Anna Stesia

On numbing out vs. coming alive

Thanks for coming with me on a little archive dip this week, everyone. This piece is a deeper cut, circa 2014, from my ancient blog. It’s a longer read but you’ll have lots of time to get to it. The newsletter is going quiet for an untold spell after today and when we reconvene it will be in a new form.

A few years ago I had some surgery, and surgery, while it buys you pain, also buys you pain meds. There are probably some noble souls* among us who don’t exult when they find themselves in position to take heavy narcotics but I’m not one of them. A nice little prescription for some Percocet or Vicodin is the dangling carrot on the other side of whatever crappy something-or-other I’m going to have to go through to get it. 

*or chronic pain sufferers—a tip of the hat and an apology for the above to you people, all of whom I’m sure would love nothing better than to be able to get off the pain meds.

After my surgery I got to spend a few weeks in bed hopped up on Vicodin. Every time I laughed or sneezed or coughed it felt like I was getting barbecued from the inside out but, you know what, I didn’t laugh or sneeze or cough that often. The rest of the time I was sailing in a warm haze, watching Netflix and eating the entertaining snacks my husband brought in to me several times a day. 

Vicodin, unfortunately, gave me horrible, vivid, rubbery dreams. I had to stop taking it every night by 8:30 or I was doomed to wander until dawn in the grossest parts of my subconscious. I asked my doctor if he could give me an alternative and he wrote me a prescription for Tramadol.  

I took Tramadol for one day, beginning at 1:00 in the afternoon. As soon as it kicked in, holy smoke. The high was the sweetest in history; I’ve never felt anything like it before or since. I felt like I was wrapped in furs riding through heaven on a parade float. A revelation. Tramadol. Jesus bless.

You were supposed to take a dose every four to six hours. My feeling was, hey, let’s make it four. The four end of this schedule is where the party’s at. Why let this feeling fade any more than it needs to? As soon as the minute hand ticked over to 5:00 pm, I popped in Tramadol No. 2. 

I thought I was a genius until a couple of hours passed.

Here are some of the common side effects of Tramadol: 

• agitation • anxiety • constipation • cough • diarrhea • discouragement • drowsiness • feeling of warmth • feeling sad or empty • feeling unusually cold • fever • headache • heartburn • irritability • nausea •nervousness • shivering • sleepiness  • sweating • trouble concentrating • unusual feeling of excitement

Here are some of the rarer ones:  

 • change in hearing • clamminess • cold and flu-like symptoms • confusion • difficulty moving• disturbance in attention • false or unusual sense of well-being • feeling hot • feeling jittery • flushing or redness of the skin • goosebumps  • headache, severe and throbbing • hot flashes • loss of voice • muscle aching or cramping • night sweats • tightness of the chest • trouble sleeping • trouble breathing

I experienced many of the side effects listed above but I don’t see anywhere 

ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY THAT YOU ARE GOING TO DIE 

or 

CONCENTRATE WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT AND GRAB ON TO LIFE WITH TWO HANDS OR ELSE

or 

IMMINENT TOTAL DOOM 

or 

HOLY-FUCK-UNLESS-I-GET-LUCKY-THIS-IS-MY-LAST-NIGHT-ON-EARTH DESPERATION FEELINGS

which I suppose all fall under the “agitation” heading.

I was sweating, freezing, nauseated, metallic-feeling and dead panicked and I spent the whole night until the sun came up googling Tramadol horror stories (oh, they’re out there), pacing back and forth between the bathroom and the bed, and praying my head off. 

Morning came and I lived.

The point of the story is that there’s a downside to sweet, sweet numbing.

Oh, my darling, sketchy friend. Numbing. I press your little metaphorical morphine drip button probably fifty times a day in all my different ways because I’m constantly deciding that whatever major or minute level of mental or physical or emotional suffering I’m undergoing is unacceptable and must be stopped in its tracks. 

Nurse! (Candy Crush.)

Nurse! (Web surf.)

NURSE! (Xanax.)

A glass of wine, that’s a nice one. Classy little magic carpet ride to an adjacent reality where it’s always evening and there’s always a fire in the fireplace and the day’s responsibilities are complete and there is no tomorrow coming to bring new ones. Also, wine feels rich, like money, like where there’s wine there can never be dirt or poverty or hardship. I’m in from the cold, insulated. Somewhere a few rooms away, barely audible, Robin Leach is narrating my own personal episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or I’ve dropped into the Little House on the Prairie where Half-Pint stumbles onto a cache of fool’s gold and the lens goes all vaseline’d while she imagines her family drifting slo-mo through Walnut Grove wearing fancy, blinding white linen. 

A beer during a tense Seahawks game. I’m a lightweight but I metabolize alcohol differently while I’m watching football. It disappears into my system leaving no tracks. I’m too keyed up to notice any effects other than not dying from sports-related freakout. 

Pot, once upon a time. After I broke up with my previous boyfriend and before I met my husband I bought myself an attractive pipe and made the plan to take up pot smoking for real. I’d dabbled since I was a teenager, but I decided it was time to take it up as a proper identity. Rakish, unflappable stoner. My new identity only lasted a couple of months because I met Dave and he was sober and I was in love so I wanted to protect him and anyway I had the best drug of all flowing through my system. Pot and I parted company until I was prescribed medical cannabis during a long illness and that’s not the sort of party I’m talking about.

There’s a Buddhist term, dukkha, that translates to something like “suffering”, or “unsatisfactoriness”, and it’s about that “if only” feeling that chases most of us around all day. Alarm too loud, toast too crunchy, toast too soft, I don’t like your tone, maddening article, stupid comment, job traffic weather aches humiliation. Get me out of here. Fix it. Change it. I don’t like it. These things that we’re complaining about, they’re not the causes of our suffering. Our suffering about them is the cause of our suffering about them.

This is the trigger to get our numb on, these endless flashes of dukkha. You pick your numbing agent of choice—from Hershey’s Kisses to heroin—and you shut the dukkha out. 

All day I enact these micro defensive maneuvers and I’m starting to wonder just how long I’m going to resist coming all the way alive like this. Because that’s what I’m doing. I’m resisting coming fully alive. I mean, I have a pulse and I’m conscious for most of the day but I’m afraid of something. I don’t know what it is but I don’t want it. I suspect the thing I keep fighting off is my own life, my own life force, and that seems bad, but what is my own life? What is my life force? Am I onto something? Is it frightening? What is it?

There’s a personality type system called the Enneagram and I’m really into it.

There are nine different personality types in the Enneagram. I’ve identified myself as a Nine, aka The Mediator, The Peacemaker, The Peace-Seeker. Nine is the most potentially numbed-out type of them all. According to the Enneagram Nines repress their anger and squash all their attendant unruly boat-rocking impulses. This makes us easy to get along with but you don’t achieve that kind of repression without becoming a master of numbness. The challenge for a Nine is to become unrepressed—wide awake and present no matter what—and in doing so release all that untapped dynamism. 

Every Enneagram type has three sub-types according to which avenue the overarching mechanism expresses itself through most often. So each of the nine types have three expressions: social, sexual and self-preservation. 

When I was diagnosing my sub-type I was hoping I could honestly declare myself either the social or sexual type of Nine. Those sounded cooler than being a self-preservation type. Obviously. But no. Sadly, no. The more I read, the more I recognized myself in the safety-seeking, comfort-loving Self-Preservation Nine. The numbest of the numb.  

I don’t love this about myself but I understand it. I learned to numb early in life the same way we all do, through trauma. Necessity, self-preservation, the best thing I could come up with. A fully solid set of moves.

What am I afraid of? What am I trying to squash when I’m numbing myself?

When I send my fishing line down to check I get a flash of facing some beast, some kind of enemy, going into a bright hot battle. Annihilation. Something wants me dead. Something wants to burn me up. I don’t know what that is. I'm looking at this through a veil.

Practically, in real-life terms, what’s the danger in coming alive? Well, maybe your life is stacked with things that aren’t working and if you de-numb, if you see it and feel it, you’ll have to do something. Maybe your body’s broken or your job is crushing or your relationship is dead or your friendships are unsatisfying or your living situation is untenable. Maybe something is hurting you.

I mean, yes. Something is hurting you. If you’re getting numb something is hurting you even if it’s just your own thought patterns.

Ugh. Exhausting. There’s so much to do every day already. You want to say there’s more? Extrication or rebuilding or re-conceiving or healing or moving or or or or or oh god just pass the wine. Tomorrow’s problem. 

We’re not just afraid of the rough stuff, either. 

One of my favorite words is poignant. 

poi-gnant adjective \ˈpȯi-nyənt

1:  pungently pervasive <poignant perfume>

2: a (1) :  painfully affecting the feelings :  piercing  (2) :  deeply affecting :  touching

b :  designed to make an impression :  cutting  <poignant satire>

3  a :  pleasurably stimulating

    b :  being to the point

I love the word, I love the experience of poignance, but it’s unsustainable. That kind of sharpness is for a quick in-and-out, not for an extended stay. 

When I was very sick and in the hospital at the beginning of 2013, I didn’t see my children for nine days. I’d never gone so long without seeing them but I was too unwell to handle it for that first hospital stretch. After nine days I was ready and Dave brought them to see me. 

I heard them before I saw them. I heard their footsteps in the hallway, their little voices. My oldest boy was six, my youngest was three. The poignance began its assault as soon as I detected my boys with my ears. Then they rounded the corner into the room, into my line of vision, and I was fully harpooned. Their scruffy, hopeful, tentative faces, so exquisite; their puffy overcoats, navy and gray; their little pants. Their milky skin, the look and feel of it. Their flutey voices. The feel of them pressing up against my leg and my sides. I hadn’t been able to take care of them for months and now I was getting better and here they were, my little ones, open for love. The beauty burned me and tears come even today while I write this.

You can’t live there. Not at that pitch. 

Hold on.

Is that true?

On my 19th birthday I hung out with my friends at one of their apartments. We drank and played Scruples, asking each other questions from the cards. The question came up, “Would you rather live a life of great joys and great sorrows, with extreme highs and lows, or would you rather have a more moderate existence, missing the extremes on either end?” I expected a landslide with me for the former. 

Nein. Two of us opted for the former, and the rest of the room chose the more moderate existence. Team Highs and Lows was appalled with Team Moderation and vice versa. You can’t live like that!

We both had a point but I’d vote the same way today. I’ve bumped both extremes and I’d still say it.

[2023 Tina jumping in with the benefit of hindsight to say that 2014 Tina might say differently if she knew what was on the menu. 2023 Tina isn’t trying to tempt fate. 2023 Tina abstains.]

I have to practice sustaining that sharpness a little longer, is the thing. I want to believe it can stretch out and diffuse into something livable without losing its potency.

I was talking with my teacher about the difference between aliveness and stimulation. He said that we’ve gotten so numb as a society that our craving for stimulation is ramping up just so that we can feel something. Louder, faster, bigger, funnier, sexier, more violent everything. But stimulation, while it gives us a jolt, doesn’t address the thing that made us go numb in the first place.

You know it when it happens, though, the other thing, the expansion of the aliveness within. It’s not contentment, exactly, or well-being. Those are by-products, maybe, of aliveness, or presence. Sometimes everything aligns and you catch it, your aliveness, and it’s not because of the things that aligned. It’s not because of the sunset or the food or the fire or the mountains or the company, whatever was in place when the flash happened. It’s not because of the good news that somebody’s going to live or you got somebody back or you got the job. Those are the curtains opening, not the show.

What is the show?

Quiet mysterious everything?

Friend or foe, I don’t give myself the chance to know. On and on I block it out.