{"id":1397,"date":"2012-02-12T09:01:55","date_gmt":"2012-02-12T14:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2012-02-12T12:46:28","modified_gmt":"2012-02-12T17:46:28","slug":"my-hubris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/?p=1397","title":{"rendered":"My Hubris"},"content":{"rendered":"

The roads are empty this morning as I drive to pick Molly up from a sleep-over so she can be at her weekend job by 7 am. I am thinking about what to write. The moon.\"\"<\/a> No longer quite full, it hangs over the tree-line. Magical how the moon’s visibility is determined with reassuring predictability by the sun. Car heat cranked up against the cold, I sit in the friend’s drive and wait for my daughter to appear. Amidst messy winter bramble next to my car I can see a patch of green and white: snowdrops. A sweet harbinger of spring. I know where to find some near my house – I can get my camera and post them later – and write more about the end of winter.<\/p>\n

But none of this clicks into inspiration this morning and I recognize that I am searching for something, anything to move me away from the subject I’ve been thinking about since finishing Bill Clegg’s <\/a>Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0Then, this morning I see the news that Whitney Houston<\/a> is dead at 48, the same age N was when addiction won the battle.<\/p>\n

I lived for years looking for distractions from the truth. Anything to avoid dealing with the reality of living with an addict. Hating myself, I welcomed the well-spun lies and chose to believe the crazy excuses for strange and bad behavior. Believing his promises, and making and breaking my own. Believing it was just a matter of time before he realized there was too much to lose, sure he would decide he loved us enough to quit. \u00a0Even as he shrank into a shell of a man, as his once hazel eyes turned empty – his soul swallowed into blackness, even then – an ember of hope remained that he would find an exit out of his drug-maze, back to us. Even when I’d had enough and finally was ending the marriage, I imagined his recovery as possible.<\/p>\n

In the pages of Bill Clegg’s addiction memoir\u00a0I glimpsed N. As I read, it was N I visualized living for his next hit, scoping out a bathroom to get high in. It was N I read about – a view of his secrets, of what he was up to, what he was thinking through all those missed appointments and lost jobs. In reading Clegg’s story, I stepped out of my own story of despair of living with an addict, into N’s world – the story of being the addict. This dark world, insane existence he lived while just beside me. And me a fool, so sure I held the light that could lead him away from his demons. What hubris in thinking there was anything I could do against such an enemy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The roads are empty this morning as I drive to pick Molly up from a sleep-over so she can be at her weekend job by 7 am. I am thinking about what to write. The moon. No longer quite full, it hangs over the tree-line. Magical how the moon’s visibility is determined with reassuring predictability … Continue reading My Hubris<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,19,7],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-living-with-addiction","tag-time","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pPzTS-mx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1413,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions\/1413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}