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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Three
Spring 2004
Momentary Expression through Addiction - Page 2
by Sarah Pacella
The phenomenon of needing to fulfill multiple roles is seen in the case of many drug addicts, according to a survey done by Tom Decorte in the International Journal of Drug Policy. “Controlled users have a multiplicity of meaningful roles, which give them a positive identity and a stake in conventional daily life, and both these factors anchor them against drifting toward a drug-centered life”(Decorte 101). In contrast, the uncontrolled user or the addict, who does not have a multiplicity of meaningful roles, lives a life that is completely controlled by the drug. People who use drugs for recreation have the “multiplicity of guarantees” Smith describes, and these positive meaningful roles help to prevent someone who is a drug user from having a drug-centered life because they have a “positive identity.” This notion of the controlled user avoiding addiction is not the case with Elizabeth Wurtzel: her “multiplicity of meaningful roles” did not “anchor” her against “drifting toward a drug centered life.” She becomes an addict despite her roles, or possibly because of the pressures caused by them. The drugs help her forget about her need to be performing and they give her the ability to cope with her life roles by not caring about them. She secludes herself from her friends and family because of the drugs and therefore loses her “stake in daily conventional life.” The drug is what defines her self because she will do anything in order to get the drug and she no longer cares how society views her unconventional behavior. Wurtzel does drugs in order to stop feeling the constant need to be performative, but in the end it causes her to be more performative. Throughout the autobiography, she makes many references to her need for drugs, and how she had to perform as though she wanted to speak to a friend when in reality she simply wanted to get drugs from him.
Max seems to want me to go through the motions of acting like I care. Yuck. I’m too tired and jonesing to manage it. I’ve been antisocial for so long that I don’t know how to talk to my friends anymore. I try to make conversation like I’ve been missing him for the last few months, like I’ve been meaning to pick up the phone for a while now. (44)
Wurtzel describes how she has to perform in order to get her drugs, to pretend that she cares in order to get cocaine, but since she has not really been missing Max she is being very performative in her addicted self.
The roles performed by a person are a result of the external norms of the society; they are roles attached to a person of a specific gender, race, or sexual categorization. These norms are impressed upon a person from a very early age: “your programming happens early, and correcting bad input is almost impossible after a certain point. . . Who can say if therapy, even with all the good medications, will ever be enough?” (Wurtzel 220). Obviously, Wurtzel was greatly affected by her cultural surroundings and the daily life she experienced as a child. She believes that if something is constantly impressed upon you as a child, “bad input” in her words, then it is possible that this may never be corrected ¾ in fact, it is “almost impossible.” The input, bad or good, is what helps to create a person’s self in that it causes reactions to social expectations. In Wurtzel’s case, it was instilled in her that being alone is a form of rejection, and it is this that she is constantly struggling with throughout the autobiography. Robert Jay Lifton also believes that society has a great impact on an individual, and his concept of the “protean self” provides a complicated sort of solution for the addict self that Wurtzel has become.
The protean self is necessary for a person who is attempting to overcome addiction because by definition “idea systems can be embraced, modified, let go, and re-embraced, all with new ease that stand in sharp contrast to the inner struggle people in the past endured with social shifts”(Lifton 6). A person can easily embrace a certain idea one day and modify it the next, and then completely reject the same idea at some other time. For Wurtzel this is a very important concept of the self to consider because in order for her to recover from her addiction, she needs to let go of the thought that drugs are helping her and to embrace a new life without drugs. There is a problem with the necessity of the protean self, however, because although it allows Wurtzel to overcome her addiction, it also leaves room for her to relapse. Once she lets go of her addiction, there will always be a chance that she may re-embrace her old habits, which she eventually does: “I had reverted completely back to type. Congratulations, Miss Wurtzel: you are the same as ever. Your resilience, your ability to bounce back to your old habits, is admirable. You are to be commended for your stubborn desire to stay the same. Your uniqueness has made you a common idiot” (Wurtzel 245). The ability to re-embrace ideas, provided by her protean self, enabled her to “bounce back” to her addiction.
The drugs originally allowed Wurtzel to become less self-judgmental, so she took more of them in order to maximize her happiness. Gary Becker defines this consumption as the “maximization of utility”: according to the psychology of the addict, if a small amount of a drug leads to happiness, the maximization of that drug will lead to ecstasy. He defines the utility maximization further by separating it into two parts: “1) reinforcement in which ‘greater current consumption of a good raises its future consumption’ and 2) tolerance in which ‘given levels of consumption are less satisfying when past consumption has been greater’”(Becker 682). The reinforcement of the happiness caused by the original consumption of the drug leading to more use is the first step in the process of addiction. The original consumption of the drug will, in time, lose its effect because the body will gain tolerance to it. Therefore, the drug abuser will find herself consuming even larger quantities to gain the same effect from the drug.
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