In the Prison of My Mind, I'm Taken Care Of

 I’m sitting in the Delta sky club lounge at DIA, waiting for my flight back to Boston, when the thought occurs to me I could jet off to LA and spend the week lying about at the Chateau Marmont if I really wanted to. I’ve always had the urge to run, especially when life gets as stultifying as it is right now. 

A year ago I lived amongst chaos. You know this. 3 day benders, a different guy every week and I didn’t even need to sleep with them to get what I thought I wanted, which was a sprinkle of cocaine and a crumb of attention. Maybe some MDMA thrown into the mix and an invitation to join a table at a massive club in Brooklyn where I could drink for free and dance while elevated above the crowd. It’s fun being a drug user. It’s sad being high all of the time. Drugs helped center me. Drugs destabilized me. They allowed me to orient myself. I could settle into a physical space when I couldn’t find stability inside my own head. It was necessary for me to gather knowledge about the places I lived in because I had no conception of how one goes about exploring what’s going on inside the self. I went out so I wouldn’t have to go in. Doing drugs is no picnic, as much as Hunter S. Thompson tried to make them out to be. Cat Marnell did the whole drugged out NYC woman about town thing and made the lifestyle sound so cool, knowing just as well as any other drug user how horrific it is staying up all night having delusions night after night after cruel, dark and cold night. Deception through writing, the oldest trick in the book. For me, all I did was decide to go off my meds and book a flight to Miami for a music festival where I paid 200 dollars to get into a club I don’t even remember spending 12 hours at. Drugs were a constant, but they were not my friend. I could not find space to exist within my own mind. And still I romanticize the parts where using was fun. Life is full of contradictions when you’re young, rich, beautiful and smart. 

It’s funny how a rich person's life is automatically reduced to a stereotype, even when they develop an addiction. At least that’s how I look at my own life. Cocaine, alcohol, shopping. The diagnosis is clear in my mind: too much money. Too much time on my hands. No need to develop any sort of belief system, interests, hobbies or career goals. I can just sit poolside by a cottage in LA and write, read, think about writing, get drunk, sleep it off, sleep with a stranger. I know that drill all too well. I guess I just dream of doing it in LA because I’ve already done it everywhere else. A change of scenery gives me something to write about. I can’t promise it’s anymore interesting than what I already write about, given that I seem to tell the same stories and just change the background. But hey, I’m at the Chateau Marmont, I’m at the Ritz in Tokyo, I’m sitting in the backseat of a strangers car in South Africa, I’m on the balcony of a hotel in New York, I’m in the airport lounge in Denver. I’m in my own head. Whatever comes from it is all a part of my process, if not new. Deception through writing, I'm a master at that, if nothing else.

Life isn’t as fast-paced as it once was, mostly because I’m in Boston which is a city where too many people have died for it to be a city that really comes alive. It’s a town that hasn’t fully grown into itself yet, which makes it the perfect place to glow into someone you could only dream of becoming. Boston just might be the ultimate get well soon city. The boys aren’t cute enough to get you into any trouble, and there’s no way the drinks are strong enough to make you forget you’re in a place as dull as Massachusetts. There’s no pretense to Boston. No one dreams of moving to this state and becoming any different than they are now. That leaves you with easy access to everything. Not expecting anything from anywhere gives you the chance to make it all up as you go along without worrying if you’re doing it all right. You don’t have to feel like you have a whole city to impress. Boston is the place transplants go when the part of them they were hoping to find in another city got killed off. The weather is shit. The people are a snooze. But life is as fulfilling as it’s ever been. It’s just as meaningful as it is meaningless. But more often than not the latter seems true.

A potent memory of the first time I didn’t feel the need to run comes to mind as I write this. I was drunk and stoned after midnight in a field in Tennessee, sitting by the main stage at Bonnaroo, when my friend looked at me with glassy eyes and enlarged pupils and said she doesn’t want to leave, she never wants to leave, she wants to grow roots. She opened her arms to the drugged out crowd, smiling and laughing, and said, all this? I want this forever. Grow roots, stay there forever, never leave. Thought loops of the drug-induced variety. 

I grew up with that friend in Colorado. To me, that will always be the place of baggies of mushrooms being sold in the Red Rocks parking lot, manic meltdowns at gas stations, a desperate search for places that don’t card for cigarettes, pitchers of margaritas that lead to massive fights with whoever is willing to pick up the phone. It’s a place where you can start the day with a blunt, clumsily slide into a stupor and pretend to busy yourself with something that feels like you’re making moves. Maybe go for a hike, where you can get more stoned. Maybe go skiing, also where you can get stoned. It’s essentially a playground for those who like to indulge and move around. 

I find Denver to be a deeply unsettling place. Drugs, in my experience, are meant to grind you to a halt. Anyone who feels the need to get high and go do something is unhinged, and not in the fun, kooky way. It’s like they’re so desperate to make something out of the day. Girl, you’re high. Why not sit down, grow roots, stay there forever, never leave. On that note, that could be everyone’s intention when they move to Colorado for the weed. Drugs emulsify us, allowing our energy to seamlessly meld with our surroundings. If you’re not ready to commit to a state of mind but want to feel connected to a space, just say yes to the offerings and see what comes of it.

All this? Every transplant seems to say. I want this forever. Coloradans can use weed to say- this is my town now. I belong here. GPS? Bitch, please. I'm always headed west.

I’m on my 5th life as I enter my 27th year around the sun. All the lives that came before Massachusetts were just as intertwined with scenery as they were with drugs. It’s now impossible for me to not associate the dreary weather of Oregon with pain killers and abusive relationships, the snow white pills in stark contrast to the dark sky and relentless rain. The foggy blue mountains were the same color as the bruises on my thighs from a violent boyfriend. Bruises can be clearly seen but only felt when pressed on. Oregon tightened its grip on me so intensely the pain started to feel good, satisfying that strange masochistic impulse a lot of us feel. Oregon is an insular community. A lot of people who grow up there never end up leaving because they don’t know anything else. It is the toxic ex of the Pacific Northwest. Fitting.

They say in AA to be wary of people, places and things that might trigger you to use. There’s too much coke in Colorado, random research chemicals in Oregon, and everything else and then some in NYC. I can’t help but notice that floating from state to state was like playing whack-a-mole. Have a scary experience with one drug, one state with bad weather, one dismal relationship, then move away from all that to a place that’s good enough to grow roots, stay there forever, never leave. The next tricky little mole always seems to pop up wherever I go because I’m just as unwell here as I was there. That feeling of being unwell, desperate to find somewhere, someplace new, a place with promise, is what kept me going when things started to get dark.

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Bored during a slow day at work, I texted my boyfriend that it’s days like this where I want to have a relaxing day catching up on reading and maybe write a little, but I’m still in work mode so I end up just zoning out to reality TV. I could spend the whole shift googling silly little questions like why did Jax and Britney get fired from Vanderpump Rules? Why did Carole leave Real Housewives of New York? What season of Keeping up With the Kardashians did Kim lose her diamond earrings? I obsess over the lives of random people America has deemed to be micro-celebrities and become so wrapped up in all of their nonsense I begin to forget that I’m at work, I’m in Boston, I have a life here. I wish that I didn’t have to claim Boston as my own, so I get wrapped up in everyone else’s lives as a way of vicariously living out this fantasy in which I’m doing something more exciting than I am right now. 

I do not like having a job in mental health in Boston, which is a new field for me that I’m genuinely interested in pursuing. It scares me that, even if it’s just a brief moment, I’m growing roots, I might have found a place in which I’ll never leave, and that place is not a city. I’ve found peace and a feeling of being content within the confines of the self that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. I’m at home with who I am. For a second I thought this sense of self was stultifying. I began to fear it meant that there are no more possibilities to take down another mole, eliminating the primal thrill of the hunt. But once you fix the dysfunction you have the freedom to explore something more. 

It's here, the group home I work at, the least glamorous place I've ever found myself in, nothing on my schedule except therapy appointments and reminders to pay bills, that it came to me. I'm really going to do something with my life. I'm going to become someone. And the most lovely part about that becoming is I won't have to spend 5 grand at the Chateau Marmont to make it happen.