In Defense of the Addict

There’s this moment in a documentary about Amy Winehouse. She’s just won a Grammy, surrounded by family and friends on a stage in London. She celebrates, hugs and smiles, and leans into the ear of her childhood friend to mutter, “Jules, this is so boring without drugs.”

Her pain is clear. It is poignant and raw and real. And even more so when she overdosed at 27.  

She’s not a fallen star or turned into a shooting star or whatever other floaty euphemism people would like to use to describe her body giving out over heroin and liquor. In that moment, in that and all the other moments of intoxication and public breakdowns, she is no longer her talent and brilliance and everything else that makes up a person. She is another human in need and in pain.  

But that isn’t pretty or fun or entertaining, so we turn into a story, one that becomes digestible and casual and twistedly admired. There’s this fantasy we buy into, the good dying young, living too hard, the beautiful tortured souls lost in a world for which they are not made. The far less romantic truth tells of an addict and of their demise. 

It’s an uncomfortable image, someone dying assumingly by their own will, conceivably over something they did, they control. We see it more closely on street corners, in the eyes stumbling out of a bar or the arms holding a cardboard sign, and it’s easy to turn away, for not all our legs are held down by the grip of invisible hands. Taking the artist in anguish or the homeless drunk at face value seem to be the easiest for us to hold, to take as acceptable without considering the existence of another problem. It stands as impersonal as we make it. And our dysfunctional acceptance becomes an inadvertent praise.

The glamorized idolization of the Cobains and Hoffmans and Ledgers may really not be different than ignoring the bum on the curb. Or your neighbor or cousin or friend or teacher or guy at the party or girl next to you at the grocery store. We separate one from the other, qualifying experience and struggle through status and stigma.

People laughed at her. They said she was a mess and took pictures and turned her crisis into a headline instead of something like hope or help. And she was a mess and was lost, her and all the other addicts, though mess does not substantiate abandonment or scrutiny. Mess means human, and people need other people. But not like that. 

In defense of the addict, I implore you: Do not look away. Do not throw aside your own addictions, rendering them distant and detached because they don’t come in a syringe or a bottle. Note what they feel like, and do not disassociate the bonding humanity accompanying them.

Do not forget that there is nothing inspiring or edgy or productive about an artist dying from addiction, in the same way that there isn’t when the kid from your high school or that friend of a friend does. All the other addicts, famous or not, hurting publicly or privately, do not warrant the subtle distance we give them, unconsciously protecting ourselves from the societally constructed grime laying on their hands. Be aware of the words used to describe the next poet or songwriter or actor who’s overdose sparks a minute of discussion followed by a memorial painted in a soft white light by broken hearts claiming genius and perfection out of a person who may have been, but who also fell victim to the cracks and left them broken.  

Perhaps it isn’t up to us to save, but rather to pay attention.

She is not forever young. She is forever gone because of something that could have been helped.