underlying tension that translated as the inability to feel safe. I’d never felt truly secure.
This ‘exercise epiphany’ hinted at a life where I was able to control the negative emotion and find a way to create these elusive feelings of natural well-being.
Without getting high! Bonus!
I shared this with Anna, and the steps after this encouraged me to find different things to do, other than walking, to make me feel just as good. Aside from writing, I found knitting kept my fingers occupied and baking cakes for Leo, Katie and her brood was therapeutic. Delivering the cakes in the evening got me out of the house and the smiles on her children’s faces when they bit into my chocolate fudge brownies contributed to a slow-growing self-esteem. I didn’t have to find things I liked about myself; I just needed to remember what was already great about me. Life was becoming an earnest search for serotonin-inducing activities.
And then I was sent to a place called Oddfellows House, a small red-bricked building with a car park at the back, that was used by the substance misuse service as a meeting place for what I liked to call my Fellow Followers of Oddity and where we all tried to figure our way out of a whole heap of pain. These followers were ex-heroin addicts, crack-smokers, and amphetamine-takers, with a couple of alcoholics thrown in for good measure. Most were men, a couple were women, and every Friday morning we ate toast, drank tea, and discussed what it was like coming off our particular drug of choice and what we were doing to ensure we wouldn’t go back to it. Some part of the morning involved us sitting around a large table, having acupuncture needles stuck in our ears (to help with the craving). We looked like some form of hybrid version of metal-eared aliens, wide-eyed, and toothless (the older drug addicts), trying to figure out if the funny tingling in our ears was really trapped energy releasing itself or just wax dislodging. After this there was the option of a free massage or reiki, which involves someone placing their hands on you to transfer healing energy into your body.
Some Fridays, I would partake in the conversations; other times I would take my university revision and listen to others talk while I read about the mind and behaviour.
Jimmy joined the sessions about three weeks after I started. He didn’t say much at first so I didn’t take much notice of him. He was a tall, stooping-through-the-door type of man, skinny and long. He had shaved light blond hair, a sallow complexion, and when he spoke his two missing front teeth gave him a slight lisp.
I noticed him the day that a few of us were all sitting around the table in silence, while the group leader (I nicknamed him Acupuncture Guy) walked slowly from one of us to the next, pulling the small copper needles out of our ears. The ambience in the room was very relaxed, chilled to the point of a narcoleptic atmosphere, with soft music playing in the background, and my brain felt like it wanted to curl up and fall asleep. One of the men, Joe, a recovering alcoholic, broke the silence. He started talking about pain – the pain he felt from the needles and the pain he felt now he wasn’t drinking.
‘It’s like there, you know?’ He looked at us all sitting around the table. ‘And I, like, don’t know what to do with it. I wanna let it out, but I don’t know how. Without it . . . you know, like, really hurting. Without it killing me.’
We all nodded; we all understood what he was talking about. Pain and what to do with it, how to express it, how to cope with it, how to deal with it.
The mood was serious and then Jimmy piped up. Shaking his head, he said in a thick Lancashire accent, ‘I know what ya mean, mate; it’s like plaiting snot in fog.’
I was the first to burst into a loud laugh. He looked at me, puzzled for a moment, and then a smile curled from the corner of his mouth and he started to chuckle.
Joe began to laugh too and then everyone followed and the room was filled with laughter.
Even Acupuncture Guy’s broad shoulders moved up and down in time to his silent laughter.
Once we calmed down, Acupuncture Guy proceeded to tell us about organized group walks up in the hills of the Pennines that we could go on.
But it had me thinking about emotional pain. We all laughed, but really, why did we find it so difficult to deal with? I had pushed out a 9lb 9 baby, with no drugs. My physical pain threshold was high, so why wasn’t it the same for my emotional pain?
It was then that I looked individually at each and every one of the men and women sitting around the table. We were all so different – in age, in sex, in colour even – but we all felt a common bond: our struggle with pain, and how to
manage the energy of hurt before it became really painful, before the energy moved and threatened to destroy you.
It was at that moment that I realized that the ‘e’ in emotion was energy and the ‘motion’ was the movement of that energy. If it hurt, my natural reaction was to push it out; like whenever I got a splinter as a child, adults always told me to leave it because eventually my body would gather all the necessary resources to push it out. But with emotion, something would have happened at some point in our lives that told us to resist the movement and instead, do the opposite, and pull back. That’s when we got scared, anxious, and panicked because we didn’t know what to do with it. So we pulled it back and pushed it down, tried to force it back to where it came from: its point of origin. Except the force of the energy was so powerful, so strong, that once it had begun to move, no force within us was strong enough to hold it down forever.
As I watched all of us sitting around the table, I realized that whether it was an attack, a death, rape, beatings, abuse or torture, they all led to one thought, one negative belief about ourselves, pushed into a space where it had no choice but to fold back on itself and double over, causing a pressure which eventually had to move: e-motion, energy in motion. Our resistance against this movement caused the pain and we reached for something – a spliff, a pipe, a drink, a needle – to push it back down where it would fold again. A continuous pile-on, thought over thought, feeling over feeling, piling on, pushing down. Ours was a fight, a battle of resistance; our drug of choice was the weapon.
Oddfellows House was for the battle-worn, the ones who had decided the fight was no longer right for them. Something in us had awoken to the idea that we could find a way, find some answer to the pain. That maybe moving towards it and through it and letting it out would somehow be better for us than moving against it and away from it and keeping it in. It was, after all, energy, and when we reached that point, the beginning before that energy moved and became emotion, there was something in us, buried deep inside of us, that could actually deal with the pain.
We at Oddfellows House were at odds with our true selves, with that true voice, the part of us that could deal with living a truthful life. This was the voice Teen Nay had sought in Egypt, the source of my true self, the point of origin of my own energy. She had needed to find it and for me to see it so that I understood my own validity in this life, my own purpose. Who I am before the pain, what happens to me going through the pain but, more importantly, who I become after the pain.
Later, Jimmy joined me in the reading room, where the day’s newspapers were laid out, and where I usually went to study. After a while, he put his paper down. I glanced up and saw that he was rubbing his hand; it was slightly red. He noticed me watching him and I gave him a friendly smile.
‘I dint mean to make ya laff, ya know. T’was all serious, like, an’ I go an’ be the bloody joker.’
‘Naaa, it’s okay. Sometimes we could all do with a good laugh,’ I reassured him.
He rubbed his hand again.
‘Did you hurt your hand?’ I assumed he’d hurt it searching for a viable vein to take his daily requirements of brown.
‘Me kid bit me.’ His face lit up.
‘What? Oh, wow! Bit of a naughty one, then?’ Why was he happy about it?
He shook his head and laughed. ‘Na. It’s me own fault. I was teasin ’im rite bout avin skid marks in’t boxes (boxer shorts), an’ then he bit me, an’ I ses what ya do that for? I can see ya teef print on me, an’ he ses, that’s ya kid mark.’
I don’t know why I found this guy hilarious, but I did and I creased up laughing again. Jimmy chuckled along with me and then we proceeded to talk about the wonders of being a single parent. He was the proud parent of an eight-year-old girl and a six-year-old joker of a son. Their mother, a heroin addict herself, had run away to Folkestone with his friend. Jimmy’s children were in foster care, but he and his mother had managed to get temporary custody of them, one of the conditions being that he cleaned himself up and got off heroin for good, which was why he was at Oddfellows House. By the time we had finished chatting I was convinced he had not yet met his calling as a stand-up comedian. He was hilarious and completely oblivious to it.
On my way home, I continued my thoughts about pain. Jimmy had spent most of his life using opiates to hide from his. But when he knew he was the only one left there for his children, he had finally decided the pain of losing them would be far greater than the pain he was feeling now.
Pale white horse in comparison.
Still, horsemen of the apocalypse aside, I realized Jimmy and I were truly no different; we had different lives, and had experienced different storms, but we were both on the same search. Both he and I needed to change and we were both at Oddfellows House because the pain of staying the same was greater than the pain of changing.
With all of these thoughts swimming around my head, when I got home, I decided to do as much research as I could about pain. I found an infinite amount of information but one thing that made me stop in my tracks was a video clip I found of the recorded sound of a plant growing from a seed through the soil to reach the air above it. The recording sounded like screaming. The growth for the plant, the pushing against the soil into the air and towards the sun above it where it could blossom, was painful. That pain was caused by nothing other than resistance, pushing against something as strong and powerful as the earth, and yet the small seedling found a way.
I thought about how, even after all Jimmy and I had been through, we still managed to laugh, still managed to find humour in everyday life. And then it came to me: my pain was transient; it didn’t last. It always had a beginning, and a middle, and there was always an end. I realized that I could use this knowledge as a force to propel me through the experience of the pain, to allow it to come out instead of me pushing it down. If I did, then maybe one day I would find myself on the other side of it.
Jimmy and I were the seeds, the growing flowers; events meant that we were growing in different ways, but growing nonetheless, only to reach the same place. Who we truly were and where we belonged under the sun.
Growing up around smokers and drinkers was a normal part of everyday life, but it meant that health was never at the forefront of my mind. The only exercise I ever did was at school and even then I tried everything to get out of P.E. by regularly sticking my fingers down my throat and telling Mrs Dixon of Dock Green (she was tall and looked like a policeman) that I had my period four weeks a month. Teen Nay reminded me of this in one of her diary entries when she had started to exercise. This made me think about health and the fact that you could find the word ‘heal’ in it. I soon realized after the amnesia that dealing with my mental health meant at some point dealing with my physical health. Especially my brain, which of course was in control of everything my body did.
For the first time in my life ‘shopping for personal trainers’ didn’t mean searching for tailor-made Adidas to fit my huge size nine feet. No, instead it meant I found Gary, ‘fitness expert to the stars’, on the internet. He was tall and fair, and he had the most intense blue eyes and a refreshingly no-nonsense attitude to health, coupled with a kind and understanding nature. He was an ex-athlete and a fantastic trainer. I had not yet met anyone who had quit smoking weed and actually put weight on, but I had managed it, so Gary sent me to a nutritionist and came up with a healthy eating and exercise plan. I was apparently severely dehydrated and had very little lung capacity, which along with the excess weight were temporary things that could be fixed, and he told me that if I put in the commitment, time and energy, then my health goals could be achieved.
Throughout our time in the gym, Gary also became somewhat of a therapist and I found myself telling him how I was quitting smoking and that I was in therapy to work out my issues. More importantly, I told him about losing my memory and being fifteen years of age again, how my life had turned out to be a colossal disappointment to Teen Nay and that I needed to keep the promise I had made
to change my life. He listened intently and then assured me he would do anything he could in his power to help me keep that promise.
During one session, about a month into the training, he said something to me that was so simple but which changed the way I saw my mind and how it worked. Working out that particular morning was a struggle and, while boxing the punchbag, I burst into tears. I was fed up and tired of going to bed every night on my own. I was missing male company and after the break-up with French Dude was sad that I had experienced another unsuccessful relationship. I ended up telling Gary how I felt. I told him about the relationship pattern that was no longer working for me (prince + princess + rescue = Disney) and that I wasn’t sure if I knew how to relate to men any other way. He listened while instructing me to continue with my sit-ups and then stopped me.
‘Every time you talk to yourself in a negative way or criticize yourself—’ he started.
‘I know, I know,’ I said rolling my eyes.
‘No, Naomi, you don’t.’ He looked at me intently. ‘You increase your stress hormones. Stress hormones tell your body there is danger, and then your body craves rich and sugary foods for a quick burst of energy.’
‘To escape the danger?’ I had an idea where he was going with this.
‘Yes. Then your body produces a hormone called ghrelin to defend itself from stress, anxiety or depression—’
‘Let me guess,’ I interrupted, ‘this makes me want more sugar?’
