As Easy to Swallow as Cough Syrup
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| Photo taken from Teen Vogue |
The first introduction I had to the Kardashians was when I was in high school. My sister was home from boarding school and brought one of her friends with her. You guys have to watch this, her friend said. These girls are so dumb. The whole family is crazy. As someone who started watching Bad Girls Club in middle school, you could say I’m fascinated by girls who are shameless about bucking the rules. In my mind, a bad girl, a dumb girl, a crazy girl was the most badass thing a girl could be. Those girls are free to live life on their own terms, and the more people judge them the faster they’re able to ascend to a life beyond my wildest dreams. One where people’s perceptions of you can’t touch you because you were willing to show the most embarrassing parts of yourself. The parts that are ignorant, small-minded, selfish, vain, materialistic and bratty. Once people have seen that, the only way to go is up.
In fact, these girls are anything but dumb. Like the reality stars that came before them, Paris and Nicole Richie are the first to come to mind, they are hyper aware of the brand they cultivate for the sake of media attention. If we’re talking about the Kardashians, the brand that catapulted them into the superstar fame they have today is one of honesty. Here was a normal family, living an upper middle class life in the wealthy but very boring neighborhood of Calabasas, who was willing to share the most mundane aspects of their lives to prove they are just as capable of providing drama-filled entertainment as they are of being normal, boring, and sheltered. The early episodes were filled with random photoshoots Kim did to gain some sort of foothold in the entertainment industry as well as plenty of loafing around their store, Dash, eating Chipotle and talking about the disappointing men they were dating. Let’s not overlook the fights. Oh my god, the fights! Who could forget the legendary, iconic, epic moment when Khloe made fun of Kim for buying a Bentley, proving in one fell swoop that Khloe was jealous and Kim was selfish. That whole fight is what led to the world knowing about Kim’s ugly cry when she broke down during a family trip to Breckenridge. Not everyone can relate to fighting with their sister about a $200,000 car, but whether you choose to admit it or not, we all saw something in ourselves in these sisters. We didn’t always like what we saw. That’s part of the Kardashian genius. They were willing to show the ugly cries and the jealousy and the petty arguments to show that we could trust them. We’re not so different, you and I, is what they said to my young high school mind.
Now, their lives are harder to connect with than ever, complete with rides on private jets to islands the average American doesn’t even know exists, a closet filled with Birkin bags, and cover stories in Vogue. But my relationship with them was built on trust, so I kept up with them over the years because I knew no matter how hard they tried to flaunt their wealth in an attempt to prove they had “made it,” at some point the walls would come down. Kim would show that ugly cry, Kourtney would break up with Scott only to get back together with him and get pregnant with another one of his children, and Khloe would put her entire life on hold for yet another guy who is only capable of treating her poorly.
Their story was told exactly the way that I needed to hear it. An average family is plucked out of obscurity with a sex tape scandal, catapulted into fame. Their story is what Rax King would define as perfect- capable of being swallowed whole without needing to look at what was so delicious about it. Unlike the scandals of the same kind before it, think Pamela Andersen and Paris Hilton, the sex tape became part of Kim’s brand. She’s a hot girl doing hot girl shit, showing off her naked body not because she needs the attention, but because she needs you to know she isn’t ashamed of who she is. A turbo thot is what she was born out of, and it’s a title she claimed a decade later when she became Kimye. Clutching the pearls and calling her a slut, saying she’s damaging the minds of her children by showing off so much of her body on social media, and whining about how she’s an attention whore does very little when she’s willing to take those claims and turn them into a magazine cover, a clothing brand, a video game, and an invite to the Met Gala. Despite all that, she’s still the same bitch she was at the show's humble beginning, taking selfies, buying expensive things she doesn’t need, marrying questionable men, and ugly crying when life gets to be too much. I don’t care if the material aspects of her life are ones I can’t relate to because I’ve seen who she is when those things are stripped away. She’s fearless, shameless, bold, a hustler, and clever. What could be more real than that? I’m not a fan of Kim, but I trust her with my life. I didn’t want to know about the Kardashians when I first started watching them on TV, but I needed to know about them. I needed to know that it was possible to rise up out of the darkness towards the light. My lights may not flash in my face the way Kim’s does whenever she steps out into the paparazzi-ridden world she lives in, but it’s there. I just needed to keep watching until I found it.
The deeper I got into my depression and the more often I got high, the more I felt like I needed to hide. Even when it was 70 degrees and sunny, a perfect day to go out and have myself a merry day, I would be posted up in the basement, watching the Kardashians. I have the wisdom now to look back on that time and recognize it as a form of escape, but in the moment I felt comfortable and safe. My brain was too foggy from the weed to care about what mean things the kids at school said about me that day. I was too invested in the Kardashian’s trip to Thailand, the one where Kendall and Kylie ran away, to think about the essay that was due tomorrow. Being extremely stoned while watching their show opened up a whole new world for me. I was in my own little world, a world where I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to allow myself to be truly entertained by what was happening on the show. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that cameras were following them everywhere, so of course Kendall and Kylie weren’t really missing. The reality part of reality TV didn’t matter to me at the time, because I believed it was real even if it wasn’t. While stoned, I could exist in their world so that I didn’t have to exist in mine.
Being stoned is a shallow headspace to be in, very different from the psychedelics I later started using. I spent the better part of a decade smoking weed, but I’m having a hard time thinking of ways I can describe what it did for me. My memories around the feeling stop as soon as I think of the bong rips I took for breakfast. I guess more than anything it made me black out, not the scary way alcohol did, but in a way that put me at ease because I knew I wasn’t going to do anything dangerous or stupid. I was just going to be high, and that feeling of just existing, just being, is what saved my mind from thinking about doing something that would put my life in danger. If I didn’t spend the worst parts of my depression getting high, I probably would have gone through with killing myself.
Shit got real my junior year. Real in a way that required serious help. I was drunk all the time. I was so behind on my assignments that teachers were making me use class time to catch up on everything I had missed. I was having severe panic attacks that led me to dipping out on school altogether so I could down a bottle of cough syrup and go to sleep in the middle of the day. Looking back, I knew it was bad because I stopped watching TV. I no longer wanted to feel comfortable. I just wanted to get fucked up and do stuff that put my life in danger. I saw a psychiatrist who recommended a treatment center in Houston. After a particularly dreadful concert experience in which I was thrown out for being drunk, I got on a plane and never went back to Colorado.
I was no longer suicidal after 6 months of inpatient treatment, no longer weighed down by the issues that plagued me before I went away, but I still liked to get high just as much as the drug addicts I became friends with at my new school. My roommate liked to watch the Kardashians too, and showed me this site I could use to watch new episodes for free so I didn’t have to rack up my mom’s credit card bill buying entire seasons on Itunes. It’s a paradox, isn’t it? I was a healthier version of myself, showing up to class, doing my assignments thoughtfully and on time, taking my ADHD medication without abusing it, but I was still back on my shit. After class I would go to the park with my new friends and chain smoke cigarettes, huff computer cleaner, and drink entire bottles of Robitussin (PSA: If you’re a fiend like me, get the kind with Dextromethorphan but no acetaminophen, you gotta protect your liver so it doesn’t get completely wrecked when you decide to get drunk the next day). When the drugs wore off just enough for me to not be too paranoid about getting caught by my dorm parent, I would head back to my room and tune into my favorite girls.
I spent a year and a half doing that same routine. This time around, I made sure that I was getting good grades in school, so even if I failed a few too many drug tests I could get away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. I got into a good college, graduated on time, and took a plane to Oregon. I traded my memories of getting high in parks for taking obscure research chemicals in the forest. I was smoking more weed than ever. There was just so much of the good shit readily available in Oregon! But I was showing up to class sober. Baby steps. I was making new friends who wanted to watch Bojack Horseman and Rick and Morty, so I put the Kardashians on hold for a bit. I didn’t need to escape into their lives the way I once did. I was still getting super high, but it wasn’t because I was trying to avoid the darkness. I was doing it because it was fun. I was doing it not because I needed to feel comfortable, but because I wanted to be silly with my friends. We had a good time until we didn’t. I was in a bad relationship with a bad guy who swayed me to transfer to a new school. I didn’t leave Oregon, but I left behind the friends I had made and the memories we had of getting stupid high in the forest and trying to find our way back to the dorms after the sun went down.
At my new university, I quickly regressed to the Lizzy I was before I went to treatment. My relationship became my whole world. The guy I was seeing was possessive, aggressive, controlling and heavily addicted to opiates. Everytime I wanted to go out, it would turn into a fight. I realize now he didn’t want me to have any friendships outside of the relationship because it was easier to control me that way. If he was the only person I could rely on, then he was the one with the power. Anything I wanted to do that didn’t involve him was a threat to his power. I got tired of fighting with him, so I stopped trying to make new friends. I was so exhausted from the mind games he would play with me whenever I wanted to go out that I became comfortable with sitting in his dorm room getting high and not seeing anyone besides him. He became my whole world. We did a lot of drugs together. He had a very interesting sexual fetish related to the medical issues I had struggled with, so the things we did in bed made me get really sick. I was prescribed a large dose of hydrocodone more than once, so our regular routine would be getting stoned off opiates, smoking weed and watching Rick and Morty. While on opiates, I went back to feeling comfortable the way I did when I started smoking weed. This feeling made me anesthetized to the abuse I was experiencing. That first year went by in a blur. I knew things were bad, but I was so sick from the drugs and so tired from all the fighting and feeling like I was walking on eggshells that I didn’t know how to get out of it. I made one friend that year, a friend I still love dearly. He helped me take steps towards getting away from this bad guy in more ways than he probably knows.
After that first year at a new school, I was still holding onto the codependent relationship I had with the bad guy, but I was able to spend more time with my friend. Man, we smoked so much fucking weed together. It felt like the friendships I had at the first college I went to. We weren’t necessarily trying to escape, we were just afraid of leaving college without the experience of being young and stupid with people we cared about. Doing drugs with him felt so much lighter than it did with my boyfriend. We fucked around with xanax not because he wanted to use it as a way to get me to do things in bed I normally wouldn’t be okay with, but because we just wanted to see what all the hype was about. We blacked out, cuz that’s what happens when you’re taking bars! It didn’t feel scary or sinister. It didn’t feel like it was a problem that needed to be addressed the way my drug use was before I went to treatment. We were just two kids having fun, living life in a dream. We took psychedelics together and talked about the traumatic experiences that have become a fabric of our existence. We did molly together and danced in a fratty rager in the woods. We snorted coke off the dashboard of my car and ripped bowls of weed mixed with tobacco until the sun came up. We took the two hour drive to Portland an embarrassing number of times in a manic journey to score whatever drugs my dealer had on hand. That’s the only drug-filled time of my life that I look back on and smile about. His story, like my closest friend from the first high school I went to, isn’t mine to tell. All I can say is we both needed an experience that made us feel infinite, like life was ours for the taking and we didn’t need to fix each other or our problems. We had all the time in the world for that.
Senior year, we moved in together. Right before we signed the lease I hit a wall. I got a DUI, and got a really bad UTI from engaging (nonconsensually, it must be said) in my boyfriend’s fetish a little too heavily. The UTI spread to my kidneys, needing serious antibiotics and more opiates to help with the severe pain I was in. In between going to different doctors for all the meds I needed to get me healthy again, I had to deal with a lawyer, outpatient rehab, and pissing clean so that I could get the DUI dismissed. I wasn’t taking any medication for depression, and the drug use that went on between my friend and I subsided as we both decided to get jobs and take our school work more seriously. Things were starting to weigh on me in ways they hadn’t for years. I started distancing myself from my friend and the bad guy and went back to my earliest form of comfort, chilling alone in my room watching the Kardashians.
Most of my memories of senior year consist of me laying in bed obsessively watching the Kardashians. I couldn’t get enough of the new stories they were telling through their show. It had been years since I’d kept up with them. There was so much to catch up on! Like an old friend calling me after falling off the face of the earth during a bender, I was hanging onto every word like my life depended on it. In some ways, it did. I mentioned before that if I didn’t have the drugs to numb me out, I probably would have reached the point of no return in my depression. Now that the depression was back and I had a court-ordered drug test to contend with, I relied on the Kardashians not only to be entertained, but to be saved. My girls had their own drama to deal with. All of us were going through it. Between Kim’s pregnancy battles, rumors about Kylie’s pregnancy circulating and her need to protect her privacy, drama with the forever problematic Kanye, and Scott becoming more and more of a drug addict womanizer, it felt relieving to engage in their controversy. They made me feel like I wasn’t the only one who was struggling. As someone who has always felt like they have to deal with shit alone, that family reminded me that everyone fights their own battles. Those battles can be ugly, messy, overly-dramatized and sometimes pathetic. That’s okay. Time goes on, another season will air, and the blank space in between offers us a chance at redemption.
Tragedy struck my final year of college. I got hit by a car when I was drunk, riding my bike to my friends after killing a few hours drinking alone at a bar. I had to get surgery to fix my fractured jaw, and of course, went home with a massive bottle of opiate syrup because I couldn’t take any pills with my jaw wired shut. Man, that medication was something else. When I was taking opiates with my boyfriend, I always felt stuck. Like I couldn’t move anywhere or do anything. I felt glued to the bed. That was very convenient for him, as he could do whatever he wanted to do with me and I was powerless to stop it. Nor did I care about stopping it. I was strung out and living in a daze. With the syrup, I felt energized and euphoric. I was more focused on my school work than I had ever been. Partly because I was high, mostly because I needed to get good grades in my classes so I could graduate with a passable GPA. On the night of my friend's birthday, I took way too much of that damn syrup. Combined with the massive amount of weed I had smoked, I left his house in an inescapable paranoid state. I felt manic, out of control and genuinely feared for my life. I actually called 911 because I couldn’t drive myself home. I was confused, couldn’t concentrate on anything besides my heart beating irregularly, and my skin was clammy. I went to my boyfriend’s house and he let me crash there. I woke up to him pulling my pants down and blacked out whatever happened next because I don’t need to remember.
Of course because I’m a drug addict, I didn’t stop doing opiates after that. I just stopped smoking weed. I thought that was the source of my delusional paranoia, so I gave my impressive collection of things I used to get high to a friend of a friend I used to smoke with. He was grateful to have it, and I was grateful to be rid of it. I quickly ran out of the syrup and started indulging in my boyfriend’s drug of choice at the time, Kratom. Talk about psychosis, bro. I was on some other shit with Kratom. I became really druggy about it. I made tea out of it, lurking the drug subreddit to find the optimal temperature to brew it so the psychoactive compounds were released but not destroyed. I drank grapefruit juice to make the high last as long and strong as it could. Like Kourtney’s problematic relationship with Scott and Kanye’s bizarre behavior, my vices hadn’t disappeared; they just took on different forms. I kept getting high on Kratom long after I stopped smoking weed. Through it all, I kept up with the family who’s insanity made me feel sane.
By the skin of my teeth, I managed to graduate college with a BA in English Literature. On my last day of classes, I zipped away from campus like a bat out of hell. I packed up all my shit in one night, booked a mover for the next day, and before the sun went down I was halfway back to Colorado. I didn’t even say goodbye to my friend. That’s the only part about leaving Oregon that I regret. Things with the bad guy had reached a standstill in my last few months of classes. I moved an hour away from campus in an attempt to get away from him, knowing that if I stayed close by I would never be able to detach myself from him. He still hit me up because he knew I would respond. Sometimes I would drive the whole hour just to see him, crying and listening to Lana Del Rey on the drive home, knowing I had given him parts of myself that I would have to fight really hard to get back. I was a mess. I was drinking Kratom tea like it was water, alternating the days I got high with the days I got drunk. The only way I knew how to take the power back I had lost to the bad guy was by going to a state where he had no reason to ever visit. I arrived at my dad’s house in Denver, feeling exhausted from the 5 year journey I had just taken.
I spent the first few months after I graduated getting high and drinking, cuz you know what they say about old habits. I was still depressed, and now that classes were over and the college bubble had popped, I was confused about what my place in the world was. I was dealing with the existential dread that every kid fresh out of school feels, but on top of that was something more intense. I was mentally ill, and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was wounded from the mental damage of my abusive relationship. I didn’t know which way was up. I had escaped from my drug-fueled college years, and now I had to pick up the pieces. I was no longer naive enough to think that moving to a new place would help me “find myself,” I knew that I needed to put in the work to be saved. I was the only one who could save me from myself. I learned that from watching years of Kourtney attempting time and time again to make things work with Scott. She left him for good when she realized the only person who could make him change is himself.
I moved to New York in the fall of 2019 after working men’s fashion week that summer. I fell in love with what the city could offer me. Being backstage at a fashion show, I felt like I had made it. I had come so far from the girl who got high and drove through the hills of Oregon with her boyfriend because she had nothing better to do. I entered a new season of my life, sure to be filled with a new cast of characters and new milestones to celebrate. I started seeing a therapist, one who I’m still seeing, and got an internship writing for a magazine. When I came home to my tiny one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg at the end of the day, I would watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the latest reality TV show that had caught my attention. I was still depressed, so with the help of my sister and therapist, I started seeing a psychiatrist who put me on a mood stabilizer and antidepressant. I was still doing drugs, still getting drunk. Around that time, news broke that Tristan had cheated on Khloe with Kylie’s best friend. I bought a bag of coke that was so strong I almost OD’d alone in my apartment in the middle of the day. Blood was pouring out of my nose, my vision blurred, and my heart felt like it was vibrating. My bedroom was filled with empty bottles and cans and the weird trash that accumulates when you’re a drug addict. Any normal person would look at my life and say, man, she has it BAD. I was going to work every day in this glamorous art gallery. I had a fashion week show on my resume. Even when I “made it” like the Kardashians had, the walls had to come down.
Serious changes needed to be made, both in my life and in theirs. In the summer of 2020, I checked myself into outpatient rehab. Scott’s relationship to alcohol and drugs had destroyed the relationship he had with Kourtney, leaving Kourtney with no choice but to co-parent with him and leave room for nothing more. Tristan’s obsession with women and lack of boundaries damaged his relationship to Khloe. I owed it to myself and other people to not let my own vices get to the point where they were hurting people beyond repair. I’ve done a lot of embarrassing, dumb, reckless, and dangerous shit while using. I’ve never destroyed a relationship. Why let it get to that point when I could just stay sober and be mindful of my own behavior?
After a relapse shortly after I reached a year of sobriety, I came back into the rooms of AA and now I have reclaimed 5 months of sober living. My head is clear, and I’m doing the work I need to reverse the narratives I’ve built up as a way of surviving my abusive relationship. In that time, the Kardashians have transcended the narratives of being dumb, fame-hungry sluts with a crazy family. They’re now a household name. Not bad for a girl with no talent. I haven’t escaped my past, at least not yet. Some of the really, deeply offensive things I said to people haunt me. I’m still plagued by memories of the myriad ways I hurt people. I’m sure there are some people who came into contact with me when I was using and are certain they can never forgive me for what I said, for the ways I acted. Just like how Kendall never really came back from that awful, racist Pepsi commercial, in the eyes of many I’m just as canceled as she is. Even if we move through the world with the best of intentions, we’re all going to fuck up on a grand scale at some point. We’re all going to hurt people. I’m lucky enough that I get to go through the pain that comes from knowing I’ve hurt others, and hurt myself most of all, behind closed doors, with the help of friends I trust, my sponsor, and my therapist.
The Kardashians are lucky enough to have their efforts be seen by everyone. They get to transcend the limitations of their past because the whole world has seen them at their worst. With each new season, with every new scandal, they get to show the world how they’ve learned, or haven’t learned, from past mistakes. They get to start over, and that process doesn’t always look perfect. But as long as the show runs, they can look back on that masterpiece with pride, because no matter how low they got they always owned that process as their own.
I just finished step 2 of the 12 steps. The step where you begin to form a conception of a higher power. My sponsor wanted me to write about a faith I had growing up. If I worked a different program, one where you could place people as your higher power, I would write about the faith I have in the Kardashians. I’ve watched them grow. I’ve watched them stay stunted. I’ve watched them cultivate a presence in the media and in the hearts of people around the world. I held onto their show so tightly, so very tightly. They were my security blanket. I’ve healed enough now from the addiction and the abuse I endured, as well as the trauma I went through via my medical issues, to know that the world doesn’t exist in absolutes. There are no guarantees.
When I first started watching the Kardashians, I loved that they were considered hungry for fame, because as long as that hunger was there that would mean there would be another season, and another season after that, and one more after that. For as long as I needed them to be an absolute, a guarantee, a fixed staple in my life, they delivered. Say what you want about them, but those bitches know how to hold it down.
One year ago, the final season of their show aired. Fans and critics speculated about the reasons why, but I didn’t read any of those articles. I’m just as selfish as Kim was when she was taking photos of herself on the way to get Khloe from jail. I don’t care why it ended. All I know is that they served their purpose to me. I didn’t watch the last season. I didn’t need to. I had found new absolutes to be grateful for. I held down a steady job throughout the pandemic, one that gave me health insurance and a constant paycheck. I made new friends from rehab and from AA. I found a sponsor who always answers when I call. I worked the steps, giving me new chances to learn more about myself. I keep seeing my therapist every week, who gives me new ways to think. Those things will change, they will take on new forms. I watched that happen with the Kardashians and their relationships. I watched it happen in my own life. The only absolute is that everything is subject to change.
In less than a week, the Kardashians new show airs on Hulu. So it is. I may or may not tune in. I don’t know if I really care anymore, if I’m being honest. I kept watching long enough to find the light. I have my own world to live in now. I’m owning my own process. The whole city of New York has seen me ugly cry in public. The only way to go is up. Just like the Kardashians, I was once considered a bad girl, a dumb girl, a crazy girl. I took a page out of Kim’s book and posted a nude photo of myself to Instagram when I turned 25. I don’t need the world to know I’m hot, but I need them to know I have ascended. I have arrived.
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