The Strength of our Faults: Some Thoughts on Relapse, Recovery, and Demi Lovato
I haven’t written one of these editorials in a while. Part of it is due to a lack of new/creative/coherent thought. Another part of me (that big unspeaking part that keeps me up at night) felt that I could no longer sit here and write all these lofty words about the recovery process having not lived up to it. It was the experience of imposter syndrome that I had battled throughout graduate school all over again and the subsequent fear that I would be found out and exposed. Then, just the other day, I read that Demi Lovato had overdosed and was administered Narcan in order to stabilize her. My heart immediately went out. I had not followed her so much, but I knew that she was outspoken about her battles with bipolar disorder (ditto) and struggles with addiction (ditto again). I could suddenly relate to the questions of self-worth at my own relapse and realized that she was still no less an advocate for mental health because of hers.
I felt like Nicole Kidman at the closing scene of the movie Dogville where she, as the character Grace, argues with her father over them mutually seeing each other as arrogant, at which point the father says to her: “You, my dear child, you forgive others with excuses that you would never in the world permit yourself.” I had always before followed the father’s line of reasoning that “the penalty that you deserve for your transgression, they deserve for their transgressions… Does every human being deserve to be accountable for their actions? But you don’t even give them that chance! And that is extremely arrogant!” Grace (and I) took this as meaning she needed to be as hard on others as she was on herself. But what if, just maybe, the solution is that we need to be kinder to ourselves?
They say that knowledge is power, but it is also pain. This to me is where the truth to what they now popularly call an “empath” is about. To me it is not so much our ability to tap into another’s feelings in some sort of psychic way but that through a compassionate understanding of another person’s position we can legitimately feel it for ourselves. For many situations this of course takes some imagination, but it is not at all impossible. If such relations were completely impossible so too would be any kind of communication at all, at which point reading this article becomes simply masturbation for me and at best voyeurism for you. Besides, why the hell else do any of us listen to music anyway? But the trouble with empathy is that having it doesn’t make life any less painful or easier. In fact, it is the very pain itself that is the condition of being able to come to the understanding in the first place.
There is strength in our faults. But the popular adage that we get stronger by failing by somehow rising above them and having “learnt a lesson” from the experience seems misguided to me. It seems to aim towards a conception of “perfection” where our goal is to reach some ideal of human experience. If anything, however, human experience has taught me that there is no “ideal for living.” That even when we are able-bodied, neuro-typical, and meet the checklist of socially acceptable desires and ambitions there is still something left over. Not that I am trying to say that we need be indulgent with our lesser natures, but simply ignoring them doesn’t seem to work, either. It’s easy to call mental “illness” or addiction a fault, but in so doing we don’t get rid of them.
Lovato’s song “Sober” makes plain the struggle. In it she sings most poignantly, “To the ones who never left me/ We’ve been down this road before/ I’m so sorry, I’m not sober anymore.” There is so much strength in that statement, though. In the U.S. we have a tendency to make a fetish out of happiness. For fuck’s sake, it’s in our Declaration of Independence (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”). Not only that, but it is framed as something that we don’t yet have, something requiring a pursuit, such that we are constantly striving to get there. On the one hand it is a virtue to strive to continue to make the conditions of life better, but if the intention is to become other than what we already are then we are only ever going to miss out on ourselves.
If my obsession with various arts has taught me anything about life, it is that there aren’t any answers to either. Just as there are many ways to create there is also no one way to be. And just as some creations are sadder or happier or whatever, it doesn’t make them any better or worse for it. Knowing that isn’t going to make things any easier, but it may strengthen the capacity to bear it, which, in my opinion, is what redeems our faults. For it is not in ridding ourselves of them that we find strength but through making something of them that we become whole. Maybe what we need is to be a little less hard on ourselves for the sake of others, in which case happiness may not be so long of a pursuit. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the words from Dan Deacon’s “When I Was Done Dying” to meditate on:
“And the earth looked at me and said ‘Wasn’t that fun?’
And I replied ‘I’m sorry if I hurt anyone’
And without even thinking cast me into space
But before she did that she wiped off my own face
She said better luck next time don’t worry so much
Without ears I couldn’t hear I could just feel the touch
As I fell asleep softly at the edge of a cave
But I should have gone deeper but I’m not so brave”