Fate, Fortune, Luck, Grace?
A remarkable personal narrative in today’s Sunday Times Magazine by David Carr (the Times’ Media columnist). The mix of honesty and self-deception, freedom and addiction, waste and grace is stunning. Here’s a small sample:
To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.
Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.
Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.
Here is what I remember about how That Guy became This Guy: not much. But my version of events is worth knowing, if for no other reason than I was there.
As the children of alcoholics, my brother and I might have been our parents’ “redeemers,” as Carr’s children were, but that’s strangely cold comfort.
You do your best to move on and be happy when recovery takes hold. But if addicts sometimes get the happy life they didn’t deserve, “redeemers” realize they had to see and do a lot of things they didn’t deserve, including listening to decades of apologies, which you realize are thinly disguised demands and threats: We’re all sober now. No harm done. Tell me that’s it’s all OK, you weren’t hurt that badly. And tell it to me over and over. Or I might just fall into despair, and you know what will happen then …
You can forgive, of course, and you can even find a certain sense of the ridiculous in after some decades have passed. In fact, I laughed outright at this line from Carr: “Not in my case, but it was a much closer call than I would like to admit. I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds.”
In other words, for all the travesties he’s visited on his family and kids, he’s really just the average Joe with his feelings of inadequacy.
Only an addict could make an understatement like that. And believe it.
Jean,
thank you for your thoughts — as usual I find them perceptive.
I confess I did not pay sufficient attention to what you call his “understatement.”
As you know, I’m a great admirer of Dante. One of the finest moment’s of the “Purgatorio” is when he finally meets his heart-throb Beatrice, only to receive a frosty rebuke — no “we are all frauds” stuff from that tough lady.
In fairness to Carr, he turned his life around within a year of the birth of his children and rebukes himself for taking even that long (they were born in April and he was in rehab by December).
What is unsaid is that Carr is the beneficiary of what I would call generations of social capital — were he not white, not the child of solidly middle class parents, etc., it’s not clear to me that he would have been able or permitted to make the kind of 180 degree turn that he did without sinking much lower. He would more likely be in jail than employed by the NYT.
Jean:
Wow.
Thank you.
“In fairness to Carr, he turned his life around within a year of the birth of his children and rebukes himself for taking even that long (they were born in April and he was in rehab by December).”
Yeah, well, excuse me if I don’t cheer. A lot can happen to a neglected baby in within a year, and the only reason the kids aren’t dead is because Carr’s family’s intervened and pushed, with God’s grace, Carr toward recovery.
And, you’re right, being white didn’t hurt, either.
While I’m happy that Carr’s not wreaking havoc on himself and those who love him anymore, I always have to wonder to what end addicts decide to write these confessionals. There’s a deep need among addicts not only to say they’re sorry, but to tell the world how much they themselves have also suffered.
And, of course, they have.
But taking what they say at face value can be dangerous. They may be off the booze or drugs, but having a habit makes them adept manipulators, liars, and self-kidders. Forgiving an addict is a lot easier than trusting them.
“Taking what they say at face value…”
i’m sure Jean Raber is correct in essentials. But the whole effort of this piece was to show that Carr’s own self-account all these years that he had told himself about how he recovered was itself a bit of a fraud. He went back and heard from one person after another that almost nothing was a matter of his own effort or courage or resourcefulness. So I thought he earned his claim to being a fraud, and wasn’t just making a pro forma assertion to claim average joe status.
I thought his reticence about his wife and children were admirable — he leaves them (almost) entirely out of what might have felt like an effort at self-justification, with all the apologies and implied demands that Jean describes. That strategy perhaps leaves them more authentically a matter of grace.
I also wished that this raised-Catholic had been able to put some theology on the failure/recovery account, but perhaps he has lost the vocabulary for that.
Jean,
one of the things that struck me about his account is that I think he would agree with your statement above: “taking what they say at face value can be dangerous.”
(While I was composing this, I see that James Englert just elaborated on the point.)
There’s a new book called A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives. Here’s an excerpt from the Scientific American review reprinted by Amazon:
The thought has occurred to me that the suffering in Purgatory (if there is such a place or state) consists of having these illusions stripped away so we see ourselves as we really are.
I didn’t read the article as suggesting that his family pushed him into rehab, rather, they enabled him to get rehab and a decent fostering situation for his children when he asked them to intervene.
Jean, as the child of someone who had A LOT of problems (not alcoholism) I too find it hard to muster a lot of sympathy for “recovery” stories. When I get called on my lack of sympathy, I usually say something like: “I already gave my childhood to the enterprise, and I am not giving one more minute of the rest of my life.”
But anyway, as these things go, it is still the case that it is much better that he recovered than he did not, and that he did so before it did lasting damage to his children. It’s a fine line between glorifying bad behavior and celebrating redemption. That is also why so many people have such difficulty with the parable of the prodigal son.
I’d like to offer the 12 steps of AA for consideration:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Jean’s point about family members is poignant. Steps 8 and 9 are very difficult to handle for boith the alcoholic/addict and affected family members. In most situations, the alcoholic’s damage spans generations and continues long after personal sobriety. Often, no effective amends can ever be made. The caveat in step 9 is significant. It is often harmful to even attempt to make amends. The only partial meaningful amends is lifelong sobriety.
Here’s another aspect to the story. Jonah Lehrer, author of ‘Proust was a Neuroscientist’, offers his comments on the isue of memory.
The link is:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/
Mike
“The thought has occurred to me that the suffering in Purgatory (if there is such a place or state) consists of having these illusions stripped away so we see ourselves as we really are.”
David,
I suspect you’re right. I have my own personal belief about Purgatory: It will be right here on this Earth, and we will literally have to face everyone whom we have injured, and if we try to lie or makae unjustified excuses Jesus will set off some sort of siren, adding another level of humiliation. It won’t be Hell, but it will be very, very painful. Those whom we have injured will, of course, also have to offer us apologies for their sins against us. And none of us will be allowed into Heaven until we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us.
Good thing the Lord will be there to judge us.
“But taking what they say at face value can be dangerous. They may be off the booze or drugs, but having a habit makes them adept manipulators, liars, and self-kidders. Forgiving an addict is a lot easier than trusting them.”
Yup. There is a whole industry that rose up in the fifties with Synanon, and all its imitators. Many of these “manipulators” began to advise everybody how to live and especially how to be miserable in life. All of a sudden we were all screwed up. There is original sin and all that but how many of us did not give one iota about our parents and everyone else. I believe in rehab and have worked much in this field. But there is a point where the ex-alcoholic/drug addict wants to make sure everyone is miserable with them. It does have to do with recovery but cut the crap that we are all addicts. Manipulation is the hardest fault to get rid of, it seems. Not that addicts have a monopoly.
And somewhere we can fit good old Augustine in here. (Now why wouldn’t I?) Some believe that the Confessions were the greatest act of self promotion ever. Or at least no one would have known him had he not wrote this redoubtable mea culpa.
I said, ” Those whom we have injured will, of course, also have to offer us apologies for their sins against us.”
Oops — just the opposite. I should have said, “Those who have injured us will also have to offer us apologies …”
Speaking of face value, The New York Times has an interesting article today on how people perceive themselves in mirrors. All sorts of deceptions come into play, mostly favorable, of course.
For “Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes”, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22angi.html?pagewanted=2
“Ah, wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!”.
== Robert Burns
Ann, the mirror story was interesting–and germane to this piece.
Quite literally, we can only see ourselves two-dimensionally in mirrors (or photos or on video), where others see us three-dimensionally. I sometimes wonder whether that makes it easier for any of us to kid ourselves in our addictions to substances, people or ideas.
A friend who also grew up with alcoholics, and she used to say that it helped to see her mother as a mirror image of what she might have been had she not seen her mother’s addiction. Not that her mother drank from a sense of altruism, but the result was to scare her straight.
Totally off-track, but I was interested to note the bit in the NYT report about highly socialized animals who recognize themselves in mirrors. Cats have two reactions to mirrors. They either try to fight the cat in the mirror (the smart ones might even go around the other side of the mirror to see if the cat’s there). Or they simply don’t make any sense of the image, and simply try to spray the mirror as a new object that has to be marked as theirs.
Perhaps that’s what comes from their “serve no purpose, obey no master, seek maximum comfort” lifestyle, of which I have been a willing, even slavish, co-dependent for a couple of dozen (mostly) ungrateful strays over the many decades.
Yes, cats do fascinate. A psychologist friend told me that the affective part of cats’ brains are much larger than the affective parts of dogs’ brains, and cats can sometimes exhibit more empathy with their owners than dogs can. My two cats seemed always to know what I was feeling — at sad times they even petted me!
I wonder if animals fool themselves the way we do — we automatically leave out data that is streaming in into consciousness, distort it, and impose old data on the new images. Just consider Hillary’s fabulation of the sniper incident. Amazing.