Oblivion

[I’d just begun reworking this older piece prior to my recent dog walking disaster. There truly are no coincidences. My enthusiastic embrace of the flood of euphoria as the opiates kicked in—yay, no pain and no worries—was a timely reminder that the promise of oblivion will always be just offstage, singing its siren song.]

The onslaught of puberty, when my already jacked-up nervous system became buffeted by hormonal fluctuations, was a tipping point for me. The atmosphere at home had mellowed from one of threatened violence to one befouled with disapproval, ridicule, and general incivility. The unceasing parental intrusion and complete lack of boundaries juxtaposed with total indifference was bewildering. Suddenly all my sadness and fury were magnified to the point of feeling unbearable. And expressing any of it was forbidden.

One day, at fifteen, I angrily decided that if I were going to be considered bad no matter what I did, I might as well be bad. What was the point of being a straight arrow, working hard, getting good grades, if they not only didn’t notice but still treated me as if I were reprehensible? I might as well get something out of it. That’s the day that my long love affair with oblivion inadvertently began.

For most of my cohort in the early 1970s, underage drinking was a rite of passage, and I was an eager participant. Fortunately for me, my body usually intervened before things could get too out of hand; I’d feel either sleepy or sick and call it a night. This day, despite knowing nobody who did, and knowing that if I were caught my parents would kill me, I decided that it was time to try weed. I convinced a friend to join me, and the rest was history. When that first high hit, none of it mattered anymore: not the fear, the anger, the sadness; not the hopelessness or the feeling of being trapped. I could breathe. And I could laugh. I’d found the answer.

I spent the next two years, literally, in a fog. Hours and hours elapsed in a car in the high school parking lot, the air thick with smoke, Benny and the Jets or Walk on the Wild Side or Life on Mars blasting from the stereo. I did the bare minimum necessary to keep my grades acceptable. My life was in that parking lot and my family was the handful of kindred spirits who for their own reasons were also seeking oblivion.

I only saw the downside in retrospect. It didn’t occur to me at the time that developing a reputation for being one of a handful of kids who were constantly wasted might not be helpful in alleviating the sense of alienation I’d felt since infancy. And of course, I had no clue that I was pressing the pause button on my emotional development, trapping it in the amber of my fifteen-year-old brain for at least a decade. I did wonder, when I emerged from the haze, what I might have accomplished had I not been so high so often. I was motivated by little besides my next smoke and evading detection. Despite my increasing carelessness, my parents never did catch on, which was primarily a relief but also a puzzle.

Senior year of high school, I emerged from the cloud a bit. My stoner friends had graduated, and I was working half-days at the family business. My closest friend those days was a revelation: she indulged occasionally for fun rather than constantly for anger management or self-medication. Over time, I learned to do the same (I thought), and this is the version of me that arrived at the college I’d put next to zero thought and effort into selecting (because another side effect of oblivion, which in my case persisted for decades, is that planning falls by the wayside).

That first year I reveled in being away from home and participated in my share of typical freshman foolishness (saved more than once, I later realized, from potentially disastrous consequences by my otherwise ill-advised, path-of-least-resistance choice of a single sex school). The following year, I spent my first semester in Italy (the fulfillment of a childhood dream), where harsh drug laws meant we celebrated with alcohol only. When I returned to school stateside, I found I’d been betrayed by my roommate; I was both literally and figuratively locked out and on my own. I was also suffering from reverse culture shock and grief at leaving Italy and the friends I’d made there.

Reverting to the same solution I’d devised at fifteen seemed a no-brainer. It had worked before, and I saw no reason why it wouldn’t again: I wasted no time in buying an ounce and disappearing into the haze. While I never had much trouble finding someone to keep me company, I was the common denominator. I was the one who couldn’t seem to find a reason to stop, even when a couple of years later I had to admit it might be advisable.

After graduation, living on my own and working, I once again became much more measured in my consumption. When I joined the Navy a few years later, I never gave weed another thought. Which had far less to do with any epiphany than with the threat of immediate discharge and prosecution. Just like that, I was over it.

But by then I’d developed the habit of meeting any discomfort, however minor or temporary, with a quest for oblivion. Alcohol, much more socially acceptable, was a favorite, but sex would do, or food, or in a pinch, sleep. I just kept digging those same neural pathways until I had a trench. A trench that I fell (sometimes dove) into repeatedly for the next thirty years.

Climbing out of the trench hasn’t been easy. Facing the truth about my childhood while choosing a different path than I did at fifteen was a start. Examining the wreckage of the decades that followed was the next step. It was excruciating work; the grief and pain were overwhelming at times. Which made the idea of oblivion more attractive than ever.

Life being what it is, some days the abyss still beckons. That’s when I strive to remind myself that, with the exception of death, oblivion is only temporary; that shit sandwich is still going to be sitting on your plate when you return. So I’m doing my best to live in the present, to practice calm acceptance, and to carefully back away from the edge.