I’m at ease with the downtrodden and broken. I belong in illegal poker rooms and strip clubs. I belong in pawn shops and after-hours bars. I belong with those who had so much potential but lost it all to heroin.
And I belong with Anthony Bourdain.
There’s footage of Bourdain that haunts me. In the penultimate season of his brilliant show Parts Unknown, he’s in a fishing village in Hong Kong. He looks out over the water with a tentative smile and says,
“I think I’m happy.”
The vulnerable part of Bourdain was located in the corner of his mouth. It is the mouth of a sensitive, seven-year-old boy. Hearing those words out of that mouth is crushing. In that moment, he thought he’d beaten the internal voice trying to kill him.
Having it all doesn’t remove the assassin in our mind. I don’t think there’s an addict alive who could watch the late host of Parts Unknown and not feel close to him. It was his way of thinking I recognized.
Some of my fascination with Bourdain stems from how he thought he could outsmart the internal voice trying to kill him. I thought I could too.
I knew I was an addict when I was 21 years old. I asked for help and got it. I was clean for the better part of two decades.
But I reached a point where I just didn’t want to be an addict anymore. I stopped doing the things that kept me alive. I divorced myself from a community of people practicing how to live with the disease. I thought I could choose to be alright without them.
That didn’t work. I was in a cesspool of opioid addiction for a decade and wound up a heroin addict at the age of 48.
Years ago, Bourdain quit doing heroin and gave up his crack habit. I can only suppose somewhere along the way he decided if he stopped the hard drugs, it was enough.
If only.
I suspect Bourdain refused to understand himself, and I get that part most of all. He and I both thought we could decide we didn’t have the disease of addiction.
The intricacies of this disease—or how we think—are talked about freely in church basements, in secret. They are not discussed elsewhere without trite labeling and generalizations. Addicts are misunderstood, misdiagnosed, underestimated, overestimated, shunned. Clinical treatments are woefully inadequate.
There is so little practical understanding of how our brains operate. It’s not just the rest of you who don’t understand us. People die every day without understanding themselves, or why their lives were filled with such suffering and mayhem. Entire families are devastated because one member has the disease.
It’s a condition with side effects including ruining the lives of everyone who loves you.
I didn’t know Bourdain personally. Our paths crossed very briefly in downtown New York City in the 1980s, but my path has intersected with lots of people. It’s a byproduct of being a bartender.
I opened more Budweisers for Joey Ramone than I could count. I poured an Absolut on the rocks for Lauren Bacall at the Dakota, in Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. I’m terrible with names, but always remember what people drink.
While walking down Second Avenue years ago, I ran into the late Dean Johnson. His drink was very easy to recall, because in my entire career he’s the only person who ever ordered it.
“Hey! Tequila and Grapefruit!” I called out.
“Not anymore! I’m sober now!” he replied.
Both of us laughed and laughed. We never broke stride. Life is funny, and you never know who’ll end up sober. Sometimes it’s the unlikeliest of people.
You also never know who’ll end up dead. Just like getting clean, it’s the unlikeliest of people. It’s always shocking when it’s a celebrity we adore, someone with a life we imagine as better than our own.
Bourdain’s life was a paradox. He was a world traveler, successful, wealthy, attractive, hilarious, and had what he described as the “best job in the world.” How could he suffer?
That is the crux of the matter. I think Anthony Bourdain can teach us more than someone with 30 years clean and sober. What he referred to in a 2014 episode of Parts Unknown, I know as the disease of addiction. And although his death certificate may read suicide, I suspect this disease might have killed him—not with drugs, but with his thinking.
Bourdain didn’t want to think of addiction as an illness. While speaking with a bunch of addicts in Provincetown, where his dance with heroin started, he said,
“There was some dark genie inside me that I very much hesitate to call a disease, that led me to dope.”
Me too, man.
I’m always looking for an out. I do not want to have any disease, but particularly this one. I’m not alone, either. No one wants it. Most addicts I know would like to believe anything other than the truth: we have a lethal disorder of the brain. We have to do a lot of work to stay alive, long after the drugs are gone.
Untreated addiction has its way with you, whether you’re using or not. And that genie to whom Bourdain refers is very loud, persistent, and never gives up. That genie got game, and I suspect Bourdain got worn down.
If you want to know how the disease works, picture a funnel.
If you were to scoop my brain into that funnel, every thought would be distilled down to a drip marked misery. The genie underneath collects the dark thoughts, then starts talking to me. It drowns out all the good. If I get miserable enough, I will pick up heroin again. Or I’ll kill myself and be done with the whole business.
It starts before I open my eyes in the morning.
I’m aware I’m waking up. A flash of a dream comes into my consciousness; some nebulous memory of something dark and unknowable, something disturbing I can’t quite remember.
I’m immediately overwhelmed by a sense of futility. Another day.
You’ve got to be kidding. I should not hate waking up this much, it’s not normal. Life is just relentless. I’m failing. I will never have the life I want. Every action I take is futile. This is pointless. I’m pointless. I don’t know how to function in this world and it’s evident I will never learn. I’m not like other people. I can’t participate, I don’t even know how. I don’t know what to do.
Nothing matters. Not really. I am one of eight billion people and I’ll die and stop existing and it won’t matter.
I’m too old. I don’t have enough money. I’ll never have enough money. I have no education. No one likes me, and I hate everybody anyway. I cannot stand to open my eyes. Why do I continue to kid myself? Why do I keep trying? It’s so stupid. People keep telling me I need a god. There is definitely no god.
I should write more. I should want to write more. Maybe writing is a bad idea. Maybe it’s all a bad idea. I like to paint, I should paint. But that means setting up the easel, which I can’t possibly do. Why don’t I want to live well? I’m not grateful enough. I should be more grateful.
Fuck.
I’ve been awake less than a minute. The logical conclusion is that I should give up. I lie in bed, eyes open now. I wonder how I can summon the energy to stand.
There is science behind this wretched thinking.
When a normal person does something which gives them pleasure, like watching Netflix or taking a bike ride, they get a burst of dopamine. Then a neural pathway forms.
Netflix = Happy feeling.
When an addict takes a drink or gets high, instead of getting a normal burst of dopamine, the blasts start firing more quickly.
Vodka = Happy, happy, happy feeling!
The addict keeps drinking, and the dopamine keeps firing. So instead of three blasts it goes to five, and then ten.
Vodka = Happy happy joy joy happy happy joy joy happy happy feeling!
Or,
Heroin = Oh, here’s where “there” is. Finally, I’m home. Euphoria. Perfection. Rest from myself. A fortress of warmth and protection from the rest of you. Joy joy joy joy joy joy bliss bliss blisssssssss more of thissssssss please….
A mere bike ride doesn’t stand a chance against all that dopamine. Instead of forming a neural pathway, we now have a neural gulley. We have a neural trench. And our brain adjusts. It shifts all thoughts into going to that happy gulley. Everything becomes about the trench of dopamine that’s formed.
I’m not a neuroscientist. This is how I understand some very complicated science I learned in rehab. As the counselor explained it, she used a white board. She drew a big trench, the Katie Porter of substance abuse.
And suddenly, I understood why I was in rehab. There is science behind my insane, destructive thinking. All these thoughts are designed to get me to give up and go back to the one thing that gives me relief. My brain works constantly to get me back to the trench.
My counselor said not to worry, if we stop going down into the gulley, eventually it becomes like an overgrown path. If we quit walking down its way, weeds will spring up.
Okay. That might take a while.
Meanwhile, the genie is screaming in my ear like Gilbert Gottfried.
“THE TRENCH! THE TRENCH! What’s wrong with you, you moron? You can’t participate in life like regular people, go back to what works! TAKE THE TRENCH! Get in your car and call your dealer NOW!!!!!”
And here’s what else I’ve observed about my own thoughts: the trench isn’t the only thing that gets overgrown. All my former pleasurable activity pathways are so overgrown they’re barely recognized as ways at all.
When I got out of rehab, I stared at the walls and tried to figure out how I could avoid killing myself that day. There was absolutely nothing I wanted to do except drink Coca-Cola. (They may have removed the cocaine, but I remain convinced there is something special in Coke Classic.) This went on for close to two months.
Life did not appeal to me. I went to a group once or twice a day and listened to people who told me it would get better. I thought,
“Maybe for you. Not for me.”
Rational thought was definitely not a pathway. I hadn’t driven down Rational Way in years.
My husband, a well-adjusted man if there ever was one, a man who reads 72 books a year from the library and goes mountain biking for fun, has neural pathways, plural. His brain is not one giant neural gulley.
I will never understand how he dredged up enough compassion to live through this time. But I think he had some kind of intuition about what was going on. Unlike me, he had hope I’d get well.
I got through those days using every single bit of assistance available to me. It was impossible to do alone. I am miraculously glad to be alive.
But I still wake up like that. The difference is now I know I won’t stay like that. I get out of bed knowing if I show up for the daily routine I require, my thoughts will change. These bad moments are not eternal.
But it can feel like it. Things can go from dark to hopeless very quickly. I need people to remind me they pass.
After forty years of dealing with my addiction, decades of being clean, relapsing and becoming a near-casualty of the opioid epidemic, I have finally reached a conclusion:
I have a disease of the brain. I will always have this disease, whether I accept it or not. And if I don’t wake up each day and make my recovery the priority I will die of this disease.
Or I won’t die. I’ll live in misery. Untreated addiction is a gruesome way to live in the world. Cue Anthony Bourdain.
We kill ourselves, slowly or all at once, because of our thinking. We kill ourselves because one of the side effects of this disease is its voice, telling us we don’t have a disease. It’s a disease of self-obsession, and I’m always found wanting.
Help is available, but here’s the thing: it’s not a one-shot deal. It takes time to get well. I had the privilege of time. I had a spouse supporting me, so I could devote time to recovery. Many people do not, and it’s so easy to get overwhelmed and return to our one relief.
The genie has a bag of tricks. One is a veil, and it draws the veil down at every opportunity. When the veil is down, we forget what life used to be like when we were using. Addiction comes with something my late friend Sharrie referred to as,
“The Instant Forgetter.”
When I was twenty-one years old, I got some real help for the first time. For the next sixteen years, nary a drink or drug crossed my lips. Then I stopped practicing all the things I do to stay alive. I divorced myself from the friends who helped me.
My thinking wasn’t unreasonable. Since I stopped getting high so young, maybe I could blame it on that: being young and stupid.
The veil descends, and memory of what my life was like evaporated.
Stupid young people generally don’t bleed from the nose and gums because of their daily use of cocaine. Stupid young people rarely wind up in a psych ward. Stupid young people don’t try to kill themselves in their teens.
I forgot all that. Instead, I became obsessed with drinking wine. In Europe. I never liked wine, but that’s beside the point. I wanted to drink like a grownup.
When I watched Parts Unknown, I fantasized about my own life. Maybe I could have what Bourdain had. Maybe I could be myself and be successful. Maybe addiction wouldn’t determine my life. He figured out how to beat it on his own terms.
Addiction did not define him. He shook the parts that didn’t work and kept the fun ones. He foiled the celebrity system with all its traps. He made millions doing a TV show without becoming a jerk selling steak sauce.
The hope he gave me was the addict version of the Big Lie, that someone with this condition can beat the disease on their own. Bourdain seemed capable of playing both sides.
He was not just socially acceptable, he was adored. He brought a punk aesthetic to television that somehow managed to be refined. He was exactly himself.
Most importantly, he gave us communion. His ability to sit down with people of every race and nationality and break bread was more holy to me than anything I might get in church. There is no greater instruction on how we can accept each other than sitting together and taking a meal.
Bourdain wasn’t shunned as a weirdo. He was popular. He let me know that authenticity was not only possible but treasured.
There he is in the Seattle episode, sitting down with the late Mark Lanegan, arguably one of the worst junkies of his generation, arguably its greatest and most moving voice. If ever there were a tortured soul, it was Lanegan. Bourdain brought him into the living rooms of people who didn’t realize how desperately they needed to hear Strange Religion. He gifted Mark to greater America.
There he is obsessive-compulsive about martial arts, channeling all his negative energy into something constructive. Isn’t that what every therapist I’ve ever had tried to get me to do?
There he is with a hangover of epic proportion, still showing up for work.
There he is having another. He put down the dope and still gets to check out with booze. How does he do that? Could I go traveling and split a bottle of wine with friends?
There he is with Asia Argento, perfectly happy. Two dark horses alive and living the curmudgeon dream.
There he is in Sicily, the perfect metaphor for how addicts experience life. You can keep what passes for society. I am not participating in this sham. Oblivion is preferable to putting up with you posers.
Anthony Bourdain lived his way, and he didn’t do any of the stuff I have to do to stay alive.
There is no Parts Unknown where he decides to get clean and sober. There is no footage of him going to groups or trauma therapy. He skipped all the tedium. He figured out how to be himself in this world and succeed while doing it.
Then he hanged himself.
Drugs are not the problem.
Drugs are often the only solution. Addicts have bad wiring. Taking away the drugs doesn’t fix the wiring. We are our most vulnerable when the drugs are gone.
To people without the affliction, working a difficult job, struggling to pay bills, taking care of children with no help and never enough money, it’s got to be galling to hear the word “suffering” in relation to a rich white TV personality.
We’ve been trained to be so polarized that we may have lost the ability to understand that two opposing truths can exist at the same time. It’s true that Bourdain had a fantastic life. And it’s true he suffered.
Why should any hard-working American care about addicts? Why should anyone struggling to feed their family give two cents about a privileged man who had everything and threw it all away? Why should anyone care about what happens to any addict who is bent on destroying themselves?
I think the simplest answer is that more people die from overdoses in our nation than gun violence. Odds are you will personally lose someone to a drug overdose. For such a terrible problem, there is little understanding of addiction.
I don’t want to suffer, and I don’t want others to suffer.
Because I don’t want to suffer, I’ve had to take a weed whacker to my brain. I’ve discovered the miracle of neural plasticity. The human brain can change.
Slowly, slowly, way too slowly for comfort, I practice developing other neural pathways. I have learned that I feel better making my bed. I have learned I feel better if I write every day. I have learned to practice living. I have learned to take help, to be in a community, to do all the things that make me roll my eyes. I have learned that it is an impossibility for me to manage the disease alone.
But my brain still rubbernecks sometimes, gazing longingly at that neural trench that has begun to narrow. There may be weeds there, but my brain knows that is exactly where I get the most dopamine. I haven’t gone down the trench in years.
It’s still there.
I know what happens to me the minute I think,
I’m fine, I can do it alone.
"I’m extremely skeptical of the 'language of addiction.' I never saw heroin or cocaine as 'my illness.' I saw them as some very bad choices that I walked knowingly into,” Bourdain once said.
I don’t want to have a disease, he didn’t want to have a disease, none of you want us to have a disease, you just wish we’d wake up and quit doing insane, stupid, destructive things. I hear you.
Wouldn’t it be great if addiction were not a disease?
I sincerely wish every addict and every family member of one could understand: my brain doesn’t work the way yours does. And rehab, although it gives us a shot at getting better and may be the first step in becoming well, is not going to keep us off drugs. We don’t learn something once and never forget it. Our brains forget on purpose, because remembering doesn’t get us to the gulley.
It isn’t exactly logical. Drugs made the problem. Your person may have appeared just fine before they started using. If you take away the drugs, you should be left with a functioning human being.
Probably not.
If your addict is anything like me, here’s what you will have instead: someone with the impulse control of a toddler. Someone who weeps looking at a pile of mail. Someone who cannot take any criticism at all. Someone who will lie to you and steal from you and do everything they can to go back to the thing that put them in the soup in the first place.
It makes no sense until you understand what happened to our brains. We can get healthy again, we may even reach a point where we’re glad to be alive. But it’s a very long road, and it’s practice, practice, practice. We’re tasked with rewiring our brains.
And most of us don’t even know it.
I could still die by my own hand. I could still die from an overdose. I respect the power of the destroyer inside me.
I belong with Anthony Bourdain. My last suicide attempt was about ten years ago. I couldn’t believe it when I woke up. I’d followed instructions so carefully, and here I was again.
I was lucky enough to find a way to live. I know what works for me. But I’m emphatic in my belief that addicts need more options to get well.
If all drugs in the United States disappeared, you would be left with a population of people whose brains would eat them alive. Drugs aren’t required for the disease to kill us. Our thinking can do it.
Policy doesn’t reflect this. Lawmakers think the problem is Fentanyl. And although its acute lethality is horrific, we are naïve to believe cracking down on Fentanyl is the one big solution. Brilliant chemists employed by cartels all over the world can only be hard at work on the next deadly synthetic opioid.
It’s a question of supply and demand. Addicts demand drugs. Someone will supply them, and trust me: we’ll find them.
The more draconian our drug laws get, the greater the need for the next opioid. If we don’t have time tested, evidence-based options on the table available to addicts seeking treatment, too often there is no choice but to go to the street.
We want answers. We want it to be simple. There are no easy solutions.
Anthony Bourdain was a beautiful, complicated man with endless resources. He could not bear to be here. When we get that, we might begin to understand addiction.
One of your very best. Thank you Elizabeth.
Thanks so much.