The Fear

I am two hours away from the 96-hour mark. Every hour or so, the fear sets in. This is unlike any fear you will ever know. We expect fear to come in response to something in our environment that endangers us, and in that context, we see fear as a normal productive part of life; it helps us to survive and succeed in the face of threats. This fear is like the 800-pound monster that lives behind your closet door, never seen, but lurking there, waiting to eviscerate you. This is fear in response to nothing. This is fear for no rational reason, but it is still fear nonetheless. It is a kind of fear that creates questions rather than responses: will I ever feel good again? Have I ruined my life permanently? What did I miss out on while I was high and will those opportunities ever present themselves again? What will tomorrow be like, and what if it is worse than today.

96 hours is a long time when you are crashing. It is an eternity, a milestone that I am clutching like a half-inflated life raft; I have watched the ship slide to the bottom of the sea and I made it off the deck, yet I do not know if, while clinging to my flotsam, I will survive, nor do I know if this is a better fate. The physical symptoms subsided at 72 hours. The runny nose, diarrhea, the flames and ice cubes darting from my flesh, and a never-ending stream of sweat, were nothing compared to the fear. Some accounts place the physical symptoms somewhere next to the flu, which I believe is accurate. At 24 hours my nose became runny and my skin began to feel like pinpricks that I could not discern were either hot or cold. But most of all, at that point, I felt weak. I left work early that day. I only made it through about two hours when the crash began to fall. I crawled right into the bed that I would later make slogging wet with sweat. At 48 things were still the same, but perhaps slightly better. But at 72, after I felt as though my skin had been zipped back on, the fear remained, and in the absence of physical symptoms it seemed to be glaring at me and no longer subdued by the trauma to my physical body, which had subdued it. And here I am staring it in the face.

Two months ago, while I was high, I took out a 3” X 5” index card and wrote myself a note from the dreamy world of opiate intoxication. Having crashed a few times before, but never with the serious intent of leading to permanent abstinence, I thought I’d leave myself a souvenir from the netherworld; something that would let me know that, from the other side, everything would eventually be o.k. On the other side, everything is cool and everything is fine. There are no worries, no fears, no scary monsters under the bed. Like a time traveler who leaves a message in the past in order to mark the future, I wrote this:

“It is an illusion. See thought it. Everything is o.k. Things are not what they seem. You have seen that peace is possible, now find it. If you could find it then (while you were high) you can find it again. Don’t be a pussy! Do what you need to do. Do what you know is right. You can accomplish whatever you need or want to. Just don’t do it! Nothing lasts forever. This will pass. Believe it. There is no substitution. Do it all. There is no honor in second place. Push through it. It is not real. It can be whatever you want it to be. Don’t be afraid. Believe in yourself. Don’t believe the fear. It is not real and everything is o.k. It will go away.”

I squarely folded the index card and tucked it into my wallet where it has resided for the past eight weeks, unfolded, until today. The fear is so pervasive that the words from the index card seem as shallow as words of comfort from the executioner to the condemned. The words make no sense at all. I read the attempted encouragement from the netherworld like a treatise from a sophomore-year philosophy course: it can never be the case that things are not what they seem because how things seem is the only way that things are. At least that’s the way it seems at 96.

I am afraid. Afraid the Percocet destroyed my liver. Afraid I altered my brain chemistry. Afraid I will die. Afraid that if I live, I will never know pleasure again. There seems to only be the pleasure of the drug or life without it, and each is exclusive of the other, as though there is only one choice, yet somehow I know that one choice results in death. Yet, what remains, the possibility of life, but one without joy, seems no consolation. I once heard a story that the lowest Roman slaves were given a choice between two destinies. Supposedly they could choose between either a lifetime of slavery, or one night in Caesar’s Palace enjoying the lustful splendor of all the pleasures it entailed, but be executed at sunrise. Sometimes a choice is no choice at all. I am indeed going to die. We all are. I have merely made a choice about how I’d like to do it, and hopefully it won’t be drowning in my own vomit. That’s my choice at 96.

Tomorrow: How did this happen to me?