I remember waking up that first night in the hospital, in the middle of the night. I was looking down what looked like a row of beds, although there was only one other bed in the room, and I decided that I was in a Vietcong hospital and I was a prisoner of war, chained to my bed. I got up and tore off all my chains, which meant pulling out the IVs and spraying blood all over the walls. Then I woke up out of this haze and, being a very neat drug addict, I cleaned up all the blood before I pressed the button for the nurse. I did quit drinking after that, but only because I’d had pancreatitis and they said I had to stop drinking to avoid a recurrence of the pain. I didn’t stop taking cocaine.
What I needed then was something to replace the alcohol to go to sleep with, and I discovered the Pill Lady in the Valley. I was doing very well in Hollywood at that time, and I’d drive my custom-made Porsche convertible to the Pill Lady in the Valley and I’d ask her what she had. She’d say, “Well, I have two hundred of these and they are Mexican, two dollars each, and I have fifty of those, they’re five dollars and they are really good, and I have seventeen of those and they are ten dollars each. I have some of this black tar heroin too. You can try that.” And I’d just say, “I’ll take it.” I would clean her out of everything she had every time I visited. I always pitied the poor drug addict who showed up after me, because there was nothing left. I would be back four weeks, six weeks later and she’d say, “Jesus, you didn’t do all that yourself, did you?” I’d say, “Oh no, I have a lot of parties.” But basically, I was just using it to go to sleep. Anyway, that didn’t make me quit either. That might have been a warning sign to somebody else, but not to me.
The moments of real despair came when I couldn’t sleep. When I had taken too much cocaine, or run out of alcohol, or didn’t have the right pills, or just couldn’t get the combination right, I would end up awake in bed for hours, sometimes all night. I was desperately alone and miserable and occasionally suicidal at the end of a long night after not being able to go to sleep.
I decided I needed to have a pistol in the house, so I got a Glock 17 and kept it between the mattress and the box spring. My head was on the pillow, always twelve inches away from the Glock. I thought about that Glock often in those days, when I couldn’t go to sleep. But that wasn’t a wake-up call for me at all.
I used to take a lot of drugs on the road. I remember once coming out of that haze when I’d taken too much cocaine and had drunk everything in the house and I was dozing. I remember waking up with a start, every muscle clenched, sitting up halfway in bed, absolutely convinced that I was dwindling in stature, literally. I was sure that every time I breathed out, I was shrinking a little more. And that when I inhaled again, I wasn’t reexpanding. I sat in this clenched position for like forty-five minutes in a total panic, a total drug-induced psychosis. I was sure that I was going to die by dawn. Then it went away. I was able to lie down, roll around, be miserable, go to sleep. Still, that was not a wake-up call.
I remember once waking up in a hotel in New York with slurred speech and it didn’t go away all day. So the next morning I went to the hospital to talk to a doctor about it, and he said it was from taking a lot of drugs. The slurring persisted for a couple of days, and that was pretty scary. I thought I was going to be permanently debilitated, but then that went away, so that was not a wake-up call either.
Nor were the nosebleeds, which were regular toward the end, but eventually, somehow, I had this gradual, dawning realization that I have to do something about this. That the only responsible thing is to do something about this. I basically had alienated everybody in my life.
The whole time all this was going on, I had a therapist who knew I had a drug problem and was waiting me out. I sometimes lied to him, told him I had stopped for weeks at a time, blah, blah. He knew what I knew, that it was just a matter of time. We talked about it regularly, and I gradually realized that the only responsible thing to do was to go to rehab.
Finally there was one summer, the summer of 1998, when I acknowledged, okay, it’s time to make a plan. I was going to go to rehab early in 1999. Marty, my therapist, was going, “What do you mean? Why are you going to wait till January?” I explained that I was so important in the movie business—by the way, I was the only person in the movie business who thought that—I was so important that I couldn’t take a month off and just disappear. In the past few years I had been taking a month off in the winter to go skiing in Aspen, so I would take the same month off this year and go to rehab instead. I had this all worked out in my mind. Now if you say to people in the movie business in L.A., “I’m renting a house in Aspen for a month,” they’ll immediately ask you, “Well, when can I come for a weekend?” So I said I was going to Canada, because I knew they’d say, “Well, it’s cold in Canada. Have a good time.”
I finally had a date—February 7—and I let everybody know that I was going skiing. My parents decided they wanted to come and stay in my house while I was away, for a kind of winter vacation. Fine, fine—only they got these super- saver fares and they had to come out three days before I was leaving. Now that’s a bad idea, because I had a lot of narcotics to take before I went to rehab, and if my parents were staying with me I couldn’t stay up all night, get whacked out of my tree, and play the guitar. So that was my last three days, waiting for my parents to go to bed at nine thirty, waiting for my nose to stop bleeding so that I could snort more cocaine and play more guitar and get ready to go to rehab. The rehab wasn’t very real in my mind. It was on the schedule, that’s all.
Of course, the day arrives and I’m supposed to leave at seven thirty in the morning. I try to sleep for an hour at five thirty, then I get up at the last minute. Because I had this whole charade going about skiing, I had to pack all this shit, my skis and everything, and I am wearing an enormous parka, waving good- bye to my parents, who were in their own Norman Rockwell dream, and my friend David is there to pick me up, with my parka and my enormous bag of ski stuff, and of course I am going to rehab in goddamn Arizona.
I hated rehab. When I saw they had this higher-power thing going on there, I was really pissed off. My brother had been sober for many years, and at the time I didn’t get along with him at all, and I assumed that everybody in the recovery program was just like him, so that was bad. It took a week or two before I really turned my head around and realized how great this experience was going to be for me.
I remember Marty—who I later found out was in recovery himself—telling me before I went that I should try to say yes as often as possible. I was like, “What do you mean? Why?” He said, “Because there are going to be people there who have seen a lot of people like you come through the process. They are going to try to help you, and the more you can say yes and just do what they suggest, the better off you will be. Just don’t question everything, and don’t start with no as the answer to everything.”
That stood me in good stead there after my first week. I was basically detoxing and pretty hostile, and they keep you that first week in rooms right off the nurses’ station so they can take care of you. I was not a very good patient. But then you move into the other buildings with roommates, and I started meeting people and listening a little more. At some point, I realized I was forty-five years old and I was done. It wasn’t going that well for me, and I didn’t want to be here in rehab five or seven times. I didn’t want to start again, I didn’t want to be lying there at four in the morning thinking about that Glock again. Gradually I realized those people were there to help me, that they had very specific knowledge of exactly what I was going through in that moment, and they knew how to help me get through that moment. And I really made some good friends there. By the time I left rehab, I really wanted to stay sober; I really wanted to. I was willing to do what ever it took.
Marty had said, “We have to have an aftercare facility,” so I went to this outpatient rehab facility called Matrix two or three times a week. Most of the people there were just trying to get sober, but some people, like me,
were using it as outpatient aftercare. I was there for a couple of months, and then, when I was six months sober, I asked if I could stay there and be a volunteer. In each group there are the therapist and the clients and then a coleader, which is this volunteer position. Marty had told me you have to do two things to stay sober: go to recovery meetings and help other alcoholics. So I did this volunteer thing, and I have been doing it for eight years now, and I go to meetings still.
At first I hated the meetings. I stood in the back, I wore my sunglasses, I folded my arms, and I kept my jacket zipped up so that nobody dared say hello or anything. But I just kept going. I did it. Marty had told me that I had to do this to stay sober and so I did it.
Why did it work? Well, as part of the program, we’re often asked to tell our stories. You’re trying to make sense of your life, so you tell the story of your life in such a way that you understand it. When I was in rehab, I remember very vividly feeling that I did not know how I’d gotten there. I just did not know how I’d started out as a promising young screenwriter and ended up in rehab at forty-five, an alcoholic and a drug addict. And I very vividly remember sitting in that circle of sixty people in rehab, recalling this thing that had happened to me years before in L.A. I had written Mississippi Burning, and I came to L.A. and I bought a little gray Porsche, and I was really cool in my own mind. I remember driving down Sunset in my little gray Porsche on a sunny day and I’m at a red light, and a bumblebee landed on my windshield wiper. I am looking at him, and the light changes, and I take off, and of course this bumblebee is trapped in this kind of little vortex of air behind the windshield wiper and it can’t get out. It’s getting bounced around like it’s in a washing machine. I go for a mile till the next red light and then the bumblebee flies away, and I’m looking at it and going, “Now what does he think just happened to him? How can he find his way home? What was that all about for him?”
I remember that coming into my mind in rehab, and this sense of knowing that I am that bumblebee. “I am here now and I do not know how I got here.” We tell the stories of how we got here to ourselves and to other people all the time, because what I believe recovery is, at its essence, is that I talk to you about what happened to me and you talk to me about what happened to you. I tell these stories, and I’ve told them all a hundred times. I tell them for therapeutic reasons, both for me and for the recently quit addicts that I talk to regularly, just so they hear what happened to somebody else. I think of what happened to me a lot, because it’s so important to an alcoholic to remember where you were in order to stay here where you are now and not go back. If I started thinking that everything was cool, I’m fine now, I could get in trouble again.
Because that was the main lie of my life as a drug addict—I’m cool, it’s cool, everything’s cool. I dress like a bum now, but when I was a practicing drug addict I dressed very well by the standards of Hollywood at that time. I wore black Armani suits. I drove a convertible Ferrari. I dated the most spectacular-looking girls I could find. Illusion was everything that I had, the illusion that everything is cool. I’d end up at home with an eight ball and a bottle of vodka and two packs of Marlboro Lights, but that was my private problem. Now I don’t want to go back to that sort of pretending. Now I’m just trying to be a good citizen, insofar as I can. I’m trying to do my job and be a good husband and be a good father. I’m just trying to take my place at the table.
Aimee Liu
Aimee Liu suffers from an eating disorder. Her first book, Solitaire, described her experience with anorexia, at a time when eating disorders weren’t on most people’s radar. Since then she’s become a successful novelist and teacher. In 2007, she returned to the issue she’d first explored nearly thirty years before in her book Gaining: The Truth about Life After Eating Disorders. It’s estimated that 8 million Americans have an eating disorder—7 million women and 1 million men. And though eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, Aimee’s story demonstrates that there is a way out.
I
f I could talk to my previous self, I’d say, “Pay attention to what you love. Give yourself permission to focus on what you love and act as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Just focus on what gives you delight, what gives you pleasure, what really makes you tick, and also, learn to understand yourself. Look deeper than the obvious.” So much of who each of us is really comes down to our DNA. We are all born with very particular temperaments and tendencies, and some of that you can change and adjust, and some of it you can’t.
There were three moments for me. The first one occurred when I was between my sophomore and junior year of college, when I really hit bottom with my eating disorder. There was another one that occurred when I was in my late forties, when I realized that I had been living in a kind of a half-life of eating disorder for over twenty years. And there was a third one, which was the turning point to real clarity.
The most obvious turning point was the first one, which propelled me out of the real depths. It was 1973, and very few people really knew anything much about eating disorders. I was in a period of profound, self-imposed isolation, living my life basically to satisfy the eating disorder. In order to protect my weight loss and to prevent the world from pushing any food in my path, I had elected to spend that summer in New Haven by myself. I was a paint er, painting self-portraits all summer long, by myself. I was living on a single bag of oranges, which I stretched for as much of the summer as I possibly could. I was walking several miles a day, to and from where I was house-sitting to the gallery where I was painting. I didn’t talk to anybody, I didn’t call anyone. It was the summer of the Watergate hearings, but I didn’t turn on the television or pick up the newspaper, I didn’t listen to the radio. That was the world I created for myself that summer.
One afternoon, in August, walking back to the house, I was in the middle of Cross Campus, which is bordered on one side by Beinecke Library Commons and on the other side by Sterling Library—it’s an enclosed quad—and it was very, very hot in that dirty, polluted, claustrophobic way that New Haven can get. The humidity was high and it was about 97 degrees. Everything felt very polluted and very still. Halfway across the quad I was just struck by the silence. It was a moment that stopped me in my tracks. It felt like the entire world had emptied out. There wasn’t a sound. Not a bird, a whisper, a car, a truck. There was nothing. I don’t know why, but I suddenly was completely shaken by the realization that I had pushed everybody that I cared for away from me. That there was all this life out there, all the people I knew from school were off living a life filled with things, with their summer. I felt like I was the last person in the world, and I didn’t want to be the last person in the world.
At the same time there was a recognition that I had completely created this situation myself, I had basically isolated myself. I suddenly came up against the recognition that my life was totally empty, I was absolutely empty, all my senses and all my emotions just blunted. That was probably the most hopeless yet hopeful moment I can remember. It was a state of despair and—I don’t want to say guilt—a recognition that I was responsible for what I had done to myself and to my life, that nobody else was responsible, and that the only way I was going to be able to change it was by making and choosing a different path for myself going forward.
The first thing I did was call some friends. I tried to locate people and tried to make plans to reconnect with people. I was specifically trying to think of people who were healthy, people who were joyful, people who ate, people who laughed, people who cared about themselves and about what they were doing and about other people.
I had always denied that I had a problem, and I’d always defended my . . . well, there was no name for it then. Nobody at that time called it anorexia. It wasn’t until years later that I heard that term for the first time. But I defended my choice to maintain a minimal weight and to not eat and to hide underneath that obsession. I had noticed that although there were a number of other people on
campus who were doing the same thing, and there had been a number of other girls in high school also doing the same thing, we were very much in the minority. The majority of people seemed to be much better adjusted and more self-directed and more purposeful and happier in their appearance. I had noticed that, but I didn’t really pay attention.
That moment on that hot August day was really the first time that I’d ever come face-to-face with the reality that something needed to change dramatically. Instead of seeking out pathological, negative examples, I started to look at life- affirming examples as role models. I suppose the simplest way to say it is that instead of actively choosing to minimize everything about myself in my life, I started looking at the possibility of maximizing my life.
I didn’t know any treatment that one could get, and I hadn’t come from a family that had any use for psychology or psychotherapy, so unfortunately, when I had this turning point, my assumption was that I could and should take care of business myself, and that I could do that simply by choosing better role models and making different choices. Those are both important, but in and of themselves they’re not enough. What I realize now is that I sent myself into what I call the half-life of eating disorders. I didn’t continue to obsess about food and weight as I had done before, but I didn’t acquire really good coping skills. I didn’t fully come to terms with the wiring and temperamental aspects of my body and my mind, those things that were contributing to the eating disorder. I remained very compulsive, very obsessive; it just took other forms. Rather than obsessing about calories and losing weight, I became obsessive about performance, about other aspects of my life. For the next twenty years, I was in that half-life where I was still captive to the same kinds of thinking but with behaviors that didn’t involve food.
Moments of Clarity Page 5
