Monday, February 3, 2014

Getting through Monday: a caveat

This Monday: especially hard to get on with.

I didn't know Philip Seymour Hoffman, and to be honest, I often have a hard time understanding it when people feel personally hurt by the loss of someone whom they only actually knew through movies or books. But this loss is really getting to me, too. It's painful and frightening, not just because I liked him, or because he was young, but because addiction is so terrifying and painful a subject for me.

I've tried a few times already this morning to derive some sort of conclusion about this -- about access to treatment or the glorification of drugs in our culture, about collective responsibility for one another and personal responsibility for one's self -- but mostly I just think: this is just so sad. 

One one hand, the particulars of Hoffman's death -- the length of time he'd been in recovery, the heartbreaking state in which his body was found -- reinforce my feeling that, however apocalyptic my boss's response to my giving notice may be, I did the right thing to leave my job for one whose schedule, salary, and location now make it possible for me to put more time into recovering from my own problems. Eating disorders are no heroin addiction, but they are potentially fatal, and having both lived with and been a high-functioning addict, I know how tempting it is to just deal with your problem (or not) privately, rather than rocking the boat by pointing out that things are still pretty fucking far from okay.

But it just brings me back to the sadness of someone taking his son to Knicks games and preparing for the third Hunger Games movie and generally keeping it moving, while having this secret thing, this incredible personal loss -- because the feeling when you were recovered, and then are not, is itself devastating -- and not feeling like he could call time out and ask for help.

It is so incredibly sad, because now, of course, no one's thinking, but now's a shitty time for more rehab, these movies have to come out. If you went up to any but the most morally bankrupt of us, that person would say: fuck the Hunger Games, go get the help you need. But in day-to-day life, when a person still could be getting help, we don't have a lot of patience for that person interrupting our goings-on with his messy, intractable problems, especially when the problem is addiction and the person in question has been through this before, often publicly, and already got help, for Chrissakes.

It's so sad, and life is so short and guarantees of any kind so absent, and really, you just need to be loving, as loving as possible, all the time. To set aside what is trivial -- the person's choices that you don't like, that Huffpo article you were reading or bonus you were earning before they got in the way with their humanity and need -- before a crisis rips those things from your hands.


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