The Myth of Normal 179

In light of these testimonials, how much more absurd Jeff Sessions’s insistence on “better choices” sounds. Shall we do Nancy Reagan one better by erecting more truthful highway billboards and school cafeteria signs: “Just Say No to Pain Relief”? Or “Just Say No to a Warm, Nurturing Feeling in the Belly”? To inner peace; to calmness, empowerment, a sense of self-worth; to community and friendship; to unfettered self-expression; to an elusive sense of comfortable normality; and to love? “I did notice,” Navarro told me, “that whenever I started using substances again, I got a sense of what a human being is supposed to feel like.” Try saying no to that. When it comes down to it, all addiction’s incentives can be summed up as an escape from the confines of the self, by which I mean the mundane, livedin experience of being uncomfortable and isolated in one’s own skin. Underneath however many surface layers of “normal” functioning, that alienated discomfort can be disturbing to the point of torment: a persistent sense of being abnormal, unworthy, and deficient. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, perhaps the world’s best-known former heroin addict, crystallizes this escape strategy in his autobiography, Life: “It was a search for oblivion, I suppose . . . the convolutions you go through just not to be you for a few hours.”[7] Why would the self need to be escaped? We long for escape when we are imprisoned, when we are suffering. Addiction calls to us when waking life amounts to being trapped in inner turmoil, doubt, loss of meaning, isolation, unworthiness; feeling cold in our belly, devoid of hope; lacking faith in the possibility of liberation, missing succor; unable to endure external challenges or the inner chaos or emptiness; incapable of regulating our distressing mind conditions, finding our emotions unendurable; and most of all, desperate to soothe the pain all these states represent. Pain, then, is the central theme. No wonder people so often speak about the benign numbing effect of their addictions: only a person in pain craves anesthesia. As a quest for self-escape, the internal logic of addiction is inescapable. Where I am is intolerable. Get me out of here. Here we arrive at the second cornerstone query regarding addiction, one that has become something of a mantra with me: Ask not why the addiction,