David Foster Wallace on What You Learn in Addiction Treatment
"That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels."
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Do you know Infinite Jest — the brilliant, sprawling, and maddening novel by David Foster Wallace?
Weighing in at over 1,000 printed pages (after editing), this book is about…well, almost everything: Tennis. Football. Nuclear war. Mass media. Mental illness. And much more.
It’s also about addiction treatment. Wallace writes about it with sardonic humor, great feeling, and a knowledge of Twelve Step fellowships that could only come from direct contact.
There’s a long, juicy section where Wallace lists the lessons offered by addiction treatment. I’ll quote rather than summarize, because these are just too good:
…that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.
That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.
That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/ Her/ It before He/ She/ It will help you.
That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/ her/ it.
That loneliness is not a function of solitude.
That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.
That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while.
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.
That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.
That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis.
That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them…. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.
That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
That you don’t have to hit somebody even if you really really want to.
That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.
That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.
That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.
That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.
That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.