Welcome to Orchid
/By Karen Collazo
As I passed the threshold into The Orchid Recovery Center, I braced myself for an environment that would contain hostility, anger and – most importantly, women I could not relate to. During my stay at the detox facility I had convinced myself that I was in for a very odd experience; one that would no doubt provide tons of stories to tell at dinner parties, but nothing like the positive life changing journey that was about to take place. Over the next two weeks, I lived with a group of twenty women who seamlessly took to their position in the social order, followed firm rules and maintained a very strict schedule. In that cocoon, we learned about ourselves, grew fond of each other and healed some of our wounds.
Orchid is comprised of two facilities. There’s the main office on the top floor of a 4-story building. This is where we spent most of our days, being split up and shuffled from one room to the next for: group therapy sessions, acupuncture, art therapy and one-on-one meetings with our individual therapists. It’s designed with a comfortable and soothing aesthetic in mind. Near the entrance there is a large bamboo plant. As you walk down the halls you feel the healing energies of the space and the people. The walls are painted in a muted mustard-tone and are tastefully dressed with inspirational quotes. The furniture throughout is dark cherry wood and you can find Hindu statues, Asian Zen décor and orchid flowers adorning the tables. The couches are soft, comfy and red.
The second facility is the apartment complex. Orchid owns an entire 2-story building, which includes: 18 one and two-bedroom apartments, two laundry rooms, a TV room, outdoor seating, a grill and a pool. Each apartment is simple and contains all your basic furnishings, appliances and kitchenware. They each feature ample living space, closets and bathrooms, and are all decorated the same. Apartments are supposed to be kept tidy, with beds always made and all personal items in their respective drawers or put away in the cupboards. Women, who stay for long periods of time, tend to put up pictures of friends and family to make the place feel homier. You’ll typically find loved ones taped to mirrors. If on Saturday you had a few dollars leftover from your grocery run to Publix, you might splurge on some flowers for your place.
The day started promptly at 7am. This was when prescribed medicines were distributed under supervision from a tech that stood on the other side of a glass window, in one of the apartments that had been setup as a small office/ storage space. Meds were handed out daily until 8:30am. If you had packed perfume or hairspray with your belongings, this was kept in a locker and you had to ask for it every morning. The techs supervised the use of these items as well. As the women gathered by the gated entrance, the staff would quickly check each apartment to ensure all maintenance procedures had been followed. More often than not, there was a dirty dish left in a sink or a bed was unmade. This would hold up the entire group and we would all wait patiently as the woman in question returned to her apartment to take care of whatever mess had been left behind. Then we’d all board the bus to head over to the office.
The two facilities are only five minutes apart, but the ride goes through a sketchy neighborhood. Every morning we were greeted by a despondent homeless man standing at the entrance of I-95 asking for change. Promptly at 9am, with all twenty of us sitting in a circle in the main room, we started the day with what was called “Goals and Gratefuls.” This was when all the women would go around the room and share where they were at in their recovery.
“Good morning ladies. My name is Karen and I’m an addict,” I’d say.
“Hi, Karen,” they said in unison.
“My drug of choice is cocaine and today I’m 12 days clean.”
Round of applause.
“Today, my goal is to not obsess over what time it is but to be here now, so that I can fully take in all the tools that are being provided. I am grateful for my family, friends and all of you ladies for helping me feel worthy of recovery. My defense mechanisms are rationalization, isolation and avoidance. Yesterday, I reached my goal of writing my life story, which I will be sharing later today.”
Once we’d all had our turn, we’d move on to participating in a group activity. We had a number of activities we engaged in. There was therapy, yoga, educational movies and classes on nutrition. At Noon we would get a lunch break. All twenty of us would return to the apartment complex in the white vans. An hour later, we were back at the office for our afternoon activities and sessions. At 5pm, we returned to the apartments for the evening and were allowed to relax and use the phone for two hours. If for some reason you broke a rule, your phone privileges were the first thing to be revoked. The day ended at 8pm with another round of “Goals and Gratefuls.”
“Hi, I’m Karen and I’m an addict.”
“Hi, Karen.”
“My drug of choice is cocaine and today I’m 12 days clean.
Round of applause.
“Today, I did not reach my goal since instead of looking at the clock I just went around asking everyone for the time.”
The room erupts in laughter.
“I’m grateful for Orchid, the techs who bought me cigarettes and my clean time. My goal for tomorrow is to stop judging everyone and focus on myself.”
On my first day, I was assigned a big sister. Your big sister is a fellow female addict who takes you under their wing to show you the ropes. My big sister happened to also be the matriarch of the group. She was known among the women as Mother Mary. She was very dedicated to the program and had a laser focus on winning back her family’s love and respect by completing a 30-day program. Every Sunday, my big sister took care of coordinating family potluck dinners with the girls and was a natural at policing the gossip that unsurprisingly took place among the women. Mother Mary was a former 911 operator and a current badass with short red hair, that had purple streaks in it, tasteful tattoos sprinkled all over and numerous piercings. Her DOC (drug of choice) was alcohol.
My roommate was the only other Hispanic-American in the program. She was an older professional from South America who had enjoyed a successful career in the field of psychology for 30+ years. Her accent was thick and she had long and curly blonde hair that she carried around like a crown. Every morning she would take special care to wash her hair and condition it and always wore it down. It was her pride and joy. My roommate and I connected like mother and daughter. We both shared an addiction to sugary treats and on our trips to Publix made sure to stock up on cookies, candy, ice cream and cake. We’d sit on the L-shaped couch in our living room, watching TV and devouring snacks, until it was time to go to bed. When you’re recovering from a drug addiction, you naturally replace drugs with food. She was intelligent and insightful and really believed that I was going to make it. As soon as we met, I let my guard down. It fell off like a chain-link cloak and remained gathered where I left it for the duration of my stay at Orchid. Her DOC was Xanax.
A few nights in, after dinner with my roommate, I made my way down to the poolside tables for a cigarette. I sat there thinking about the revelations I had made that day during therapy. I had learned that most addicts believed themselves to be unique, but we were not. We might be special, but were no different than one another. For the first time in my life, I could be Karen not just one side or aspect of her, because these women knew how I felt. They were like me. It was liberating. And when the women accepted me with open arms, it felt like home. Regardless of socio-economic background, educational level or race, we were all the same: individuals looking for love who at some point turned to drugs when we didn’t find it. I connected with each and every one of those women on a spiritual level that I could never fully put into words. Each one of us was a candle whose flame was slowly withering into defeated embers. Coming together turned the gas on high and reignited our value in the world.
While I sat there, I was joined by Jessica; she was in her early 20’s and from New Jersey, the heroin capital of the country. Jessica introduced herself and told me all about her passion for music and the influence it had in helping her through her brother’s recent death. She had dark blue eyes, olive skin and the goofiest laugh. She had been through rehab before and had ended up in a flop house in South Florida. A flop house is a halfway house that has been neglected. There is typically very little supervision taking place and a lot of drug abuse. A halfway house or sober living house that is well-managed is where recovering addicts transition into life after rehab, by learning the skills necessary to integrate back into society. Halfway houses usually have rules and curfews, with 24-hour staff coverage. According to Jessica, there was a flop house epidemic in Florida and she and her brother had been victims of this horrible growing trend.
A few months earlier, while both of them were trying to get their lives on track, her brother gave in to the disease and started using heroin again. One night, he overdosed and no one was there to help him. When the medics finally arrived, they didn’t bother to give him Naloxone (a drug that can reverse the effects of opioids) and he unfortunately passed away. He was in his early 20’s. This triggered a downward spiral for Jessica, which led her back into treatment at Orchid. She was lost, lonely and upset. While sharing her story, I was deeply humbled by her experience. My heart caved under the weight of her tragic story. I reflected on the fact that while I’ve had my fair share of traumatic events, I was still lucky enough to have my sisters in my life. In that very moment, I looked up at the dark sky to gaze at the stars and thank the universe for this gift, when suddenly a shooting star broke through the atmosphere. It was the first shooting star I had ever seen.
Women Only, Please
/By Karen Collazo
When I began my search for a recovery treatment center, I had only one criterion: that it be a women-only facility. By then, I had learned that my disease had metastasized from drugs and alcohol to sex and shopping. I thought that if I admitted myself to a co-ed rehab center, I was most certainly not going to stand a chance. I found a women-only center that specialized in dual-diagnosis in West Palm Beach, Florida. After my 24-hour stint in detox, this is where I would spend the next two weeks. But before I could check-in with my sisters at Orchid, I had to survive the next night with a co-ed population. Survival meant not engaging with any of the male patients.
After a 3-hour nap, I tech knocks on my door. During detox, the techs are continuously monitoring your vitals to ensure a safe detox process. This entails taking your blood pressure every 2-3 hours during your entire stay. I woke up hungry and could tell by the chatter coming from the dining area that lunch was still out. I grabbed my grey hooded-sweatshirt, took a cue from the others, and slipped on socks and a pair of flip flops.
The dining hall is an open space that separates the men and women’s dormitories. The walls and furniture are all dressed in the same drab peach. On the right-hand side there is a glass partition that allows the techs to observe the common area from their station. I’m wondering if the glass is bullet-proof when a girl interrupts my thought by walking past the window. She’s tall, lean and tan with deep green eyes and beautiful straight auburn hair that reaches her waist and curls at the ends. She’s wearing leopard-print tights and a dark purple sweater. She’s seductively licking a vanilla soft-serve ice cream inside a small waffle cone. We exchange friendly smiles.
On the left-hand side is the buffet station, which is reminiscent of an elementary school cafeteria. A messy stack of plastic orange and blue trays greet you at the start of the line. As you make your way down the metal counter a fellow recovering addict serves you food. Tonight, we have a choice of Salisbury steak, chicken pot pie and Caesar salad. My stomach does a tiny flip.
“We have leftover baked goods and fruit from this morning if you want something lighter. Or there’s the cereal station,” says the server, as he points to a large dispenser in the corner filled with all the sugary cereals of my childhood dreams. There’s Frosted Flakes, Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Puffs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Raisin Bran.
“I’ll take a raspberry Danish and a banana. Thanks.” I wait while he disappears to the back of the kitchen and scan the room, noticing that everyone is huddled around, either with new friends they’ve just made or sitting alone, curled up within themselves. It’s like a walk-in freezer in this facility and most patients are shivering, including me. A skinny guy with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair and a neatly trimmed beard jumps up from his lunch and rushes over to the large garbage bin next to the coffee station. He vomits violently and it echoes across the room as everyone has gone silent. I’m suddenly reminded that some of us may not be shivering from the cold.
When my snacks arrive, I make my way to an empty four-top table in the center. I pull a chair out and the red-headed girl approaches.
“Do you mind if I sit with you?” she asks.
“No, not at all. Hi, I’m Karen,” I say.
“What’s your DOC?”
“My what?”
“Your DOC? It means drug-of-choice. Mine used to be coke and then after my last trip to rehab, I went back out and tried heroine for the first time and now I’m here for both. So, what’s your DOC?” she asks.
“I guess my DOC is coke. How old are you?” I ask.
“I’m nineteen,” she says.
“And how many times have you been to rehab?”
“This is my fourth time. I started coming when I was sixteen,”
“I take that back. My DOC is whatever I can get my hands on at the moment. Sometimes it’s not even a drug. It’s sex.”
Back in New York, a therapist once posed a question that has haunted me ever since: why do you think you fuck like a gay man? When I first moved to Manhattan, I hit the dating scene like a category five hurricane. Every man I encountered was a potential object to destroy and therefore subject to being swept up by my destructive wrath. I had just left an emotionally abusive relationship with my fiancé of two years and thought men in general were now indebted to me. I would collect my dues by jumping from one anonymous dick to the other, under the guise that I was dating like one of the fabulous ladies from Sex and the City.
Most nights, I would walk into a bar with one goal: to get the guy. I’d scan the room, as I sipped my cocktail and half-heartedly listened to the conversation going on between friends. Then I’d spot him: the one I was going to conquer and take home that night. It was a competition; a game I played with no one but me. If I could get the guy to buy me a drink and take me home that night, I had won. I racked up quite a few points during my ten years in New York. And I thought I was fully enjoying my new-found sexuality after almost committing to a very sick man.
But according to my therapist, I was promiscuous because I was trying to recreate the night of my first trauma. At fifteen, I was sexually assaulted during a night in which I had no control of the situation. And according to him, seeking sexual encounters with men was my way of regaining the control I had lost that night. This somewhat explained why once I was in bed with these men I lost complete interest in the whole thing. The formula made sense on paper, but it really disturbed me.
I thought of myself as a free-spirited woman with a unique sexual libido, which was unmatched by most of my female peers. In my mind, I was a woman with a modern point-of-view on relationships. However, if I was to believe what my therapist was suggesting, then I was nothing but a sad little hamster running on its wheel, trying diligently to attain something that would eventually get me nowhere. This was the first indication that my addictive behavior extended beyond drugs and alcohol. It also included men.
Back at the detox center, I’m fighting every desire in me – to interact with the male patients. For me, the longing is like a sick deep yearning that starts in the caverns of my gut. The disease starts talking to me. It poses an innocent question and responds with a staunch exclamation. And then, because it is a fact, I must set out to make it happen. It goes from thought to action in a split second. I think I need this: to survive, to feel better, to get something I must have. He was shuffling around the halls and common area anxiously, after throwing up back in the dining hall. Wearing the detox uniform: pajamas; a pair of red flannel bottoms, a long-sleeved white shirt, black socks and flip flops, he opens the door to the patio. Ten of us addicts were sitting out there enjoying a smoke, when he spots an empty chair and sits next to me.
He introduces himself and tells me his DOC is meth. He had been in detox for three days and was going to be released to Palm Partners soon, the co-ed treatment center down the street. He had a nice smile, even though he looked tired.
“You don’t look like you belong here. Is this your first time in treatment?” he asks.
“Yeah. Is it that obvious?” I say. And then, I turn on the charm. I smirk and bite my lower lip. I’ve been told that you can see it in my eyes, exactly what I’m thinking. I want to have sex with this guy.
“Don’t worry. You’ll do okay. You should get my number,” he says.
He writes his number on a napkin, after borrowing a pen from the tech that was supervising the smoke break. Since we’re not allowed to have lighters on us, the techs have to stand guard and light our cigarettes for us. When my new friend hands his number over, our fingers lightly graze each other and I feel a hot heat rising between my legs and slowly reach my face. Suddenly my mind is racing and I’m in planning mode.
How can I get this guy back in my room and on top of me? The TV room is across the hall so I could suggest we go watch TV together. We could steal suggestive glances and if we find ourselves alone I could give him a hand job under the blankets. How funny if we got in trouble for breaking the rules posted above the couch: No blankets allowed. Men and women are to sit on opposite sides of the room. A giddy tingling starts brewing. I imagine myself pulling him into my room, closing the door behind us and guiding his hand down the front of my pants, if only to kill the pain and sadness for just a few delicious moments. I’d hate myself afterwards and probably cry myself to sleep, but I never think that far ahead.
“Guys, smoke break is over so take your last drag,” says the tech.
I snap out of my racy daydream, put out my cigarette and smile at the guy as he hands over the napkin. On my way back to my room, I toss his number into the same garbage can where he had puked in earlier. I crawl back into bed and stay there until morning.
The Intake
/By Karen Collazo
He slowly removes the first item from my tan leather Cole Hann shoulder bag; the handbag that I had purchased as a gift to myself two years prior, when I landed that six-figure Account Director job in Chicago. He sets it gently on the desk; it’s a pair of Coach Aviator sunglasses.
“One pair of go-lasses,” he says, as he writes it down on the form in front of him. We’re sitting in a small 5 x 5 drab and grey room, off to the left side of the lobby. There’s one metal desk, one dusty old black computer, two plastic chairs and right below the cobweb-covered drop-down ceiling, a security camera points directly at me. He pulls out my iPhone, which is protected by a fuchsia Kate Spade case.
“One cell phone wit cova,” he says to no one in particular. He writes this down too.
“One wallet,” he says of my light pink Rebecca Minkoff leather wristlet from the Spring Collection. Sensing my anxiety in the quiet that hovered between us, he looks up and makes eye contact for the first time.
“Don worry. Ju don’t need tees tings inside and ju will get dem back when you are dischawged.”
How did I end up here? I’m not a drug addict. I have a successful advertising career, where I get to travel all over the world with my clients—to production shoots in Mexico, off-site meetings in Aruba and private concerts in New York. I have a brand new car that is current on its payments. I live in an updated 3-bedroom condo with marble counter-tops and stainless steel appliances. I get my hair and nails done every weekend. I have an Amazon Prime account. I have tons of friends and family… Where and how did it all go wrong? Do I even belong here, at a detox facility? It suddenly occurs to me that I may have made a huge mistake.
A blonde woman cautiously shuffles past the door of my new tiny hell. Her roots are darker than the night. Her eyes are dull and sunken and her frail body is hidden beneath an over-sized Miami Heat t-shirt and grey sweatpants. She’s wearing black socks with flip flops. Cigarette in hand, she reaches for the front door. A guard quickly catches her hand before it touches the door handle. I notice the track marks.
“You don’t have permission to go outside,” he says.
“Come on man, I just wanna drag of ma fucking cigarette,” she says.
I look back at the tech rummaging through my belongings. I wonder if I will have access to the outside world or am I just like her? After my purse has been emptied of all its things, a short mousy woman escorts me to the nurse’s station. As I follow her out of the room, I look back one last time to see all my stuff being dumped into Ziploc bags.
The nurse’s station is cheery by comparison. The walls are sky blue and there’s a healthy 4-ft palm tree standing tall in the corner. Along the right wall is a row of brown leather chairs. To the left is the registration area, an L-shaped counter with a sign-in sheet, one pen and a bell to alert someone that you are there. Three young blonde women and one man are waiting to be seen. Everyone is wearing pajamas and barely awake.
The mousy nurse motions for me to follow her through the doors directly ahead, which lead to a long sterile hallway that is lit with bright fluorescent overhead lighting. The floor is beige linoleum and the walls are painted a dull peach. We are in the women’s dormitory wing. We walk past several open doors that provide a sneak preview of what my home will be for the next few days.
The rooms are simple: one twin-sized bed with taupe bedding and a cherry wood headboard, one small matching nightstand and one brown leather chair (like the ones in the nurses’ station). Each room has a tiny 1 x 1 ft window at the very top corner of the back wall, reminiscent of windows found in most basements up north. Each room has a small flat screen TV. The occupied rooms we walk past are all empty. Scattered clothes on the floor and unmade beds give away that the rooms currently belong to someone. Everyone is eating breakfast in the mess hall. The small talk and laughter that travels back to the dorm rooms are barely audible over the sound of someone’s television, which is playing Cops.
We turn the corner, pass the closed medicine window and enter a handicap stall in the women’s bathroom.
“We need a urine sample. Use this,” the nurse says, as she hands me a plastic cup. I nod and stare at her. She says, “I’m not going anywhere. I need to be with you when you pee into that cup.” What the fuck? I’m not a criminal! I let out a defeated sigh and proceed to follow instructions.
All the tests come back negative. It’s been six months since I did molly, three months since I snorted coke, a month since I smoked pot and a week since I’ve had any alcohol. I hadn’t intentionally stopped doing drugs in anticipation of rehab. I was just going through one of my usual funks; a steady and progressive depression that spikes in intensity every few months, completely draining me and forcing me to check out from my personal life. After a few months, when my body has grown accustomed to this new level of hopelessness, I’m able to engage again.
The onsite psychiatrist meets me in her tiny office, next to the nurse’s station. She informs me that since I tested negative for drugs and alcohol, that I will be moved immediately into the treatment center. However, because it’s after 10am, I’ll need to spend one night in detox. It’s standard procedure. She asks a series of medical history questions and we discuss my dual diagnosis. I ask if it’s possible for them to give me something for anxiety. I’ve been short of breath since I walked through the front doors of the facility and I can’t stop fidgeting with my hands and shifting in my seat.
She logs in a request for a suppressant, which she assures will help me relax. On my way to my room, I pick up the two yellow pills at the medicine window and throw them back with icy cold water from the cooler, which is placed directly under a notice. It reads: Only over-the-counter, mood stabilizers, SSRIs, and anti-depressant medication are approved. A tall black male tech observes my every move. A few minutes later, I close the door to my room, crawl into bed and fall asleep to Cops.
My Proverbial Bottom
/By Karen Collazo
I’ve carried the weight of depression around with me my whole life. When I was five years old, I would bring on anxiety attacks just thinking about existential topics my little mind couldn’t wrap itself around. Things like: What if my parents die tomorrow? What will happen to my soul when I die? Where does the universe end and what’s on the other side of that? Is there a God? These might seem like average questions for a philosophy major, but I was in Kindergarten.
I’d let these questions and ensuing dreadful thoughts race through my mind as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep on a school night. I’d get so worked up that I’d race to my parents’ room to kneel down by their bed and beg God (or whoever) not to take them from me or let anything bad happen. Sometimes my mother would find me curled up on their suede chaise lounge chair the next morning and innocently assumed that like most children; I was scared to sleep on my own. But really I was afraid of much more.
When I think back to my childhood, I see myself all alone. I grew up in a home with two parents and a sibling, but we were all pretty absent from each others’ lives. My mother and father were typical immigrant parents, in that they had degrees and careers in Cuba, but were relegated to minimum-wage jobs when they first arrived in this country. My mother, an architect, quickly picked up the English language and began managing an insurance agency. She would be the stable bread winner until her last breath. My father, an engineer, was obsessed with getting rich quick and took all kinds of odd jobs and illegal side gigs. He was always away on business.
Because of this, my mother was typically consumed with thoughts of her husband’s whereabouts. Add to that: managing the household, helping family abroad and keeping it together for the sake of the children, and you can’t blame her for not being fully there for us kids. Sure she’d ask about our report cards and drive us to Michael’s to buy supplies for our science projects, but she only covered the basics. When I was repeatedly bullied in school, I never turned to her for help. I simply tried my best to ignore my tormenters and eventually learned to stand up for myself. When I was sexually assaulted by friends at a party, and later ostracized by everyone at school, I took matters into my own hands and transferred to another school. My mother never probed as to why I would leave all my childhood friends behind, nor did I provide that information.
My mother was ignorant to the life that was unfolding inside of me and the experiences that were shaping my character. Some say it’s a cultural gap that forces second generations to raise themselves, because the traditions and practices of this new world elude our parents. However, there was a space that existed between our personal orbits that eclipsed our immigrant circumstance. At a very young age, I was forced to navigate life on my own and this created major resentments in me. To survive, I did the only thing I knew how. I pushed past the pain and disappointment and learned to function through the hopelessness.
Over the years, I became skilled at managing my anxiety and depression. I self-medicated with a limited set of tools available to me: food, stealing, drugs, alcohol and sex. When one device alone didn’t do the trick, I started combining them. At 30 years old, I finally lost the ability to keep things under control. I started spiraling and could not find a balance between the demands of a high-stress job and the need to cope with my ongoing despair.
One night, after drinking a bottle of Malbec and smoking a joint, I experienced my first full-blown panic attack. I was standing outside my Gramercy apartment in New York, smoking a cigarette with a friend. I remember talking about work and bouncing some ideas off him when suddenly I was struck with an unequivocal awareness that I was going to die. I was certain I would not survive the sudden impending doom that was fast approaching. My arms and legs started to shake uncontrollably. I started hyperventilating. I grew dizzy and then… black. When I came to, I couldn’t move at all. I stayed there on the ground for what seemed like hours, trying to steady my breath. Later that night when I was safe in my bed, I resolved to finally seek professional help.
The first time I ever saw a doctor for depression, was right after my mom passed away. I was 21 years old, in an abusive relationship and trying to finish up my bachelors. I woke up every day feeling defeated. It was suggested to me that a therapist might help and so I thought I’d give it a try. That experience was the coldest and most impersonal encounter I’ve ever had with a healthcare professional. I was prescribed drugs within 15 minutes, asked for the copay and told to come back next month. I walked out of that doctor’s office feeling even more lost than when I had walked in. So it was with a lot of hesitation that I approached the idea of giving therapy a second try.
Since my depression and addiction were top secret, I didn’t want to ask around for a recommendation so I decided to use an online counseling tool available through my medical insurance provider. After filling out a brief survey, I received a phone call from a specialist. For 30 minutes, I sat in the break room of a prestigious advertising agency near Union Square and discussed my medical history, my parents’ and my lifestyle choices with a total stranger. He was friendly, calm and his voice was soothing. During that first conversation, I found the courage to be honest with myself and another human being about my problem. What I had rationalized as normal behavior for so many years suddenly became clear to me as unusual behavior.
How often do you consume alcohol in a given week? Well, on average about 4-5 times a week. But you know, I’m young and single and I live in New York City so... How much alcohol do you consume during each occasion? Oh, it really depends on the circumstance. Sometimes I’ll have a bottle of wine with dinner and a few shots of whiskey. Other times, I’ll have 3-4 beers and a few shots of whiskey. Always whiskey. But, like, I have a bottle of whiskey on my dresser and I don’t wake up with the urge to drink. It’s been sitting there for a few weeks. Have you ever consumed any other drug? Umm… yes. I mean, who hasn’t am I right? Which drugs and how often? The sympathetic specialist concluded that I needed to seek treatment. I immediately hung up and met up with friends for happy hour at a hole-in-the-wall bar we used to frequent for bingo and trivia nights.
That tape played three more times, with three different therapists, and each time I lost the ability to argue my point. Little by little, each professional chipped away at a carefully crafted façade that I could no longer hide behind. It was a very slow process for me to come to understand and then accept that I was a drug addict. In fact, it took exactly five years. It wasn’t until I returned to Miami, that I finally faced my demons.
When I left Miami in 2003, I swore I would never return. I thought I was meant for bigger and better things, which Miami could not offer me then. But after 12 years, I was still that lonely anxious girl who ran away from a failed relationship, a broken family and many ghosts. The only thing that had changed during that time was my income tax bracket. Returning to a place I once called home, but no longer recognized was an unexpected culture shock. It stirred the internal 30-year war and thrust me into the deepest gloom I have ever wrestled with.
My bottom was not a palpable outward-facing collapse. Instead I had arrived at a spiritual wasteland. It was a typical week night and I had pulled in a long day at the office. There was still more work to be done once I got home, so I picked up a hundred of coke on my way. I’ll just do a few bumps to get me through this last round of emails, I thought. As soon as that first hit flooded my system, I was trapped. There cease to exist any control. Instead a savage animal intent on staying alive took over and I receded inside myself. She couldn’t stop. She blew through what I had bought and went out and got more. She spent the whole night doing one line after another, with absolutely no regard for what I truly wanted, which was to stop.
That night, my anxious mind was flooded with thoughts about being, just like when I was five years old. What am I doing with my life? Who am I? Why can’t I just die and be done with it? How can I stop? Why is this happening to me? What is wrong with me? Alone at 6am, watching the light break, I finally disintegrated. A few weeks later, when my new therapist suggested rehab, I was finally ready to surrender.
Fat Fuck
/By Karen Collazo
The best day and time to weigh yourself is Saturday morning. It is the official first day of the weekend, so you haven’t cheated yet, and it marks the end of a long grueling and slow-paced week where you feel like you were a ninja for hiyacking every sweet temptation that crossed your path. Morning time is key. You must weigh yourself before breakfast, but after you’ve gone to the bathroom. This is when you’re at your lightest. I weighed myself every Saturday morning, from the age of nine all the way until I was 32 years old. That’s 24 years of experience, so I know what I’m talking about.
To say that I suffer from poor body image issues, is putting it as insignificant as humanly possible. It actually feels more like I am trapped inside someone else’s fat body and I’ve been trying to claw my way out for two decades. I am really a skinny person held prisoner inside a fat suit, which the outside world mistakenly perceives as my own property. I didn’t ask for this; I inherited the curse from my mother.
In a family of three daughters, she was the tallest by a foot. Like a foreign exchange student visiting for the summer, she looks misplaced as her 6-foot frame towers over everyone in family photos, standing off to the side or behind relatives all the way in the back. Her clothes are always pretty tight and her size 12-feet are trying to bust out of their size 9 shoes. She’s curvy to boot. In the way that is super sexy right now. Hips for days with an hour glass shape. She was gorgeous, elegant and exotic against a post-Castro 1960’s black-and-white backdrop. But in her mind, she was fat.
Like any good Cuban girl, my mother loved to eat. When she moved to the US in her late 20’s, it was not only a step towards a bright future and freedom from oppression, but a key to THE food wonderland. Packaged high-fructose corn syrup goods as far as the eye can see, cuisines from all over the world and all-you-can-eat buffets! Her love of food knew no bounds and I’m lucky to have inherited her adventurous nature in that regard.
But, she was the kind of woman who hated herself for loving food as much as she did and always compared herself to other women. “Ay, yo no soy tan gorda como ella, verdad?” (Oh, I’m not as fat as her, right?), she would ask her ten and twelve-year old daughters during a random day of doing dilijencias (errands). What this taught me was that one must strive to always be better off than others. If you were not as fat as the woman sitting next to you on the bus, then you were the one that was winning. This constant sizing up of other women and comparing myself to them, continued well into my late 20’s and had a huge hand in promoting my drug addiction.
I know my mother didn’t intend to pass down this debilitating insecurity. She herself was a product of a culture where women with curves are usually nicknamed gordita (little fat girl). And if your sister is thinner than you, chances are very high that her nickname is flaca (skinny girl). And the two of you together cover the spectrum of what women in Hispanic communities can be: either fat or skinny. Nothing else matters.
My mother’s hopes for her first daughter were very simple: may she be skinny, marry rich and have a daughter worse than her so she gets a taste of what I had to put with. Growing up, she tried every tactic to help me lose weight. One summer, when I was thirteen, she decided a monetary incentive might just do the trick of motivating me to lose a few pounds. For one month, leading up to a family vacation to the Bahamas, I was given a dollar for every pound I lost. The goal was to get me to go from 125 lbs. to 100 lbs. If at the end of the month I succeeded in losing the 25 lbs. my mother promised to buy me a new wardrobe for the trip. Since I had also inherited my mother’s love for shopping and fashion, I was in! I remember her observing the scale tentatively, every Saturday morning, as I stripped down to absolutely nothing, lest my pajamas add any unnecessary heaviness. She would show her approval or disapproval of the number on the scale with one simple lift of the eyebrows, or a furrowing. I don’t recall if I got to my goal weight that summer. There have been hundreds of diets since then, that it’s hard to recollect that far in the past.
In addition to my mother’s approval, I also had to find acceptance out in the world. I’ve always had a handful of friends, but somehow found myself the target of bullying at school on a daily basis. Sometimes it was as simple as being called “fat fuck” on the bus ride home. Other times, it was as cruel as two teenage girls asking me if I was pregnant, while I waited in line at Little Caesars’ for crazy bread. I must have been all of eleven when that happened. Because of all these negative external cues, internally I wholeheartedly agreed with everyone. I was a fat fuck who looked pregnant and needed to go on a diet and get skinny. And super-fast or no boy was ever going to like me. This might sound like the silly naïve train of thought of a young girl, but it pretty much sums up how I still feel today.
When you’re old enough to start liking boys and have the freedom to socialize, you don’t want the voices in your head to get in the way of a good time. Enter drugs. Not only did coke give me the confidence I needed to go up and talk to the cute guy at the bar, but because it suppressed my appetite for the following 24 hours, it also helped me to lose weight. Cocaine was the one diet I stuck to for the longest amount of time. It, along with any upper I could get my hands on, was my Xenadrine. Remember Xenadrine diet pills? I was addicted to those too, before the FDA pulled them off the shelves back in 2001.
Yesterday, I had the privilege of hearing a fellow recovering addict with 30 years clean speak at a late-night NA meeting. Her message was eloquent, honest and relatable. Her truth was similar to mine: without drugs, she absolutely hated herself and wanted to be anybody else but who she was. This is my Mount Everest. If I can learn to be happy with my body and love myself just the way I am, drugs lose one very big reason for being in my life. The thing is I really don’t know how to achieve self-love. I intellectually understand the steps one must take, but I am up against years of ridicule, disappointment and rejection. I am a walking sponge, engorged by all my past adverse experiences, damaging encounters and bad examples. And the file titled “Reasons I Suck” just keeps getting bigger, as I go about my day every day. Because as much as we want to believe that chubby is in, acceptance of plus size women is coming at a snail’s pace. My biggest worry is that my body won’t be a trend in time for me to kick out the voices currently squatting in my head and learn to live clean before it's too late. I now understand that if I never achieve self-love, I’ll never recover.
The Precipice
/By Karen Collazo
When I hit the “post” button a few days ago, I knew that I was turning my back on a lucrative and successful career in advertising and exposing the false but very well-fabricated story of who Karen was. I even assumed that I would lose some friends in the process, because for many the disease of addiction is still viewed as a moral failing that can be controlled by will alone. What I did not expect was to receive all the love, support and personal stories of struggle that have been pouring in since Friday. I know I am on the right path, based on your reactions to my first blog post. And while I cannot represent the addict community as a whole, I’m honored to be able to tell my story and carry the message of recovery to those in need.
The heartbreaking truth about addiction is that it does not discriminate. Who is an addict? The blue book tells us that an addict is a man or a woman whose life is controlled by drugs; the getting and using and finding ways and means to get more. A person who lives to use and uses to live looks like everyone else: your sister who abuses Xanax, your colleague who binge drinks every day, your son who smokes pot regularly. And while they might not look like the stereotypical junkie, they are in the grips of a continuing and progressive illness. They are in pain and believe they cannot survive without drugs.
My story begins at the age of eight. Feeling less than, I began to seek comfort in food. As I got older, food was replaced with stealing, then drugs, then shopping and finally sex. To be viewed as a functioning member of society, I created rules for myself. These rules would allow me to hide my addiction for 15+ years. On the outside, I had everything going for me: a good job with a decent disposable income, a nice place in a good neighborhood, a new car, family and friends who loved me. But inside I felt insignificant, depressed and always alone. Rules like: only drink in social settings, only do hard drugs on the weekend, only binge eat on special occasions, were both a blessing and a curse. To the world, I was functioning. To me, I was enduring until the next high.
It took three therapists, some rule-breaking and a few panic attacks for me to admit that I had a problem. I had all the telltale signs of an addict. I couldn’t handle life without numbing my feelings. I couldn’t feel pleasure in everyday things. I constantly replaced one addiction for the other. I even tried a number of geographic changes, hoping that a new city would give me the backdrop for a brand new start. However, when I really examined my life with a magnifying glass, I saw that I had lost a lot of things to my addiction: the house I grew up in went into foreclosure because I snorted the mortgage payments up my nose, a very dear friend pushed me away for years, because she couldn’t stand by as I destroyed myself with alcohol, I even lost the chance to say goodbye to my mother, as she lay on her deathbed losing the battle against cancer, because I was fighting the demons in my own head. I wasn’t there for my sisters when they needed me the most. I lost a $100k inheritance to frivolousness. And countless other scenarios that played out over the years, I see now as obvious products of my disease.
While this sickness has been there all along, my turning point was being sexually assaulted at 15 years old. One night, I was invited to a party at an acquaintance’s house whose parents were away. At the time, I was desperate for love and acceptance. After years of being bullied, I had finally found approval from a group of friends who were acting out like most teenagers do. We’d skip school; buy alcohol with fake ids and experiment with drugs together. That night, I snuck out of my house while my parents slept soundly. What I didn’t know, was that when I walked into that house full of boys, I was walking into my first traumatic experience. I was encouraged to drink massive amounts of alcohol and coerced to have sex with one of the boys at the party, while everyone stood by and watched. Feeling like I deserved it, like I had it coming to me, I never told anyone what really happened that night. I was a slut who should have never gone to that party to begin with. At school the next day, the boys spread rumors around. They told everyone that I had given blow jobs at the party and my girlfriends turned against me. I was devastated. Back in my bedroom, I drowned my tears in a bottle of vodka that my dad kept in the liquor cabinet. It killed the hurt and alleviated my sorrow. Vodka was there for me when I couldn’t reach out for help.
In my 20’s, when I lost both parents to cancer, I turned again to the only tool I had for dealing with pain. Feeling like life had robbed me, I moved to New York, where for the next ten years I lived each day like it was going to be my last. I rationalized my behavior behind the pretense that this lifestyle was part of the fast-paced culture of the big city. But, when you took the glamour of New York away, there I was; just me and my inability to feel negative feelings. When my current therapist suggested I go to rehab, she positioned it as a spiritual vacation for my soul. It finally clicked for me. I had been struggling with anxiety and depression for so long that I had forgotten what it was like to feel happy and hopeful. In February 2016, I finally surrendered to the fact that I was a drug addict. And what I went on to experience in rehab will stay with me forever.
Getting Clean
/Hi there, my name is Karen and I’m a recovering drug addict. I recently joined Writing Class Radio in hopes that having a creative outlet would help me better understand and come to terms with my addiction. For the next 90 days, I’ll be taking over the WCR blog and sharing my journey of recovery. If telling my story brings hope to just one other addict who is still sick and suffering, then opening up about my struggle will have been worth it. To protect the anonymity of those seeking recovery, names of people and places have been changed. While the eleventh tradition of Narcotics Anonymous states that we need to always maintain personal anonymity, I believe this shroud of mystery further perpetuates the stigma behind the disease of addiction. Addicts come in all shapes and sizes, but we share one common thread: we suffer from an incurable disease. Yet each new day we are provided another chance to arrest our active addiction and become useful members of society. This is my journey, my process and my story. The essay below came out of a prompt given to our writing class this week: Write about a time you started over… Enjoy.
The Fifth White Chip
By Karen Collazo
Yesterday, I picked up my fifth white chip. In Narcotics Anonymous, we use a chip system to denote how much clean time one has. The chips symbolize that you are gambling with your life when you pick up drugs. They vary in color, as you accumulate more clean time. The first chip you pick up is the white chip. It signifies surrender to a new way of life. It tells all the addicts in the room that you admit you are powerless over your addiction to drugs; you’ve come to terms with the fact that your life had become unmanageable and are ready to take the first step towards recovery.
After I surrendered for the fifth time, I got a huge bear hug from a fellow NA member that I consider a big brother. He always dons a healthy envy-worthy tan and is usually dressed in cargo shorts, sneakers, and a simple t-shirt. He calls me “kid.” After meetings, my big brother hangs around to “fellowship” with the other addicts. He says this is the key to staying clean. Once he stood with me in the parking lot of a church for hours, until the clock stroke midnight, just to help me stay clean for that one day.
“Kid, you did good today. Keep coming back till you get it,” he says with a big toothy grin.
I’ve relapsed four times since I got out of rehab on March 1st. I had 90 days clean when I relapsed the first time. The day I received my red 90-day chip, I got a round of applause from my NA family. On my way back to my seat, I was greeted with warm hugs and congratulated with excited high fives from the only people who have ever understood me. For everyone in that room, I had accomplished something worth celebrating. But inside, I didn’t feel victorious. As great as it was to reach enough clean time that I graduated from one chip to the next, I had arrived at 90 days with many reservations.
Feeling like a fraud, I went out and picked up. I took one bump of coke and was immediately lifted out of my dark foggy depression. Coke has always had a way of putting me on top of the world. Without it, I’m nobody. The problem is it’s never just one bump. Soon after that first twenty, the high runs out of steam and I quickly fall back into the deep well where I am trapped most days. Because it never ends well, you’d think it’d be easy to stop. But my brain doesn’t remember the bad part. It only focuses on the one good moment and chases that dream until I destroy myself.
I’ve played the tape in my head over and over, recounting how I relapsed this last time. I thought I was doing all the right things; taking as many of the suggestions as I could about how to live clean. But there I was, peeling out of a meeting to jump on the expressway and dialing my dealer on the way. They say that when you have a burning desire to use, you should reach out and share where you’re at with a fellow addict. We’re encouraged to get numbers and actually call people. The therapeutic value of one addict helping another is without parallel. But my addiction has been active for over 25 years, way before I even picked up my first drug. That old habit of isolating, rationalizing and giving in to an overwhelming feeling of worthlessness are deeply embedded in me. I’m scared I won’t be able to overcome this pattern I’ve grown accustomed to. I’m afraid I’ll never learn to love Karen enough to give her a fighting chance. They say it takes 66 days to break an old habit. If I do all the right things and work the program the correct way, I should be able to make this the last white chip I ever pick up.
My BFF is a Dumb Ass
/By Nicki Post
I tell Juancho he has brain damage. I say it out loud. It started as a joke, but sometimes I wonder if it’s really true. I have to repeat things for him. Everything. I’ll text him and ask what time he’s going to volleyball tonight, and he’ll write back and ask what I’m up to tonight. He needs me to be his group message ambassador because he can’t keep up. “I’m in too many group chats,” He tells me. We’re in the same group chats. At least 4 to 6 per week depending on who’s having a surprise birthday party, a surprise going away party, or camping in Key West. I tell Juancho that in front of people. I roll my eyes at him. I tell him, “Juancho, come on!”
Sometimes I think, maybe I should be nicer to Juancho. But I know Juancho knows what I mean. There is nobody else I would jokingly say has brain damage. And especially not out loud, in front of other people. But I’ve said it so many times that new people who have joined the group, believed he really had brain damage. They didn’t question it. They just accepted it, because Juancho seems like he might have brain damage.
He lies all the time for the sake of lying because he thinks it’s funny. He asks for answers to questions you’ve just told him 5 seconds ago, 5 minutes ago, 5 days ago. Maybe it’s because he drinks at least six Yeunglings a night. On Friday and Saturday, Juancho drinks more, because it’s accepted. Two weeks ago we went camping in Key West and a few of us got out of the cars to watch the sunset. When we returned to the cars, we couldn’t find Juancho. His phone was in the car. He just wondered off and drank a beer. He’s not capable of considering the future, even if the future is in 10 minutes. But I love Juancho.
Juancho was one of my first friends in Miami. He texts me every single day, and writes, “yo, yo, double yo, how’s your day?” And what follows is a gibberish of Spanglish he blames on a cracked screen and ESL. He calls to see how I’m doing after a break up. I call him when I need advice. I called him when my neighbors were fighting and he convinced me to call 911.
If you don’t know us, and you see us for the first time, you’ll think we’re a couple. Juancho always kisses my forehead and tells me, “I love you Nicki. You know I do.” Anyone I date is always jealous of Juancho, but I wish my dates were capable of reading my mind. Juancho drives me crazy. I hate that he has brain damage, but I also love him too.
POST TABOO....
/by allison langer
so, the taboo episode came out yesterday. i hosted it and produced it with andrea. but instead of me taking the backseat to her, like i usually do, i led us through this episode. i wrote the script and made the final cuts. it was fun and exhausting, and it felt good to be directing an episode. but this episode is raunchy and sexual. it’s revealing and deeply personal. now that it’s out there, i’m out there, i’m having an oversharing hangover.
the last guy i had sex with texted me, “now i know why you were so horny that weekend….u just got waxed.” my dad got a new iphone. i subscribed him to writing class radio, but i didn’t download this episode. last night, i woke up at 4am in a panic. HOLY SHIT, what have i done?
when i shared the story of my daughter’s death, it was emotional and draining. i didn’t want pity and i didn’t want to discuss it. but when friends told me how much they appreciated knowing the full story, how much it helped them through their own losses, i felt better about sharing my story. in regards to the latest episode, i have not yet heard from any of my good friends. an old neighbor emailed this about her 2 yr old daughter: The 5 point harness is her BFF and she calls it ... wait for it ... WEIWEI. A recent line is "I doin' weiwei, it's good for my body."
we’ll see how the rest of the day goes…as people listen to the episode. i’m nervous and excited. i know this discomfort will pass, like everything. it’s my first step in becoming amy schumer. i want to not care what people think of my oversharing…or my open honesty…or of my wanting to be free from taboo bullshit.
my 10 year old son told me that his favorite number is 69. WTF? he said if you take the filter off the ipad and google 69, crazy stuff comes up. i did it. i expected to see naked people graphically going at it. the pictures are very pg-13, so i was less horrified after the search. but i guess i need to have a chat with him now. find out what he thinks it is. explain what i think he should think it is. i’m scared and uncomfortable. i’d like to avoid it. that would be easier than talking about oral sex with my children. feels taboo….
Take a Look in the Mirror....or Don't.
/By Tobi Ash, Writing Class Radio student
For my 45th birthday, my husband gave me a 15X magnifying LED light-up mirror. The mirror came with a deluxe set of tweezers with surgical and slant tips in a fancy leather carrying case.
The mirror doesn’t lie. It’s glass with a silver backing and NO silver lining. It shows the wrinkles, sun damage, broken capillaries, errant and stubborn hairs, asymmetry, and enlarged pores. One eyebrow is higher than the other. One eye is noticeably bigger. Even one nostril looks bigger than the other.
The mirror in the car is also deliberately cruel. When I casually flip it open, I see a long black hair sprouting from my chin. How on earth did I leave my house like this and NO ONE told me? I look like Drisella, the uglier of Cinderella’s stepsisters. My teeth look yellow despite repeated applications of Crest Whitestrips.
I would like mirrors to show the souls of people instead of the decaying outsides. The insides, hopefully grow more beautiful and radiant as one ages because of the soul’s journey. But we only get a few good years of unblemished, firm youth and decade upon decade of decrepitude.
These days, I avoid actual mirrors as much as possible, hoping to see myself reflected in the "true" mirror: my husband's eyes. There, I am always beautiful.
Blood, Sugar, Sex, Dickheads
/Julie Farman, a listener, wrote to us.....
I spent months on a blog post that was difficult to write, and I finally published it 10 days ago. I didn't realize until last night that it was shaped by listening to the first season of your podcast, which I listened to over and over again.
I love your podcast.
Your biggest fan, maybe,
Julie Farman
Julie's blog post...
By Julie Farman, author of the blog thegrayishcarpet.com
It just happened again. I read a news story about Flea playing the national anthem as a bass solo at Kobe’s final game with the Lakers and I went nuts. Every time I’m reminded that the Red Hot Chili Peppers exist, I lose my mind. It’s been a frequent occurrence lately. They’re about to release a new record and the promo machine is gearing up.
25 years ago, when I worked at Epic, I had a fucked up experience with the Chili Peppers. The incident was about a 3 on the 1-10 scale of sexual harassment in the music business of the 80s and 90s, and I never consciously thought it was that big a deal. I wasn’t even aware of how intensely I hated them until a couple of months ago, when the kid that works the desk at my gym played “Can’t Stop.” I was furious; I felt like my blood had been replaced with a million small bombs and that all of them were about to explode. I threw my weights to the floor mid-rep and pounded to the desk. Just before I screamed the only words I could come up with — NO. MORE. RED. HOT. CHILI. PEPPERS. — I realized I had to leave. I knew I’d be unable to restrain myself if I had to hear Anthony sing “mop tops are happy when they feed you” or “can’t stop, addicted to the shindig, chop top, he says I’m gonna win big.” When I calmed down, I thought about how overblown my reaction was, and allowed for the first time that maybe I didn’t hate them simply because they suck.
I heard stories about the Chili Peppers and the way they treated women long before Anthony was convicted of sexual battery and indecent exposure in 1989 and Chad and Flea were arrested for lascivious behavior, battery and disorderly conduct in 1990. No one in the music industry really gave a shit — as their legal issues made headlines, they left EMI, and every label wanted to sign them. Including Epic. I was horrified.
At first I refused to even go to a meeting with the band. The A&R guy was a friend, though, and after an hour of talking about it, I reluctantly agreed to attend. At the meeting, I did a credible impression of a person who didn’t think the Chili Peppers were assholes or that their music was completely fucking horrible; I talked enthusiastically about strategy, artist development and press campaigns, and I presented ideas on further establishing their image. None of them involved wearing socks on their dicks.
Afterwards, I took two of the Chili Peppers to the storage room where we kept the box sets and CDs. As we looked in the cabinet, they pressed up against me and told me about all of the ways we could make a super sexy sandwich.
At first I thought they were joking. When I realized they weren’t, I ran from the storage room to my office, where I closed my door, sat down at my desk, and cried. I was humiliated and weirdly ashamed, and embarrassed that I was humiliated and weirdly ashamed. There was far worse going on in the music industry at the time, and I thought I was a badass. Being a victim didn’t fit my self-perception.
When the Chili Peppers’ then-manager knocked on my door a few minutes later, I stopped crying and let him in. He offered an apology that sounded memorized; it was one he’d obviously offered many times before. The A&R guy apologized after the Chili Peppers left, and I decided to get over it. I told myself that I knew what I was getting into when I started working in the music business. I was used to the shit that happened late at night, when I was wasted in Boston and hanging out at gigs, hotels, and after show parties. I wasn’t cool with any of it, but I accepted it, and even though the incident with the Chili Peppers took place when I was a stone cold sober executive at a major label, doing my job at my office at 2:00 in the afternoon, I decided to accept that, too. It was just the way things were.
Most of the women I know who worked in the music business in the late 80s and early 90s put up with sexual harassment. We didn’t talk about it to our friends, for the most part, and not many of us took any action. We were ashamed or afraid or didn’t think we’d be believed. We thought we’d be blamed, or worse, we blamed ourselves. We didn’t want to be perceived as weak, and we thought that in order to succeed, we just had to put up with it. Sexual harassment came along with working in the music industry — it was an everyday reality — and a lot of us didn’t even realize that anything was wrong. Most of the reasons we kept quiet may never stop being reasons — shame and fear aren’t going to go away — but at least we know now when we’re being harassed.
I started writing this post in January, just after Amber Coffman tweeted about Heathcliff Berru, and just before I heard “Can’t Stop” at the gym. The incident with the Chili Peppers wasn’t all that bad in comparison to what other women have experienced, and even what I’ve experienced myself. I didn’t understand why my recent response was so extreme until this weekend, when I talked to people I was close to at Epic. One was my boss. I discovered that I never told him what happened, and with the exception of two close friends, I never told anyone else. That’s what disturbs me most.
I’m inspired by Amber and the other women who stepped forward about their experiences with Heathcliff Berru. Thank you to Beth Martinez, Jackie Fox, Kesha, Dee Barnes, Lauren Mayberry and all of the others who’ve claimed their voices and talked, tweeted, and posted their stories about sexual harassment and assault.
Fuck the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the misogynistic culture of the music industry that kept me from speaking up in 1991. I wish I had. I’m not naive enough to think it would have made much of a difference, but if it kept just one person from having to hear “Californication,” it would have been a start.
AYDS
/By Bo, Writing Class Radio student
I must have been about five years old when I realized I was gay. Somehow I knew in kindergarten that I was drawn to boys, not girls. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but I knew it was not something I could share—not something “good.” I was smack dab in the Bible Belt, in a community full of Baptists. I knew that this was something that I could never act on and had to hide.
So every day, I told myself that it would go away. My dad insisted that I participate in every sport possible. I hated it, but I knew I needed to do it. I needed to be normal.
When I was around ten, I remember a 60 Minutes special on the gays in San Francisco. My mother said, “Oh, Lord. That’s so sick!” I could see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye, making sure I was listening.
Or when I was 12 and my dad and I watched the Phil Donahue show featuring a group of lesbian mothers. My father said, “Good God almighty!”
He paused, shook his head in disgust and said. “Fuck you lesbian mothers!” Then he got up to change the channel. I’d never heard him use the F word before.
Then, when I turned 18, the story of AIDS—a gay cancer epidemic they called it—was all over the newspaper and TV. They showed images of men absolutely decimated, skin and bones, covered by lesions.
My reaction to this horror: I’m not gay. I’m not like them. I can’t be.
Everyone whispered that this was God’s punishment. This confirmed what the church had always said.
There was an appetite suppressant called AYDS that my mom and sister took occasionally to lose weight. It sat in the lazy Susan, and every morning the bright yellow box stared at me screaming“AYDS! AYDS! AYDS!” It was a constant reminder of what awaited those who chose to partake of an aberrant lifestyle.
So then I decided I needed to step up my devotion to Jesus. Normally evangelical Christians get baptized around the age of ten—the age of accountability—this is when you know enough to choose Jesus as your savior; after that age, if you die and haven’t accepted him as Lord and Savior, you’re gonna fry in hell. I had been baptized as a youth, but as many backslidin’ sinners do, I decided to get baptized again. I rededicated my life to Jesus. I had to do whatever it took to keep myself safe, away from gays, away from AIDS.
My freshman year of college, I got involved in a Christian fellowship organization called Campus Crusade for Christ. This is where popular attractive, mostly fraternity guys and sorority girls got together for weekly fellowship. Their main objective was to talk about what God was doing in their life and to convert others. A typical meeting would involve Suzie giving glowing reports of how God had used her, “Guys, God is doing great things at the Phi Mu House. I was able to share Christ with one of my sorority sisters the other night.” And she prayed the sinners prayer to accept Jesus. The crowd burst into applause.
I thought this was kind of cheesy, but I had to be there. By now I KNEW I was gay, so I had to stick to it. I fought my desire. I dated women and I became an active member of Campus Crusade for Christ.
One night as I walked across campus and I saw a light on in the basement of the building adjacent to where we were supposed to meet and an open window. I got close to the window to see what it was. A sign in front of the room said “Gay and Lesbian Alliance.” The people looked like the dregs of humanity. Big fat ugly women; small effeminate wimpy men wearing big glasses. They were singing a song, “WE ARE GAY AND LESBIAN PEOPLE, and we’re fighting, fighting for our lives…clap, clap, clap.”
I was shocked. I tightened my backpack and sprinted off to join the Campus Crusaders for Christ.
The Secret to a Great Ass
/By Nicki Post, Writing Class Radio student
I do this thing, where I clench my ass. Sometimes when I’m listening to music, I’ll do it to the beat. When I drive, I’ll do it as I pass by telephone polls. And when I’m just sitting around, I’ll do it. One side and then the other. When I’m walking, I’ll do it. It’s like this tick that I can’t stop doing. Even as I sit here typing this, I’m doing it. Not all the time, but it’ll just happen. One side, then the other. I time it with each keystroke.
I worry it makes me walk funny. The only person I ever told was my freshman roommate in college. We were like instant best friends from the first second we met each other in person. Maybe because on the phone we thought we’d hate each other. I thought she was a nerdy color guard. She thought I was a butch athlete. But when we met, we fell in love, like best friend soul mates.
I told her one night, probably sitting on the bottom bunk bed, probably talking about boys, probably talking about doing dumb drunk things. I don’t know why I told her, but I told her. And she said, “Yeah, sometimes you walk funny.”
I’ve always done it. I don’t remember when it started or why. But in 4th grade, I was sitting in an assembly and Tyrone Anderson was sitting behind me. I heard him laughing. I was wearing this T-shirt with a small neon yellow fish that’s getting eaten by a bigger neon green fish. And from the other direction, a neon pink fish has an open mouth that’s about to eat the green fish, and again on the opposite side is an even bigger neon blue fish that’s going to eat the pink fish. I heard Tyrone laughing. And he was telling other people and other people were laughing. I knew they were laughing at the neon ocean on my back, but I knew the attention was on me, and there I was, sitting cross-legged, and I couldn’t sit still. I wanted to clench. The right and the left. I can’t remember if I did it or not, but I remember trying not to. The attention was on me. And what if their attention turned from the fish to my ass?
Sometimes when I’m getting dressed in the morning, I’ll do it. I’ll turn around and look in the mirror, and I’ll clench. I need to see if it’s obvious. Or how obvious. Because I don’t want anyone to notice, but I think it gives me a great ass. It’s a lot of exercise.
Mother Cut
/By Misha Mehrel, a student in Writing Class Radio. He shares a story he wrote in class.
My mother was one of the original video pirates. She’d rent VHS tapes from Blockbuster and copy them onto her own blank tapes. She made hundreds of duplicates, the titles scribbled on little white tags. It became a compulsion. Even if she didn’t like the movie, she’d copy it, and neatly stack it with all the other hoarded tapes in the white wooden cabinets below the television. Eventually, Blockbuster caught on and the tapes came with a lock on them, so she started renting from a local video store called, New Concept. Besides them not locking their tapes, they also had a more independent collection of movies. I remember running my finger along eclectic titles like, “Ichi The Killer”, “Knife in the Water”, and “The Piano Teacher”.
There was a special section, behind these thick velvet curtains, where I’d poke my head while my mom had hers buried in the Iranian Film section. Behind the curtains was a sea of flesh colored VHS sleeves, pornos stacked on aisle upon aisle. I was probably nine or ten and sex was already a big mystery. My mother has always given off this impression that she’s very open-minded and kind of la-di-da, and she kind of is – I’ve always seen her as a real life Annie Hall: beautiful, nonchalant, warm yet neurotic, and always throwing on mismatched outfits that somehow look incredible on her – but unlike Annie Hall, my mom is Kurdish, and Iranian, and Muslim. That’s the thing, along with the Kurdish Iranian Muslim-ness, comes all this embedded repression about sex. There’s this story I like to tell people about my Grandmother, her mother, Salime, whom we called her Maman Joon. When I was 7 or 8 she came to visit us in Florida, it was during hurricane George, which turned out to be pretty tepid. Every so often Maman Joon would try pulling my pants down to check if I was circumcised. My mom sat down with her and assured her I was, but Maman Joon needed to see it with her own eyes. She wound up catching a glimpse of it, but since her memory was going, she’d forget whether saw it, and then try again. I enjoy telling this story because I feel like it confuses people the same way I’ve been confused in regards to my mother, my grandmother, and all things penis related. That old world Kurdish Iranian Muslim-ness, in combination with my father’s ‘Jewish German never trust a German or an-anyone-else-ness’, have been integrated into their new life here, in America. Cut to video pirating days.
My mom didn’t only copy the films, she also edited them, censoring out all the scenes she saw as inappropriate for us kids. She’d cut out entire portions of the movies: any bits with kissing, or boobs, or explosions, she’d just fast forward through them on her copies. I don’t think there was even one movie from my childhood that didn’t suddenly freeze over the image of two people, clearly about to kiss, and then speed up with those gray squiggly bands across the screen, all the action hidden by the chaos of fast-forwarding. For years I thought the movie Grease, with my then idol, John Travolta, was this avant-garde experiment of structure, with odd holes in the story, and characters would pop up and then disappear for the rest of the movie, until years later when I realized that my mother had fast forwarded through maybe a third of the film. Then there was the Wizard of Oz; the flying monkeys scared the shit out of my sister, so my mom made a new version without flying monkeys in it, which I have to say, didn’t affect the story that much.
I understand why she did it. She didn’t want us exposed to those violating images of debauchery and violence. She wanted to protect us. And there’s something endearing about the panicked, urgent ways my mother used to scramble, somehow tying together these severed movies. The mother’s cut to all these movies, which in the end resembled something like my life: scattered and confusing with very little sex.
the season is over….the work continues
/by allison langer
it took a year, but we did it! the first full season of writing class radio is done!
when andrea and i got the idea to do a podcast of our writing class, i said, “we have to show the world how great our students are. it’ll be fun!”
she said, “yeaaah! their stories are sad and deep and crazy. people need to hear this stuff!”
we thought we’d throw together a few stories, follow the students through their lives and possibly learn a little about writing. boom...a show. i’m a photographer. andrea is a writer. notice, neither of us is a producer, audio technician, or radio person. we had no experience at all. what idiots, right?
thanks to our consultant and wlrn wiz, wilson sayre, we devised a plan. we hired an audio producer, diego, rented a recording room for our class, and signed up 10 brave writing students.
we began recording a year ago. the sound was mixed and the stories placed into scripts. the first four episodes appeared on our podcast in late october. people emailed to tell us how much they loved the show. friends stopped me at the gym and at parties to say they wanted more. we were winging it!
gregory shepherd, dean of the university of miami school of communication, listened to our podcast and waived the fee for the recording room. they became our sponsor. my friend, catherine, loved the podcast so much, that she funded our first year. we hired someone very part time to help us with social media. we sponsored a few writing students who could not afford the class. we bought insurance and finally paid diego.
thanks to the feedback we received, the episodes evolved from a bunch of stories thrown together to a real show with music and meaning and a real writing lesson. we love the way season one came together. we continue to speak with our advisors to improve and grow. season 2 will be packed with great stories, and original vocals by the mann sisters, ari herstand, chloe delandis, kevin myles wilson and our favs, astromaps.
please help us move into the second season buy sharing our episodes with your friends and family and by making a donation to writing class radio on our website. diego deserves a raise for putting up with two crazy perfectionists with conflicting great ideas. and you deserve more writing class radio!
here come the newbies
/
hey this is allison. although, we still have two more episodes left to air from the first semester, a new semester of writing class will begin next week. we will bring you their stories after episode 10.
we have a few new students enrolled this semester. i used to hate the new semester because i felt like i’d have to hold back until i trusted the newbies with my dear and personal stories. i also hated waiting for them to warm up. andrea teased me in the pilot episode that i wrote stories about my dog, molly, the entire first semester i took with her, when she could tell there was something bigger i needed to be writing about. she was right. in the last class, i wrote the story of my daughter’s death and shared it with the class. everyone cried, but they didn’t feel sorry for me. nothing changed. I was still me. but a less burdened me. it felt liberating.
over the years, i have discovered that some of the students are like me. they need weeks to warm up. but many of the new students are nothing like me. wendi came to class, and on her first night, she told the story of her ex husband’s murder. I thought, “I like this newbie.”
today, we received the following email from a newbie. her email was in response to my question, “are you prepared to be vulnerable, write without shame, and air without guilt?”
Vulnerability, shame and guilt are a big, big deal to me. I know this because since I started listening to the podcast, I've been having nightmares where scenarios of vulnerability leave me a complete horrific mess. That's why I think it's so important for me to dive into this process. I think I will be a better writer for it but also a better person for it.
This journey that I'm on with my writing, it's personal and emotional and I'm protecting it like if it was my kid. It has to be private with respect to sharing it with the people in my life. My husband is incredibly supportive and so is my family. But putting myself out there on my personal social media pages is an invitation for judgment, shame and ridicule that would crush me. Remember in Cinderella when the stepmother and stepsisters rip Cinderella's dress off her and she goes from bliss to despair in a matter of seconds? I'd be setting myself up for that if I opened my mouth about what I'm doing. I'm protecting myself from them because I want to stick with this.
All that said and done, I may feel different when I come out of the other end of these next 10 weeks. You might rock my world so hard that I might have no regard for the vultures in my life and promote the shit out of this experience and I may not. I honestly can't make any promises and I feel like you should know that going in.
i thought, “i like this newbie.”
BLAH BLAH BLOG
/Written by Jahn Dope, student in season one and two
It all started with Andrea's creative writing class and that led to Lip Service, a night of true stories out loud. I told two of my stories from the Lip Service stage and the experience of making 600 people laugh was awesome! Now it's Writing Class Radio! I always wanted to do radio. Years ago, I had a chance to be on the air as a host and DJ. You could say, I got discovered. I was on stage at The Bottom Line, a club in Ft. Myers, Florida. I was free-styling some poetry and telling jokes. I had the crowd’s full attention. I was killing it. When I stepped down from the stage, a man came up and asked if I wanted to be on radio. He handed me his business card, which said B103.9, which is a legit radio station. I followed up and scheduled an interview.
But I messed up. The night before the interview I went out and got dosed with 15 hits of acid. I thought going out would help me with my creativity. I see now, that was a dumb idea.
I never made it to the interview, so when Andrea gave me another opportunity to be part of Writing Class Radio, I said, “Hell yeah!” The classmates are interesting individuals with juicy, hilarious and sad stories from the depth of their souls. I love class even when they dissect my stories, which sometimes feels demoralizing. But that’s all part of the artistic process. And who knows, maybe I’ll be discovered again.
oh yay....it's the holiday
/hey, this is allison. it’s the day after christmas and i cannot wait until this whole holiday thing is over. i really don’t understand those people with holiday cheer. for me, it’s one more thing. and that one more thing sends me over the edge. my photo clients are going crazy. they all want their pictures yesterday. i get it, they want to send out their holiday cards. and then last week, my external backup drive crashed and i lost so many photos. i called seagate, the company that makes my external hard drive. after two hours on the phone trying to recover lost files, the man said he couldn’t help me. he asked if I had a backup of my backup. really? what is a backup if not a backup?
our last class for our second semester was last wednesday. we all arrived at 7pm at the university of miami and the doors were locked. no one thought to call to see if the university was opened christmas week. also, diego, our audio guy, was nowhere . when I called, he said, “oh shit, we have class tonight!” i get it, class during the holidays it’s one more thing.
we caravanned to my house and held class at my kitchen table. my five-year-old was asleep in the back bedroom, but my eight and ten-year-old were playing in their rooms. i didn’t want them to hear my story so, i passed on the piece i wrote in response to the prompt, “a bad decision.”
that got me thinking. if i didn’t want my kids to hear my story about wondering if having three children was a good decision or a bad one, i should probably not be writing about such things. but is not writing about it good for me? i love my children, but i need to understand why three children feels like too much sometimes.
recently, a guy i started dating wanted to hang out with my children and me. great thing, right? well, i wanted time alone with him. but we stayed home and hung out with the kids. they loved it, loved him. afterward, i told him that i would have preferred time away from the kids. that it was too much to be here with everyone. he made the comment i’ve heard many times before, “YOU CHOSE THAT LIFE.”
true, i chose to have the kids on my own. true i chose three rounds of fertility treatment. true, i wanted three kids more than anything in the world. but i never imagined how hard motherhood could be every hour of every day.
sometimes, i look at my kids and i wonder wtf i was thinking. then a second later, they do something cute, like make their own lunches, or make their beds or color a picture for me with hearts and stars and i think, ok, i’ve got this.
i wasn’t saying i don’t want this life. i was saying, sometimes i need a break.
i listened to dear sugar radio yesterday. the episode on motherhood. two moms wrote in about how much they hate motherhood. i felt for those women. i wanted to call and invite them out for a drink or ten . i was sure i could talk them down. i wanted to tell them that they were normal and great and that we’re all going to be fine. i wanted to invite them to our writing class, so they could hear my story, tell their own stories and not feel judged.
i should write them, but i won’t. i have photos to edit and friends coming in next week for new year’s eve. writing those women is one more thing….
The effect of writing class.....
/by allison langer, student and co-producer of writing class radio
