Tag: drugs

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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People often reach out to me assuming that I’m now happy and high functioning—that I’ve “recovered” or climbed atop some “mentally healthy” pedestal. My first instinct when I hear this, ironically, is to clarify that I’m by no means what psychiatry would consider “well”—though this doesn’t mean anything to me. Instead, I explain how I’ve come to view the paradigm of “mental illness” and “mental health” as a false binary, and that I have found, in shedding this medicalized framework of self-understanding, that no state of being is permanent or anything to be attached to or worried about. And when I do seem to be falling into some kind of particularly unhelpful emotional or thinking “pattern,” I typically don’t need to sleuth around too long to figure out what’s going on. Inevitably, it’s rooted in my relationship to life around me: there is unresolved conflict between me and someone I care about; I have deprioritized social connection because I feel exhausted; I’m powerless about a difficult circumstance but haven’t yet let go of needing it to change; I’m placing too much attention on matters that really have no relevance for me. Much of the time, it’s because I’ve slipped back into my old habit of ignoring my intuition: I’ve spoken yes when my instincts said no. I haven’t had restful time to myself. Too many hours in front of a computer and not enough put toward the things and people that really matter—the things that, when I’m at death’s door one day, I’ll wish I’d done more of: expansive conversations at the reservoir with Cooper with scootering kids in tow, despite all those emails beckoning me to catch up on them; letting the boys blow up the living room to build that pillow fort even though it means more tidying; calling up the people who ignite me to catch up on life instead of just working more.

— Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, March 18, 2025)

Notes:

  • Recommended: Not a warm and fuzzy page turner but powerful. Her insights and thoughts will not leave me soon, if ever.
  • Book Review of “Unshrunk” by Casey Schwartz, NY Times, March 20, 2025.
  • Book Review in Washington Post: “She stopped taking her psych meds. Now she helps others do the same. Laura Delano’s “Unshrunk” is more than a memoir. It’s a treatise against psychiatric medications.”

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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I hadn’t done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen. I didn’t need to. I felt the pinch of wonder. I felt everything sharply, the people we met, the sensation of being in a body, of eating or drinking. I knew there was darkness in the world, but I was sure it would not overpower us; rather, we would let ourselves be overpowered by the beauty of our discoveries as we traveled through this world. Railway stations and underground trains, the commons, a magnificent oak in a park, the redbrick Victorian buildings of England and Wales, the Georgian splendor of Edinburgh, of Glasgow with its occasional black eye. And the beautiful searching eyes of our audience. Every night, the show. The ragged and sometimes glorious show.

— Bono, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono” (Knopf, November 1, 2022)

Photo: via Zimbio

Lightly Child, Lightly

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I wish, for the me I was then, that I could add one more flash, much further forward. I wish that the me nodding out in a cold cinderblock cell could see ahead five years, or even ten… I wish she could see who she will become, and the parts of herself she will leave behind. The darkness that she will learn to live with, and the light she will learn to let in.

— Keri Blakinger, random excerpts from Corrections in Ink: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, June 7, 2022)

Notes:

  • See prior post on Blakinger’s new book, here.
  • Book Review by David Sheff in NY Times: A Harrowing Journey From Cornell to Addiction to Prison
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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“As much as I liked the fast pace of that hardboiled world, in the slow moments I wondered about the point of it all.”

“I learned quickly that there’s an intrinsically desolate feeling to being homeless. It was something I did not expect, and it cut far deeper than the simple, logistical difficulties and social stigmas of being dirty and unhoused. There’s something specific about not having a place where you are welcome or safe when the sun goes down. For an underage girl fresh on the street, safe was not really an option—but after a few days, I found welcome: the Family under the parking garage. The Family was a motley collection of a couple dozen young homeless goths and assorted street people dwelling beneath the first level of the curving parking garage across the street from the Alewife train station—the end of the line.”

“I’ll have a year clean on the 20th and I won’t get a certificate for that, but it’s the only thing that I deserve one for. But then, I guess maybe nothing really important in life can be validated by a piece of paper.”

“I was not tempted; drugs finally felt like a past life, an escape I did not miss. Unlike so many of my friends, I was not haunted by cravings or drug dreams, and I felt like I’d almost cheated my way out of addiction. Sometimes, I’m still not sure to what extent I got sober and to what extent I just found more socially acceptable obsessions like running and crosswording and writing.”

“When the end is near (in prison, time slows to a trickle. Not the way it does on the ice at Nationals, when adrenaline moves faster than the ticking clock. Not the way it does at the top of a gorge, when the world is frozen. And not the way it does in The Place, when the hours blend together and disappear. This is not reality fading away or closing in but simply refusing to move forward, with such stubbornness that it seems physically painful—like the struggle of a wild animal trapped in a tar pit and straining to break free. In prison terms, this is getting short. That’s the word for when your bid is almost over, and you are about to go home.”

— Keri Blakinger, random excerpts from Corrections in Ink: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, June 7, 2022)

Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn25 Comments

We’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting … the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you. Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience. The more dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway, the more addictive the experience. In addition to the discovery of dopamine, one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance. We’ve all experienced that moment of craving a second piece of chocolate, or wanting a good book, movie, or video game to last forever. That moment of wanting is the brain’s pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain.

— Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton, August 24, 2021)