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August 1, 2009
Emotions Anonymous: How the Fear of Feeling Has Defined My Life
"It works if you work it, but you've got to work it everyday"
As I repeat those words mechanically, standing in a circle of hand-holding,
recovering drug addicts, the thought strikes me for the first time: I am not working it.
Perhaps that is why it's not working. Not that I'm not grateful for these twelve-step
Groups. I know I need help, and I will gladly take advantage of every resource that the
State Department of Corrections Program for Mental Health wants to throw my way.
However, I have come to the realization that I don't believe in Alcoholics Anonymous. I
don't believe it can work for me anyway, not anymore. I have been clean and sober for
over two years now, and the first step still does not sit right with me. Call me stubborn,
but I don't want to admit powerlessness. I don't want to be powerless over drugs
anymore and I don't want to spend the rest of my life in meetings talking about them with
other addicts. I don't want to use. I am done. I hit my bottom when I plead guilty to
armed robbery and gladly accepted a prison sentence of ten years without parole. If I had
gone to trial, I would've faced twenty-five years to a triple life sentence. In AA, I am told
that incarcerated clean time does not count. I am also told it is healthy to be scared of
getting out and using again, of being in the free world, surrounded by temptation. I no
longer find the idea of sticking a needle in my arm tempting. What scares me now is the
reason I sought oblivion in the first place. I carry it with me always, in the shade where
it's safe, where I don't' have to meet its stare, while I pretend it isn't there. I am
powerless over my emotions. I empower them every time I refuse to acknowledge their
existence. I am terrified of feeling, always have been, and I know this crippling fear is
destroying every chance I have at success. I have had to force myself finally to sit down
and write this paper after avoiding it for months. I didn't have to choose this topic, but I
believe that writing about my emotions may be the only way I will ever be able to face
them, and I don't want to take the easy way out anymore.
THIS State Women's prison boasts the best and most decorated mental health
program. The Twelve Step recovery groups are offered only to inmates rated
mental health level 2 or higher, though 90 percent of the women incarcerated here are in
for possession, selling, manufacturing, or trafficking drugs. So, once I had convinced
them I was crazy enough, these and other "activity therapy" groups were made available
to me, including crochet and my favorites, yoga and pilates. The state-employed
psychiatrists will gladly prescribe medication, if sedation is in order. Many people here
seem more than happy to sleepwalk through their sentences. I, however, have already
spent half of my life in catatonia, and I do not need any more sedation, prescribed or
otherwise. I have found that I like the waking life. The best perk of all is this: I get my
own personal shrink, who sees me once a month like clockwork. Today, I walk into her
office, plop down in an armchair that is the most comfortable thing to cradle my behind
since last month, and say, "I still haven't finished my paper." She knows exactly what I
am talking about, maybe because she takes meticulously detailed notes, scratching away
at her clipboard while I unload my issues onto her. I realize it is perhaps a bit egotistical
of me to expect her to remember my problems above a sea of 200 other inmates' on her
caseload. Soon enough, though, after apparently reviewing the minutes of our last
session, she asks, "Have you decided what you are comfortable sharing with your
readers?"
I start to tell her that I'm not so sure if the fact that slicing my skin with an exact-o knife
helped me to cope with my emotions as a teenager is appropriate for me to share with
anyone, let alone my teacher whom I've never met, when my eyes begin to get all watery.
Here we go again, I think. Where does this come from? For someone as emotionally
handicapped as I am, I sure can cry from out of nowhere, without rhyme or reason or
understanding. If one is crying, one should know why. "Maybe you're not ready for this,"
she says. Maybe I'm not. I have started writing this paper eight times now, at least, but I
cannot seem to finish it. I don't want to let this beat me. I can't give up on this, it would
mean giving up on my abilities the way I always do. This time, I think to myself, I am
going to finish what I have started.
The emotion that dominated my teenage years was sadness. I let my anger control my
external life, but inside I was just sad. "Sadness' is a broad and inadequate term, but it
encompasses all of the feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, and despair that were my
constant companions. In the murky depths of my memory, it appears to me as one
monstrous and all-consuming emotion, though in all probability it was all of them
combined and indistinguishable from one another. It was this beast I sought to escape
through sex, drugs, and self-mutilation, but these all only served as a catalyst which
propelled me down a darker, bleaker, and ever more sinister spiral. I became fascinated
by horror movies, the bloodier the better, and I even went to film school in hopes of
making my own. Looking back, I think I regarded this death obsession as the ultimate
triumph over human emotion. Ironically, I was unable to see that my life had become
more horrific than any cinematic nightmare.
Only in music did I find true freedom. When I played, I knew who I was and what I was
put here to do. It gave my life meaning, and it kept me sane. Still, drugs were an ever
present escape, and it was my downfall- my refusal to believe that I was strong enough to
cope with life without them.
Emotions have always been extremely uncomfortable for me. Growing up, I tried to
drown them out in everyway I knew, but no matter how numb I managed to become,
music made me feel. There is something about music that my very cells can connect with,
recognize, thrive in. It moves me to tears. It opens my eyes.
As far back as I can see, it was the only thing that was ever really real to me. There were
certain chord progressions/intervals that cut me to the core, and songs so perfect they
made me cry. It was the ability it had to express truth and tragedy so perfectly, and
without any words at all. Words have always been dear to me, but they often simply fail
me, when I try to express what I feel but cannot explain. Music made me see that there is
awe-inspiring beauty in all human pain. All of the indistinguishable emotions that would
have smothered me, rage and madness and desperation and grief, were unleashed at once
and I was free. I may have hated living in my own skin and it felt inside, but when I
played I could create something bigger than me, and it made living worthwhile. When I
sang I heard my own pain in my voice and understood that in releasing it, I could turn it
into something beautiful. To know I could reach someone who hurt that way was enough,
that I might be able to offer a beacon of hope in someone else's night. It seemed I had
stumbled upon my very purpose for being, while I was stabbing in the dark to find some
mercy of my own. When the whole world was black and I had nowhere left to run, I
could make a certain sound and fill this ugly place with beauty. Sometimes is sounded
wrong, but it felt right. Sometimes it was ugliness itself, but it was utterly perfect, always.
If this makes no sense to you, I will blame the incompetence of words, and wish that you
could understand the language that has freed me from the boundaries of terminology.
Then perhaps you would hear what I mean.
I scare myself into weak attempts at explanation, but there is none. I was tired of trying
before I began.
Now every day at noon, I am free for a while. I take my miracle, my blessing, my gift
from God, my guitar, into the library, where I play for an audience of books. The first
time I touched it, held it, I had not played in almost two years. I tried to tell the woman
who gave it to me, who had somehow gotten it approved with the warden, how much it
meant to me. I tried to tell her she must be an angel of mercy, but I was sobbing too hard
to manage anything except, "Thank you." Surely I don't deserve this. After all, it is my
fault that I had to give it up in the first place. I chose drugs over music. But I won't ever
let it go again. Now I am ready to surrender my fear. Now I can let it out, one song at a
time, until it no longer has any power to hold me back. Now I can get on with my
neglected schoolwork, my recovery, and my life. There now, exhale. That wasn't so hard
after all.
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