is nostalgia dangerous?
reflections from the high: a journey through the glitter and grit of 2019
DAY 995
cw: active drug use
iPhoto sits on my dock bar. right there on my laptop, it holds the repository of every photo i took on my phone from 2017-2021. i don’t go there often. i got a new phone around 9 months sober to keep my phone from creating montages of me and my ex. but i feel comforted knowing that if i need to find an image, i know where it lives.
but today, i got a notification on my laptop: a montage from when i went to Japan with my best friend Chelsea in 2019. ironic, since i am working on a piece about that. perhaps that’s why, the machine listening as i typed, “love hotels in japan” into Google.
it started simply enough. dare i say, casual? pictures of my best friend. but then i found more montages, each focusing on a place in the world or a person or a moment in time.
clicked on 2019: forced to witness a version of myself that i liked. that year, she traveled to Napa, Tokyo, and Prague. she spent a month and a half in Hawaii. she received her Master’s degree. released from the academic track, she was flung into the universe with no clear path, but she felt clear in her identity for the first time: artist.
they say at first, when we start drinking or using, that it’s magic, then it’s medicine, and then it’s misery. magic, medicine, misery: the trajectory of all use. the final three years of my marijuana addiction were such misery that it’s been hard to digest a time in which it ever felt like magic.
but upon reflection, i can see a glimmer in time: a six month period, in which i felt like a magnified version of self.
2019 was the summer, the height of the ‘magic’ phase of my addiction.
this bitch felt cool as hell.
she was living in the smallest room in her 3-bedroom greenpoint apartment. she was going on multiple tinder dates a week. she was smoking weed in her bed and on the street and on the subway. she was babysitting and performing puppet shows for children all over Brooklyn. she wasn’t writing, really. she painted sometimes. she had no active discipline or artistic practice, beyond daily morning pages and pulling a tarot card.
but there was this magic melding of self: my self concept was conducive to my self-presentation.
i was invited to parties. hell, i was the party. but i can’t say that she was “happy.” i can say that the years and months prior to this moment in time, she was deeply unhappy. there was always a deep need to feel wanted. that need was still present, but she felt unattached to the outcome momentarily because drugs and alcohol worked. she didn’t yet need the drugs to get through the day, but she wanted them. they made her feel cool, better.
this fleeting moment probably started February of 2019 and would end in September. soon, my need to be needed and wanted trumped all else, the drugs weren’t blunting it. i would enter an exclusive relationship with the first person who was interested, despite our only means of connection being our use of drugs.
but i wasn’t there yet. i wouldn’t have called myself dependent on anything or anyone. i would have laughed in the face of anyone who called me an addict.
this brutalrecovery meme perfectly encapsulates that period of time in my life:
at that time, it felt empowering to be reckless. to say yes to an invitation to spend the Fourth of July with a complete stranger from tinder and his friends in Vermont. to fly to Prague with my mother, then stay out all night with a Serbian college student the night before we were supposed to spend the day with my grandfather’s cousin in her soviet-era apartment. to let the Italian tinder date into my bed.
but of course, it is only upon reflection that i can see: i was courting chaos and opening myself willingly to danger. i was deeply exhausted, but willing to push through it.
and that’s how i know my addiction was in action: i was chasing high after high after high. i was having sex with strangers just to have sex with strangers. when i wasn’t high on drugs, i was high on being able to tell the story of yet another consort that landed in my favor.
it felt empowering to manufacture the narrative of my life. but the highest high of all, i finally felt empowered to call myself an artist.
which is ironic, of course, because no art was being made. i was so tied up in the identity of what an artist should be like— dangerous, daring, drunk and high— that i wasn’t actually making any art.
forever believing in the myth of the toxic artist, that i had to be crazy to be creative.
but also, i sort of miss her:
the girl who, when she entered the party, can light up the room.
the willingness to say yes to anything and everything.
the girl whose tinder picture was this:
a girl who wore glitter on her face every day, earnestly.
in short: this was a moment in time when i hadn’t lost myself; i was magnified.
this moment, only maintainable for a short period of six months. after that summer, i would start to lose my grip. that fall, i would start teaching as an adjunct professor, but would show up late after nights out taking research chemicals and drinking beer-shot combos at punk shows i had no interest in. i would lose the children’s puppet show gig after not learning the script before a huge show on Halloween, thinking i could improvise. i would try to write, but there was no coherence. i would send my agent huge, incoherent rambling word documents, telling her i’d have my book done in six months. to which she’d reply, “There’s really nothing here. There’s no rush, books take time.”
but this moment in time: this magnified version of self: she was hot, she was reckless, she felt brave. she didn’t give a fuck. and sometimes, i can’t help but wonder, was that me?
i was talking to my friend
about this, and she not only related to feeling nostalgia for this past using version of self, but she had additional insight. over text she said, “You’re like… do I hate them? Or… did it have NOTHING to do with them. My disease was going to wreck it no matter what.”i agree: i hate her. i love her. i wish i could still be her. i pray that there is a glimmer of her left in me, but not in such self-abandoning, self-destructive, self-aggrandizing terms.
And that’s the thing: this was the charming, cunning, baffling aspect of my addiction. it wasn’t all bad. i was absolutely exhausted. but life felt exciting. i hadn’t shut the door to the outdoor world yet, i was still engaging with it.
but in order to engage with the world, i had to soften it, alter it: i was smoking weed daily. popping adderall when it was offered. doing whippets in a friend’s basement because, why not? coke? sure. doesn’t do much for me but i’ll do it anyways.
i couldn’t just show up. i had to be altered.
and this is the nature of addiction: it is progressive, and there was no way i could stop that progression.
i can finally admit: i felt shiny while actively using drugs and alcohol, which felt difficult to admit in early sobriety. it wasn’t all bad. but i know i didn’t feel shiny for long. at almost three years sober (god willing), i can admit that there can be fun and exhilarating and expansive moments in time in which i felt like the most real and true version of myself while using. but it’s false. it’s a lie. it was my addiction lulling me into submission, tricking me into believing that what made me shiny and interesting was my capacity and willingness to use; to change how i feel at the whim of what i digested.
i learned fast that the substance will turn on you and steal that shine.
soon, i willingly let someone in who supported the use. this felt like a god-send, but was truly a curse. because it progresses. that is the nature of the illness: if you like doing drugs, you will keep doing them. you will do them until you are engaged to the wrong person, until you no longer talk to your friends or family. until you will tell every lie and hoard every secret that allows you to use. you will lose jobs and still not care. you will lose yourself, and still not care.
but i’m finally reconciling that there were 8 years before it got bad.
in 2019, i hadn’t lost her yet. i had no experience of what it would mean to lose myself. and so i didn’t know what could happen (even though my dad told me all the time throughout my childhood lol). i didn’t know that that shininess that drugs made me feel was going to rob me of my own, nature-made shine.
come September, i can now see it in the pictures, the dimming behind my eyes. it’s no longer as fun to get spontaneous tattoos or do drugs that i don’t really want to do, not even to say i tried them. it won’t take long for my evenings to be occupied just with smoking weed in bed. it will take me three years to admit that i can’t not smoke.
but that’s what’s so scary about it: all it takes is six months. the nature of the substance you choose, the decline can be even faster. i know someone who developed MS from six months of meth. soon enough, you find yourself worshipping at the alter of a substance that gives zero fucks about you. it’s just a chemical. a leaf. a drink. and yet, it occupies your days and minutes and seconds.
it always starts fun. why would people start if it weren’t?
i forget this because of how bad it got.
i guess i haven’t allowed myself to mourn the self that had fun while drinking and using. the version of self that was enlivened by it. that, because of it, i took myself on adventures that are outlandish and embarrassing— but, to this day, are very fun to write about.
i feel like i’ve been so many people in this one lifetime, and this is yet one other version of myself to contend with: she wasn’t all bad, she was having fun. but i have to remember that even when it felt good, it wasn’t: the terror and anger my mom felt as i stayed out all night. the friends who got left behind in foreign countries because i needed to fuck a stranger i’d never see again. the wreckage was there, but i couldn’t see it.
now i do. now i am trying to make things right.
now, i remember the fatigue. the notebook entries i wrote by the Charles River that said, “I just want to be alone.” then inviting an Italian guy from tinder to drink with us that night. being in active addiction is exhausting. but the momentum, the sheer momentum, was its own high.
all i could see was my next high.
as always, thank you for being here. if you haven’t already, share, subscribe, comment, like. all that jazz.
XOXO,
PAULINA
Thank you for sharing this beautiful, heartfelt entry. 🤍
I loved this!!! Thank you Paulina. Xx kb