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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 3
by Sarah Pacella
The drugs failed to make Wurtzel forget about the external expectations of society, and they did not give her the ability to be self-expressive even when she was alone. As Wurtzel begins to realize that her drug-use has become an addiction, she decides to check into a drug rehabilitation center. After being clean in rehab for four months, Wurtzel is eager to prove to everyone that she is finally normal:
but I am so dying to be a normal girl. I want it so badly that I am going to sabotage this opportunity. I want so much to get out into the world to prove that I can get out into the world. . . I want so much to test my ability to have romance that I will try it out before I am ready. I want to take what I know and use it. ( 220).
Since Wurtzel believed before her addiction that she had failed her expected life roles, she turned to the drugs in order to resist the performative nature of life. However, even while she is on drugs she finds that she cannot escape her desire to be normal and therefore she was even performative in her drug use. She constantly felt as though she had to prove to the world that she was good enough. While in rehab she feels the same way, that she has to “prove that [she] can get out into the world” in order to show everyone that she can recover and regain her “stake in daily conventional life.” Wurtzel’s certainty that she can get back into the world and maintain her newly gained resistance to drugs represents a newly formed momentary self. This self is different from any other self that she has shown throughout the rest of the autobiography because, although she knows she may relapse back into her addiction, she is motivated at this point to get back to her daily performative roles and reacquaint herself with normal life.
This particular momentary self is protean in nature because, according to Lifton, the protean self “makes use of bits and pieces here and there and somehow keeps going . . . We find ourselves evolving a self of many possibilities, one that has risks and pitfalls but at the same time holds out considerable promise for the human future”(Lifton 1-2). While in the rehabilitation center, Wurtzel “makes use of bits and pieces” of what she learns at the center and feels as though it is enough make her capable of returning to her performative roles without relapsing back into her addiction. She does evolve “a self of many possibilities” because, although there is a good chance that she will once again return to her addiction, there is also a chance that rehab was enough to keep her away from drug abuse. Returning to her addiction is the risk that Wurtzel is willing to take to return to a life that is more normative. She does eventually relapse back to her drug abuse but she still has the hope that, through proteanism, she will someday be able to completely rid herself of this habit.
According to Luis Botella, it is human nature “to interpret experience, seeking purpose and significance in the events that surround us”(Botella 57). People experience events and are always interpreting what has happened in order to gain some piece of information that leads to their own self-awareness: events tell them and society something about their character. By Wurtzel’s ability to “prove that [she] can get out into the world” she believes that she is proving to society that she is a “normal girl.” She believes that if her recovery has been a success and she can easily go back into society and function in multiple meaningful life roles, and that it will have a great significance and keep her from relapsing into her addiction. She also believes that people will interpret her rehabilitation period as successful and that consequently she will have the approval she so desperately seeks. What she does not realize, however, is that she still will not be able to be satisfied with herself when she is alone because she continues to look for approval from external sources rather than internal ones. All of her momentary selves respond to society and its expectations, but once she learns to be less performative within herself, she will be able to have more self-expressive moments in her life, and create more self-expressive momentary selves. This is something that is very difficult for Wurtzel to achieve, though, because she always worries about her normative self.
The solution proteanism provides for the addict self can also be applied as a solution to Smith’s belief that performativity is inescapable and to Wurtzel’s own inability to escape it. The idea of performativity is based on the idea that social norms are a strict set of expectations impressed upon a person according to race, gender, age, and so forth. Since proteanism allows for idea systems to be embraced with new ease, it also allows a society of people to have a belief about a performative expectation and to change it into something completely different with this same ease, in complete contrast to the idea that social norms are permanent and therefore the sole influential force of self-formation. If idea systems can change so easily from one person to another, there can be no standard expectation of any performative role. Therefore, if everyone acted in accordance with Lifton’s concept of the protean self, there would no longer be a normative self within any culture because everyone accept fluidity and change in other people. Although the protean self is very effective in solving many problems within the self, there is the one major problem facing a drug addict’s protean self: it leaves no room for permanence of recovery because one of the main aspects of this self is the ability to be open to constant change and fluidity; therefore, it is not always a positive thing for someone who is trying to recover from a drug addiction. However, the protean self does assume that the self is resilient and capable of taking bits and pieces of life’s unpredictability and leaving other aspects behind. From undergoing rehabilitation, Wurtzel sees that she is capable of being happy without drugs, takes the lessons that she has learned from relapsing into her drug self, and is persistent in her attempts to get clean. The lack of permanence of the protean self is the reason why Wurtzel questions the solidity of her rehabilitation ¾ ”Who can say if therapy, even with all the good medications, will ever be enough?” It is impossible to determine whether or not a person will ever remain drug-free due to the constant modifications of ideas within the protean self.
The protean changing of selves can be described by the notion of momentary selves: a person’s self at any given moment can be immediately changed to a new self in the next moment. These selves are often reflections of a general display of selves presented by many people in society; however, once one person has a group of these selves within him, they become unique to that person. Although most times, the self of any given person seems to be the same self presented in many other people, there are particular moments when one can be seen as a unique, autonomous self. These moments, when a person is being completely self-governing and not reacting in accordance to a social expectation, occur most often when a person is alone. This is a time when people have no one to perform for; therefore, they can do whatever their interior self tells them to do without outside judgment. Often, however, the norms that are said to be products of society are impressed so deeply on people that they perceive themselves in situations according to these norms. People worry about how others would react if they were to perform an action in public that they would have no inhibitions about doing while alone. When someone cannot handle being alone with herself without worrying about external judgments, she cannot be self-expressive. Internalized social norms forced Elizabeth Wurtzel to have a great deal of self-disapproval, which, in essence, led her to addiction:
But me, I can’t handle the twenty minutes it takes for someone who I know likes me to call back. I am so fucking empty . . . So I date more than one person at once so that the fear of it not working with one is mitigated by the fear that it won’t work with another and so on, and I do drugs to mitigate the fear of the whole thing. I do cocaine to get through the twenty minutes of waiting for a returned call. If I don’t, I cry like a baby until it rings. I’m ridiculous. This is how you become an addict. You have no inner resources. (58)
In her relationships, Wurtzel constantly fears rejection from people who obviously love her. She gets hysterical every time she is alone if she is not on drugs because she believes that people do not want to be around her and therefore that they are rejecting her. She is incapable of self-expression because of her conditioning to social pressures; she has no “inner resources.”