about before. This is a good thing. My fuck it signifies growth.
I’m happy to say I’ve become more relaxed with coughing freely in public places. I know that seems like a strange goal to have, but as I can attest, there’s a lot more peace in acceptance than resistance, especially of things we can’t change about ourselves. As long as my cough is here, I don’t think it serves me to try to deny it — not that I could.
What haven’t you surrendered to? What is it about yourself you’re unwilling to accept, or you’re afraid others won’t accept, that you’re keeping secret? Can you imagine, for a moment, how different your life would be if you stopped resisting who you are and instead embraced the fullness of you — quirks, physical “imperfections,” insecurities, and all? You get to decide how much power shame has in your life. You get to declare what you keep hidden, and what you express. Pick one thing you’re ashamed of and share it with someone — a friend, a stranger online, your hairdresser, anyone you can trust. See how much lighter you feel, instantly, when you announce your shame. The more willing you are in sharing your entire truth, the freer you become in all areas of your life. The more often you speak of your shame, the less shame you’ll have to speak of. This is a beautiful thing.
I hope one day, when my throat chakra gets balanced and my grief fully releases and Satan quits attacking me, my cough will miraculously disappear. I do believe it’s possible, and I’ll never lose hope in that reality, because (as I said earlier) it’s seriously annoying to cough all the time. Until then, I doubt I’ll ever grow to love my coughsnifflechee, but I expect I’ll continue to accept it more peacefully, without all the frustration and anger and shame I’ve felt about it for so many years. I may even become as nonchalant about my cough as my club hero was about his. One day, if I’m lucky, I may finally figure out how to be comfortably, determinedly, and gloriously shameless.
One rainy afternoon when I was ten or eleven, I grabbed my red-white-and-blue roller skates and headed to our basement to skate. I often took refuge downstairs when it was wet or cold outside, which was most of the time, in Michigan. With Donna Summer or Michael Jackson on the radio, our basement — clutter-free and gigantic to a boy my age — made for a fantastic roller disco. I’d race around in circles and spin dramatically from the many support poles, pretending to compete for a medal in the Olympics. That day, I was eager to perfect my shoot the duck, which would’ve guaranteed me a gold.
As I began my descent down the stairs, I caught the eye of my older brother, Ricky. He stood with slouched shoulders, in white briefs, shackled by his wrists and ankles to a pole in the center of our basement — the very pole I used to spin around most often while I skated. My brother stood there motionless, too skinny, beside a twin mattress on the floor next to the pole. His eyes looked dark and heavy, his face pale and gaunt. His wrists and ankles were weighted beneath metal cuffs connected to a thick chain that wrapped around the pole, giving him maybe five feet of mobility in any direction. I noticed a dirty bucket a few feet from the mattress and understood that to be his toilet. I don’t remember any foul smells, but they must have been there, blocked out by the shock of seeing my brother chained up like a wild dog. Like a prisoner. Like someone who had already tried everything else to get clean.
I’m not sure if I forgot my brother was going to be taking up residence in our basement, or if my parents had neglected to mention this fact to me. That oversight seems hard to believe but was entirely possible. My parents weren’t always the most adept parenters. I was the youngest of seven children, barely double digits in age, so any important bits of family drama I learned, I found out for myself through eavesdropping or reading between the lines. Or going downstairs to roller-skate. I’m confident I would’ve avoided the basement had I known (or even suspected) Ricky would be down there, almost naked, shitting and puking into a bucket. I wasn’t that curious a kid. Whatever the case, there I was, and there he was, and there we were. Two brothers, one horribly uncomfortable moment.
I froze on the stairs the instant I noticed Ricky. I couldn’t make sense of this incarceration, but I knew it had to do with his drug addiction. I could tell that he had agreed to this horror. He was there by his own will. When Ricky realized I was on the steps, he looked at me, stunned and ashamed, then bowed his head and diverted his eyes. We didn’t speak. What was there to say? I was confused and scared to see my brother like that. I turned around, ran back up the stairs, and closed the door hard behind me. I grasped two things in that moment: Ricky was much sicker than I had realized, and my parents would do anything they could to help him get well.
Ricky was addicted to heroin. He was eighteen years older than I, and as far as anyone knew, his addiction began before I was born or when I was still an infant. I never knew him as anything but a junkie. That was the title I gave him, even before brother. His addiction was the lens through which I viewed him. Always high, or wanting to get high, or struggling desperately to keep from getting high. A character. An actor. Pieces of a real person, I thought, but never an honest whole. Never in control. I pitied him, and I resented him. I prayed for him, and I spited him. I loved him, and I hated him — for the brother he was, and the one he refused to be.
Ricky knew he had a problem. He didn’t live in denial about his addiction, not at all. He talked openly about his inability to kick the habit. And he sought help countless times. He went to AA and NA meetings and worked with various sponsors but always went back to the needle. He checked himself into many rehabs, stayed days or weeks or months, and always went back to the needle. He even agreed to be shackled like an animal in our basement — and a second time, a couple of years later, to our parents’ bed — while he endured cold-turkey withdrawals, and still he went back to the needle. Some of these attempts at going clean weren’t effective at all, while others kept him out of the smack houses for a short time. Inevitably, though, his desire to get high overcame him and ran him vein-first back into his addiction.
As a kid I couldn’t make sense of Ricky’s addiction. I couldn’t accept his inability to control himself or the notion that he was physically incapable of doing so. Along with my anger and resentment grew disgust — with the way he spoke, always with undercurrents of shame and desperation; with the way he looked, unkempt and skinny with track marks in his arms; with the way he smelled, like chemicals and city grime, a body odor that would never wash clean. More than anything, though, I grew to hate Ricky most because of the pain he caused our family, especially my parents.
I saw my father cry only twice, both times because of my brother, because of his inability to help him. I can still see my dad, laid out on our family room couch, his head in my mom’s lap, his sobs filling our home. I wonder if he ever understood that nothing he or my mother did was responsible for Ricky’s addiction. I wonder if any parents of an addicted child can release themselves completely from the burden of that responsibility. I’ve met many parents whose children have succumbed to addiction, and every single one of them continued to wonder what they could’ve done differently and what they had done wrong. I blamed no one but my brother for his choices, and as I saw my parents become more afraid of what would happen to him, I became angrier about what was already happening to us all.
When Ricky came by for a visit — which happened with little regularity and never with any forewarning — relief, and then tension, overcame our home. Relief that he was still alive and tension over why he had come. Because he was in trouble? To ask for money? To steal from us? We hid our valuables and locked our doors. I stuffed my piggy bank in the bottom right corner of my closet and buried it beneath a messy pile of games. We never left Ricky alone, except when he went to the bathroom, and then I wondered what he was doing in there. Was he shooting up right in our home, or was there something in there for him to steal?
My brother was an astonishingly kind and loving man, but he could not be trusted. Like many consumed by addiction, his next score was the main thing on his mind, and he’d steal from anyone — even his family — to get high. I learned this over Christmas break one year, listening in on a phone call between my parents. Ricky had broken into our home the night before and stolen all my mom’s jewelry, every last piece, including the diamond watch my father