Write What You Don't Know

Or...let the bodies hit the floor

Addiction is like being stuck with a dead body.

You obviously can’t let anyone catch you with it, your decaying skin, your thinning bones, all those knife marks you made digging around in your arms for invisible bugs. One wandering eye from the wrong passerby and boom that’s it, your secrets out. 

At least murderers can get rid of their bodies. As an addict, I needed mine. I couldn’t sink it in the ocean or bury it in a forest. I needed my body, so I could keep getting high. Death—real, end-of-the-line, actual death—would have ruined the whole thing.

So whenever I left my room, I’d wear long sleeves to cover up my scabbed, picked apart lizard skin. I’d wear hats to hide my attempt at a kitchen-scissor shaved head. Eventually, it made more sense to just not go anywhere at all—to get as close to disappearing as I possibly could.

Which it turns out, is how delusion grows.

In isolation.

Alone in my room, delusional thoughts sprouted like weeds through the crime scene of my body. They twisted through my bones, becoming so much a part of me that I couldn’t root them out. As a result, I lost all concept of where I ended and where the drugs began. So, in this grand war against drug abuse, I had become just another John Doe.

Whatever was left of me, whatever nutrient the weeds and bugs hadn’t yet eaten away, it fought back. I developed some sort of subconscious survival tic. A coping mechanism. What I would do is this, I’d furrow my brow like a concerned President Obama. 

Stay with me.

I’d furrow my brow like a concerned President Obama, or maybe I’d pitch my voice up—sing a line from a Lady Gaga song. If that didn’t do the trick, I might have tried putting on a pair of jeans that looked like something Nikki Sixx would wear. Perhaps, I’d cross my legs and meditate as if I were channeling the Dalai Lama.

Because that’s exactly what I was trying to do. 

If I could just let go of myself, I could become anyone else.

Under the influence of some other person, the way I saw the world changed. The night before my intervention, alone in a hotel nestled away in uptown Seattle, I was a political leader. Instead of even doing drugs that night, I was too busy scribbling down solutions to all the world's problems on the room’s stationary. While family, friends, and addiction specialists convened on my location—to try and find me—I was Hilary Clinton rewriting the second amendment. 

All it took was a snap of the wrist, a single pose, and boom my body became someone else's. Possibilities I’d never considered before opened up. Night-to-day, my circumstances flipped. I didn’t have to be another nameless, dying addict, I could be a president, a musician, a late-night talk show host. 

Try explaining that to the wrong passerby.

It’s been eight years since the intervention, almost a decade since people caught me red-handed trying to impersonate literally anyone but myself. And yet here I am, still doing the same thing, still trying to get away with it. 

Not with drugs, just to be clear.

No, all that drug-induced psychosis has been replaced with the effects of plain-old writing. And while it could be argued that there is some overlap between writer’s block and heroin withdrawal, that might be unfair. Yes—drug addiction, writing—they’re both escape routes. But one of those routes wasn’t carved using a dirty spoon. One of those routes won’t collapse on you when you try to crawl through it.

Because when I sit down to become a politically correct serial killer, or an ancient, undying Greek muse, I don’t lose myself at all. In fact—if it’s a good writing day, if the lords of literature are smiling upon me—I come out of it with something gained. A new aspect of myself I couldn’t see before.

Because how else can we see ourselves if we don’t risk stepping away?

Isn’t the best seat in a movie theater the one that’s furthest from the screen?

So, no. I’m not a world leader, or a comedian, or a pop star. I’m not Kleio, or Ted Bundy. I’m stuck with the body I’ve got. There’s no getting rid of it. But the good news is that that’s not prison sentence I once thought it to be.

Whitman said it best. “I am large, I contain multitudes.” My one life isn’t long enough to explore all the other ones living inside. 

So I’ll keep writing.