The Ego

At one point in the summer of 2012, I found myself lying on an old, torn up green couch in the living room of my friend’s shadowy apartment. Six or seven people I knew meandered about the room, dragging their feet as slow as their words and having conversations and arguments about absolutely nothing. Lying there, half of my face buried in the warmish cushion I remember moving my eyes toward a heavy curtain hung in front of a sliding glass door that led to a small patio, and staring at a pin hole that let a perfect streak of sunlight pierce itself on to the carpet. As I watched a small brown spider walk through the beam and then slowly disappear, I couldn’t help but relate to him in a way; Walking in circles, maybe never having known that there exists a far bigger world not a few feet away from him, yet remaining either too weak to truly attempt an escape or too fearful of the warmth of the sun, we both remained meekly incarcerated.

I started to figure out that I might have been overdosing when I heard someone’s voice over my left ear ask me how much I took, and my attempted response (that would have been “of which?”) actually sounded more like I swallowed my own tongue and couldn’t pronounce anything but long, slow vowel noises. I had always been convinced that my ego would come to be the cause of my own destruction, but it was looking increasingly now like it would end up being the heroin, cocaine, alcohol and Xanax combination that would really bring it about…and on this filthy couch, too. I remember thinking that if I could only regain my ability to speak actual words, that I would ask for someone to open that damn curtain… I might have been able to get a view of the sunset that way. What a waste.

Before I started drifting off into what I can now only explain as “a complete and absolute nothingness,” one of my last thoughts became noticeably clear to me. It was that in the 20 years that I had been here on this earth, I really hadn’t mastered anything as well as my ability to understand that I possessed not only an impressive tenacity in my stubbornness, but an incredible volumetric capacity for discomfort… I truly had perfected the portrayal of dismissiveness in all ways worth helping myself, and I suppose whatever little bit of ego I still had left bouncing around in there was still alive enough to justify to myself that that might still be something to be proud of.

The very last thought that I had as I sunk deeper in to that couch was that someone would take me to a hospital, but in a room that was filled with people either tripping on acid or tying off in distant corners I’ll admit that the ‘better halves’ of some of them might have slipped a little too far away for me to be able to be truly confident in that regard. Even the person (who now I’m not so sure even existed) who asked me how much I took had, themselves already lost interest and was nowhere to be seen.

It was then that my vision began to blur and pulsate until it went away entirely, though I could feel that my eyes were still open. The sounds of the room and the arguments around me slowly turned themselves down like the volume on a television, and the strange tingling sensation that I was feeling in my legs began to walk itself up the rest of my body, until it met somewhere in between my throat and the top of my head - It all just shut off.

I woke up on that couch 43 hours later, alone.

As if life clinging to me after having spent almost two days unconscious wasn’t something miraculous, I left that apartment not thinking about it and wandered off into the world again, only stopping once on my way out the door to wonder who might have stolen my shoes.

I was back at that apartment later that same evening, with those same people, doing the same thing. Ask me why today and I couldn’t tell you. I suppose that’s just the mentality of someone hopelessly addicted to the drugs, the lifestyle or both… but there I was again on that couch as if nothing had ever happened. Whether that still drawn curtain had just folded itself from the breeze a little differently or it was never there to begin with, that pinhole never found the sunlight again. As I quickly picked my head up off the coffee table and unrolled a one-dollar bill, I was left to wonder about whether or not that little brown spider found his way out during those two days I was asleep, or if he was still somewhere crawling around with the rest of us.

I somehow managed to stay alive long enough to repeat this process for another three years, until the only thing that could have come about in my life that was capable of changing it finally did.

All I could think when she told me she was pregnant was “why me.” Of all the people in this world why am I the one who had to be burdened with such sudden responsibility? Whatever ego I had left in me fought furiously against a newfound sense of guilt that I wasn’t prepared for, and I found my resentment for everything grow ten times over within a single moment. Every horrible decision that I had ever made that led me to be the young man that I had become now presented their truest and most repulsive nature to me. It was as if the walls that I had managed to build and fortify in order to justify my actions throughout all of these years had instantaneously become transparent, and I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of more; that I could see through them, or that they were now made of glass. I imagined the face of my future child looking up at me, and me telling him or her that I don’t want to be all they have, that I don’t accept the responsibility, that I don’t even know if I’m capable of love at all.

I was smart enough to know that the small window of opportunity for the only real and good change possible within myself and for my future child would shut entirely and forever if I had chosen not to face this new reality, but I will admit that that’s exactly what I did. I pushed it all away, I pretended as if it wasn’t happening, as if it were just a bad dream. I shut that window and abandoned it all. I dug in deeper and fueled my addiction with a newfound blinding rage, directing itself outwards at anything that dare threaten the last little thread of my ego, the fragile little thread that I silently promised myself no one would ever see. My walls were now made of glass, and so I surrounded those walls with a circle of fire, as the anger and distain for the reality I refused to accept may prove to harden the vulnerability within myself and all the while let everyone else know from a far greater distance that they were treading in the wrong direction; stay away.

At times, it was the fact that the woman whom I had gotten pregnant stopped using the very second she found out she was pregnant that bothered me the most. Though her addiction and mine were quite different in their intensity and substance, her ability to simply walk away from that world and embrace complete and total sobriety still felt like she was walking away from me and embracing a completeness that was only possible without my presence. Though that’s exactly what I wanted, my insecurity just couldn’t handle the visualization of legitimate strength. It began to make me think that my own strength could be easier seen now for the façade that it really was. It began to make me doubt the resilience of my internal fortress, it showed the circle of fire as a clever illusion and revealed the small growing cracks in the glass of the walls it was there to protect. It made me feel more alone than I had ever felt in my life, and I had no one to blame but myself. It was my choice, and though I was still convinced that I made the right decision to push it all away, being bothered even minutely by her absence and the absence of my child-to-be was like the first small burden of proof that my real and hidden nature would later grow to make me out to be someone else entirely.

I was entirely absent for the first three months of her pregnancy. I was met with the deepest type of sadness and anger. I became a complete and total monster toward everyone and everything that came near to me, and I found myself wanting be more and more alone, all the while being saddened and enraged at how alone I really was. It made no logical sense, but when you’re using, especially in the way that I was, it doesn’t matter. All you’re left with at the end of the day is the raw emotional data. You cannot break it apart or dissect it to analyze, you can only compartmentalize it and work with it in larger less complicated forms. You can put all of your sadness or all of your anger over “here,” toward “this thing,” but that’s it. So, I just shifted these large blocks of emotion around in my head into slots that I made big and deep enough to fit any of them. I was living in some sort of binary nightmare, half dead and computing everything at its most basic level, never stopping once to restructure my train of thought as I was subconsciously convinced that I couldn’t. It was my egos last attempt at self-defense… I became so weakened by my addiction that my mind had no choice but to take itself apart and leave what took up too much processing power behind. And there, as that person I stayed, hypnotized by my own self in to believing that this woman and this child were what was ruining my life, as if I didn’t have any responsibility in it at all.

Then, during the 4th month of her pregnancy, something happened.

On a humid summer evening, like a scene out of a bad movie, I found myself sitting hunched over on a crate in an alleyway, using a magazine that I found to funnel a mixture of 11 crushed klonopin and whatever heroin I had left back into a small pill bottle. I carefully tapped it all out in to a single line and, some time later, woke up (again) not dead, just lying down in the same alley with my chin tucked in to my chest, head propped up against the brick, looking at my feet. As I slowly came back to consciousness, the first thing that I noticed was something strange standing to the right of my right foot.

A bird. It was this little black bird that stood not a few inches from my right foot, rhythmically pecking away at something lying on the ground. His feathers and feet were dirty and tattered, like he had been flying for weeks. His beak was chipped in the front, and his eyes were tired and narrowed. Admittedly, I was a little taken back by how strange it was to see a bird this close to me.

I noticed that what it was trying to eat was an already mostly eaten cheeseburger that had been crumpled back into its fast-food wrapper and from what I assumed, tossed casually out of a window some stories above me and on to the ground. The bird just stood there, not two inches from my foot pecking away at it, never once being bothered by my presence. It never took a piece of its food with its beak and flew away to find a safer spot to eat it. It would just rip off a piece and stand there eating it, then it would do it again. And again. And again.

I placed my palms on the ground and slid my feet backwards in the motion of sitting up to lean my back against the wall, as my neck was beginning to hurt, and within that (what I assume to a small bird is an enormous and loud) motion, he somehow remained blissfully uninterested. He just stood there. He ate as if I didn’t exist, as if I were a ghost, as if I wasn’t even there. I sat and watched him for what seemed like an eternity, every once in a while sliding my foot closer and then further away from him very quickly to see if he would move. Nothing. Not even a small flinch or a glance in my direction.

I sat there like that, silently amazed at this birds fearlessness until I was struck with a sudden realization that I can still only describe as having not come from my own mind but from somewhere else entirely, as if someone or something had reached down, opened up my head and planted a thought in it without my consent: “The bird cannot distinguish you, from garbage.”

This was the thought that had finally managed to shatter those glass walls, it was the thought that snuffed out that circle of fire that I spent so long tending to, the thought that finally put enough pressure on top of my crumbling internal foundation to bring it to its complete collapse. This thought cut through to the very center of my core and inhabited itself right at the heart of my emptiness. It instantaneously planted its roots and grew to its complete fullness between two heartbeats. It felt as if it had manifested itself as its own external entity. As if both of its hands were around my ears, pulling and screaming in my face with its deafening roar of reality, it also somehow managed to convey its complete and truly unconditional love for me; it balanced itself perfectly, wedging itself in to the exact subconscious spaces it knew that it needed to, and spoke to them fluently in the language that only those spaces understood and could communicate with. It gave my emptiness its voice back and allowed it to respond to the manifestations demand for answers.

For what felt like the first time in my life, I began to cry. I cried for everything… For myself, for my parents, for my future, for my past and for my unborn child. I wept harder and more furiously than I ever have or will ever again. I could feel every ounce of anger, fear and sadness that I held on to dissolving under its own weight. It had felt as if the world in its entirety was being released from within me, and as it all drained I could feel its emptying as some sort of unwarranted and necessary relief; just motioning onward for the sake of itself and continuing uninterrupted and hysterically in its own finality.

Through the magnetizing progression of an increasing tranquil calm, I walked myself to the closest rehab and checked myself in before the day was out.

Today, I have been clean for 8 years, 6 months and 4 days, and I still think about the bird in that alleyway. Every now and again I imagine that that bird might have been more than just the catalyst for that thought. Sometimes I imagine that it may very well have been my unborn son, flying around desperately trying to find me so that he could tell me (in the only way I would listen) that the person I was pretending to be wasn’t who I was supposed to be; telling me that he was on his way and that he needed me to be able to be there for him.

He was telling me that he wanted to be able to hold my hand when we walk through the park together and that he couldn’t wait to see what Santa would leave under the Christmas tree. He was telling me not to worry about him so much on his first day of school, that he would be perfectly fine there and that I didn’t have to cry when he got on the bus. He told me that he is going to need me there to make silly voices when we read books together, and that he’s definitely going to need me there to check for monsters under the bed. He was telling me that he was going to need me there for his first date, his first girlfriend, his first heartbreak and for the first time that he really loses faith in himself. He told me that even when he gets older, that sometimes he was still going to need me to be there to tell him that it’s all going to be okay. He asked me to forgive myself for the bad things, and told me that I still deserved to see the good in the world, and the greatness in myself.

He told me that even now, he already loves me and that he really needed me to be around so that he can show me every day that I’m also worthy of loving myself.

Dear Cooper,

You saved my life. You are now and will forever be my hero. Thank you, son.

Love always,

Papa