Inside Addiction: Part 3 | Ambivalence

What a psychic, a sound bowl, and Sylvia Plath taught me about indecision and self-deception.

When I was at a crossroads in addiction, I'd been presented with this window of opportunity to get out. I had all the support I needed to make the changes, but I wasn’t really that interested. So I went to a psychic to see if she would let me off the hook.

I arrived, and the first thing she said to me was, “You’ve got one foot in, one foot out.”
I tried to tell her I thought I was too sensitive, too special, to live in this world without drugs, and she called me a procrastinator. I told her I was actually a ‘doer’, and she said, Yes, but not when it comes to making real change.

I’d never been to a psychic before, and I was not expecting to get roasted by this woman in her lounge, decorated with spiritual instruments and inspirational quotes. But what she said to me about having one foot in and one foot out could not have been more accurate.

The Oracle and Smiths: me bringing my selves to the psychic.

I sort of wanted to try, because there were things I didn’t want to lose (relationships, mainly), but I also didn’t want to fail—and have to face that maybe it wasn’t a disease ruining my life, but actually just me. I also knew it was going to be very hard, and involve a lot of sacrifice of things I believed defined my worth: being able to contribute economically to society, achieving highly in things I deemed worthy (work, study, being thin). So I had been in this grey area of self-hatred, shame, and guilt for many years. Part of me wanted to try, but the other, more dominant part was afraid to try and fail. Basically, I was just lying in my bed, assessing all the different paths I could take, but not fully committing to any of them.

Book cover image from Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation

This whole scenario reminds me of the scene in The Bell Jar where Sylvia describes the main character lying in the ‘crotch’ of a fig tree, hesitating to pick one out of fear of choosing the wrong fig—so she watches them rot before her eyes:

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor... and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

I think what I’d been trying to do was sneak a bite from each fig to see which one tasted the best. I wanted the relationship, but couldn’t stop lying. I wanted the career, but preferred to spend my afternoons unconscious. I wanted health, but didn’t want the pain of withdrawal. So I tricked myself into thinking I didn’t really care about anything enough to give it my all. I’ll keep treading water and hope for the best, i.e. it will sort itself out eventually.

Image from Pinterest

I confused ambivalence with protection. If I didn’t commit to something—if I didn’t truly let myself care—then I couldn’t fail or be rejected. But this belief kept me in a holding pen. A very lonely, harsh holding pen. I blocked out everything I thought could hurt me without realising that all I desperately wanted was to be known.

At the end of my session with the psychic, after I’d sat there in silence for a while, she asked if I wanted a sound bowl experience. I said yes, so we went to a spare bedroom in her house where we sat across from each other and she started to play the bowls (I don’t know how else to describe what she was doing).
I hated the sound.

Practitioners might say “It’s working on a blocked frequency,” that the different notes or tones correspond to specific chakras, organs, or emotional patterns.
They might say, “The sound is resonating with an area where there’s resistance or stagnation — that discomfort is a sign the frequency is activating something that needs attention.”
I think the bowls were actually poorly tuned, or the acoustics were wrong for my ears.

Image from Pinterest

But what she said to me that day had a profound effect on the course I chose to take next—the fig I selected. It didn’t happen immediately; I still needed to see the chaos of addiction right through to the end, where my choices were then taken away from me. But that unveiling of a trait and belief in ambivalence has stuck with me to this day.

Lately, I’ve put myself out there in many different ways. I’ve told people how I feel about them—and been rejected. I’ve been open about what I want to do for work and how I want to help people. I’ve spoken very openly about this disease that carries huge stigma.
I’ve decided that mystery is overrated. Letting things remain unsaid is more painful than laying it all out. And wow, I feel liberated.

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In the next Trainwrecks edition, I’ll be writing about When Recovery Threatens Your Identity — navigating Who am I without the chaos? and building back a sense of self. This is a paid subscriber feature.

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