I keep thinking the place to start is rock bottom. I find it truly isn’t easy to pick out in the twisted horror story that had become my everyday life. But really it feels like trying to pinpoint one area on the floor of the ocean, an endless number of choices all fitting the criteria. The first scene that materialized around me when trying to narrow down my worst days is the bathroom in the intensive out-patient house in Boca Raton, Florida. An overpriced treatment facility for the medical-insurance endowed.
I was sitting on the toilet, fully clothed, in a private bathroom that was tucked away in the back corner of my private room there. I had the water running in the shower to provide cover noise. I hadn’t slept in what I had figured to be 6 solid nights. Judging by the time I had, on the cell phone I’d smuggled in, I had around 16 minutes before we needed to be in the big white “druggy buggy”. Also known as the giant white church van, used to drive the dozen or so of us girls checked in to partial hospitalization to our nightly outings. The alcoholics anonymous meetings.
I was on the phone with United Airlines. Leg bobbing intensely up and down with unmasked, anxiety marbled, agitation. Sweat glossing my pale but flushed forehead, looming over furrowed focused in brows. I sat listening to the droning unidentifiable melody of music that is hold. I glanced up searching for anything to distract me from the way I felt, my eyes falling on the tiny rectangular window, adjacent to the sink. I could see the corner of the screen was still bent, just enough for me to notice it didn’t fit into its track. I bent it. The night before. Diving through it head first into the side yard of the house and subsequently scrambling off down the street. There was a stranger waiting, although I suppose stranger is a strong term. We had met several hours before on Reddit. Without a second thought we drove 30 miles together, into some seedy alley in Miami where we split an Oxy for the fair price of 3 packs of Newport’s. I immediately injected my half of the pill after he had injected his - sharing not only the same barely functional needle, but also the same dirty spoon and cotton. I was then promptly dropped off on the same street corner I had been picked up from. Just as ungracefully I wedged myself back through the window with a solid 40 minutes left to spare before wake-up rounds. I breathlessly confirmed the night nurse was still snoring on the same couch I had left her on. Then I was able to have 34 minutes of real sleep. The first minutes in 7 nights and days.
“Mam are you there??! …. Mam?”
Jerked back to reality, from my day dream about how surreal what happened only hours before was, the bent screen and the bruise on my thigh from the squeeze assuring me it must have actually happened. It was no more surreal than what I was about to ask - scratch that - demand from this poor unsuspecting customer service representative who had been unlucky enough to be working for American Airlines that afternoon.
I walked out of the room triumphantly 14 minutes later, having been awarded a 527$ dollar credit, which happened to be just enough to book a ticket from Miami to Lansing, departing in 3 days.
Just under 18 months before my dive through the bathroom window I had canceled a flight for a family trip to Europe, any guess as to why I didn’t get to go? This canceled flight had been converted into a 2,000$ airline credit, which I had been whittling away at flying back and forth to and from rehab in Boca. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, American Airlines’ cancellation policy and the poor customer service agent, the airline had refunded the last 530 odd dollars back to the original credit card. This was my mother’s American Express card, which I was forced to remind them was against their own policy. An error so egregious that it had stranded me in Florida and needed to be rectified immediately.
Unfortunately several hours after my climb back through the small window I found out that even the clients who are in the inpatient portion need to provide urine samples. I would guess either A, they could charge the insurance companies exorbitant rates, so why not? Or perhaps I wasn’t the first client to swan dive out of one of the windows. Likely both. It didn’t matter either way, this was not going to go well for me.
After getting into an argument about the fact that even in-patient client’s needed to give urine samples I found myself rolling my wheeled suitcases down the tropical neighborhood’s crumbling blacktop. The quality of their roads reminded me of home and made me miss Michigan even more. I then spent 3 days in the resort town’s grotesque underbelly. The treatment center had refused to give me back my driver’s license, with the hope that I would be forced to eventually head back into their detox so they could creatively bill my insurance once again.
Several years later “Treatment Alternatives” would be shut down and the owners jailed for actually supplying drugs to kids who relapsed as long as they checked back into their program. They were actually running some sort of twisted addict mill. I see why a failed drug test would have been a great thing for them.
The fact that they refused to return my identification still did not stop me. When I showed up, a sickly mess, several days later at Miami International airport I was on a mission. The airport was all but deserted. It was 5 am, my flight left around 8, and I was absolutely going to get on that flight. I quickly made friends with a young man at the check in counter and explained to him my unfortunate situation. I gave him the PG version, minus the drugs. In less than 2 hours I was sitting comfortably in pre boarding waiting for the plane to be ready. Apparently they were given discretion to use Facebook accounts as an official form of identification in a pinch.
I consider this one version of rock bottom because I found myself, as I so often did, as a powerless prisoner. My very best traits used against me for evil, I was hijacked and carried along on a mission of destruction that I genuinely wanted no part of. I knew all that was waiting for me back home was more sickness, despair and torment. The shame I felt as my family tried desperately to reach me those few days, with hopes of convincing me to go back to detox were barely calmed even with the warm rush of oblivion that I found mere minutes after arriving at the Capitol city’s tiny airport. The pleading moans and weak gasps coming from the girl gagged in closet of my mind were barely a whimper at this point. What I knew absolutely to be rock bottom that night was only a bump on the way down. I remember crying hysterically that night after finally getting my fix, I wasn’t happy, although my body had stopped throbbing, the cold sweat was subdued and the soul ringing anxiety, while not gone, had been temporarily thrust on the other side of a thick divide. I cried a guttural, gasping moaning, shriek speckled cry, because I still didn’t have the only things I wanted. What I knew I would never have again, but I still hungered for was nothing more than to just sit still for 5 minutes, to hug my mother or to have just one full night of natural sleep. Things most people take for granted I would have quickly given a limb for in that moment.
I hated myself even more than I thought possible that night. My creativity, something I was sure would make me an asset was now solely under the direction of the acquisitions department. Critical thinking skills, something that is freakishly rare in this day and age now married to my interpersonal skills creating their own department that specialized in understanding the motives and weaknesses of everyone within my proximity so I was best equipped to get whatever it was I needed. All while expending the minimum amount of energy. I was a full fledged corporation with a mission statement that would have sounded something like: I am here to best use you as a means to my own end.
This wasn’t even close to rock bottom. This was a fair day in retrospect.