Rehab doesn’t happen to you. You happen to rehab. That’s something I kept thinking when, at night, I wept myself to sleep in the tastefully appointed room where I could not keep any sharp objects, not even tweezers, and did not have a lock on my door.
I realised it the moment I walked in and they demanded I remove my Marni booties, in keeping with their no-shoes policy, and I began to argue, muttering something about how I was self-conscious about my feet (a lie). I realised it when they asked me what sorts of things I liked to eat, and I considered it briefly, then said “goat yoghurt” like it was normal. I realised it when the woman who was tasked with watching me pee into a cup through a cracked door looked like I was giving her much more anxiety than she was giving me.
I was so dazed from the days, weeks, months – perhaps even years – prior that I had a good deal of trouble understanding what had got me there, what twist of fate had delivered me to this small stone manor house in the woods of the Berkshires, Massachusetts.
I didn’t tell very many people I was going, but to the select few who knew, I said I was going to a “trauma treatment programme”. I wasn’t fooling anyone, but those who loved me allowed me the dignity of not calling a spade a spade.
When we arrived, my father gave them the name I was using on my files: Rose O’Neill, after the inventor of Kewpie dolls, America’s first published female cartoonist. I related, I felt, to the tragedy of her life – she had made something people didn’t know they needed, had made a shocking fortune on her illustrations of impish Cupids, but had stayed too long at the party, and by her mid-40s her wealth had been drained by hangers-on, and an inability to duplicate her first success (which seemed to me like where I was heading, considering I hadn’t had a coherent idea since the day that we finished shooting Girls). So Rose is what they called me in rehab, until finally I gave them permission to say my name, and even then, they did it with trepidation.
We walked through the doors into a sea of beige with a grand staircase. A sweet guy with an iPad made my parents check in and show ID, which they had to retrieve from the car. I was asked to take the aforementioned shoes off and was hurried upstairs for that urine test. After that, my parents were allowed to come see my room. It was a lot like the first day at camp, or college, except many of the people here had a problem with IV heroin. It was hard to tell the difference between the patients and the orderlies, because nobody wore uniforms.
Who would have guessed that the massive tattooed man in the Harley-Davidson shirt was a sober companion, and the petite grandmother knitting in house slippers had a crippling Benadryl addiction that had caused her to destroy her own daughter’s wedding? This was the first lesson of rehab, and the simplest: never judge a drug addict by their Patagonia half-zip fleece.
This was also the moment that I realised that chaos wasn’t happening to me. I hadn’t landed here because of some sudden natural disaster, as mysteriously seismic and strange as it all felt. I had responded to events. I had swallowed the medicine. I had made choices. And I was the chaos. I would come to realise, after much resistance – after asking to skip the group therapy sessions aimed at drug cravings because I didn’t feel they applied to me, after telling anyone who would listen that I was there because of medical trauma, after retreating to my room night after night instead of socialising, to “work” – there is no good addict, no right addict, no better addict than any other.
We had all tortured and terrified our families and friends. We all lost things that we once thought we couldn’t live without. And, in our own very different and special ways, and for our own very different and special reasons, we all fucking loved drugs.
There was Walter, the middle-aged father who knew the component parts to every antidepressant and how to order them on the dark web. There was Jackson, the shy, beautiful boy with the piano who spoke so movingly about immigrating but wasn’t sure he could experience love. There was Gaylen, who was only a teenager but could have beat all our asses and got us to thank her. Shirley, a grandma and wife who knit baby booties in her free time and was getting used to not having a bottle of chardonnay by 8am along with her Benadryl. There was Livia, who was 76 and whose necklaces jangled as she rode her mobility scooter to the yoga hut. Some of us loved to party. Some of us loved to jack cocaine into our veins and give long lectures about capitalism. Some of us loved to take Benadryl in the morning, despite not being allergic to anything.
The fact that I had taken drugs, at first in order to be able to show up to work, in order to meet my responsibilities; the fact that I was sick, didn’t make me less of a problem than anyone else. It just made me harder to see coming.
On my second morning, I sat across from my new therapist, Dr Mark, a kindly man in khakis who could have been anywhere from five to 25 years older than me. He reminded me of a children’s entertainer, the type of guy who would play banjo for kindergarteners. Dr Mark asked me to explain to him, in my own words, what I thought had got me here.
Well, I told him, it started with me being sick. Or maybe it started with me being stressed. Sick, physically and mentally, and stressed in the way you can only get stressed when your wildest dreams start rolling out the welcome mat – and with them come the wildest obligations.
I was supporting a family, someone else’s family – multiple families, in fact – and my failure would be their failure. I disappointed people while also filling their pantries with fancy bread.
At the same time, my period crippled me, and when I didn’t have my period, the pain could be just as bad but with no clear cause. I was in love with the idea of my boyfriend, and he was never home, and when he was, the disappointment was palpable. My little sister had become my little brother. My parents didn’t recognise me, but I could see them looking, hopefully, as if for signs of memory in an amnesia patient. When my uterus was taken out, I started to go through menopause, and nobody explained what was happening, so I howled like a wolf in bed at night, not sure where the sound was coming from.
Meanwhile, my oldest dream – of carrying a child, of being a mother, the one from back before there were other dreams – slithered away. Because my body couldn’t do it. My body couldn’t do anything. And look at me, just look at me. In the months after the surgery, I kept remembering how many hands had been inside me, pressing and prodding. I told Dr Mark that I’d been raped once and sexually abused on a few occasions. This had felt like that. It wasn’t that – but it sure felt like it.
“Is that it?” he asked.
No, that wasn’t it. I started acting up and acting out. I didn’t know why. It felt, suddenly, like my intuition – once as noisy as a metal detector on a beach after a frat party – had just broken. I couldn’t tell what was right or wrong, what would make people laugh or make them sneer. I did things just to do them. Nobody made me, but it sure felt like they had.
“And that’s what you’ve been feeling lately?”
Well, there was the medication – the blessing and the curse of it. Klonopin for anxiety, Percocet for pain, and that exquisite, fluffy cotton-candy high as the drug moved through me, weighing down my anxiety like three quilts in winter. Bed became a wonderland. Sex became tolerable. At first, it let me keep it all together, patched me up with strings and glue, and sent me back on to the field.
The minute I had my first dose of IV pain medication, I wished in some ways I hadn’t. The shiver through my whole body – better than any orgasm – followed by the alleviation of all of it, all the lows and, I realised later, all the highs, too. Just a blank euphoria, all possibility and no immediate action. I was tethered there with a needle in my arm. It’s not for everyone – nurses like to warn you it can feel strange, that some people may cry or vomit – but for someone like me, whose thoughts, negative or positive, have always been so aggressive they can hijack a whole day, it felt like a pause button – available anywhere that accepts your insurance, available anywhere that doesn’t.
Now my pain had a solution, and that solution was waiting in ERs across America, making hospital beds as appealing as sunny brunches with friends in Union Square once were. The relief started as soon as the nurse began to screw the IV together, pump it with saline that ran cold in my arm and left a metallic taste in my mouth. I wasn’t eating much or drinking, either, so it was often hard for them to find a vein, but when they did, we all sighed with relief. I was thin, too – everyone said it – and when I sat down, my fat no longer followed with a kicky bounce a second later.
“Is that it?” he asked again.
“Yes, I think that’s it,” I cried.
“That’s not just a three-car pile-up. It’s not just a five-car pile-up. It’s a 50-car pile-up,” he said, folding his hands in the lap of his Dockers.
And I cried into my stupid kaftan, because it felt so fucking good to be heard. I cried for myself, and I cried for my parents. I cried for my sister, who was now my brother. I cried for the time I’d lost and the time I was losing, and I cried because I couldn’t think of anything but the past, and because I couldn’t imagine the future.
Walter hated me. I had tried hard with him the first day, prodding him with questions about his job as a private equity trader and his toddler daughter who was named after a top 10 emo song and his apartment near mine and his coke addiction. I was sweet and pliant. He was cold and removed. I figured he was getting off cocaine and probably pretty tired. But the next day, Dr Mark called me into his office right before group therapy.
“I’m sorry to have to say this, but your confidentiality has been breached. We learned that Walter told his wife and several friends at home that you’re here.”
“OK.” I shrugged. “I mean, that sucks … I guess.”
“Well, it’s against policy. We have to send Walter home. He’s currently in the billiards room, waiting for his car. We will have to share this in group, since some people have been healing alongside Walter for a while. Would you like to share it, or would you like me to?”
Dr Mark was the gentlest man I had ever met. I cried again, thanking him in advance for sharing. I didn’t want the job. I was new around here. Walter was their friend.
The group was divided. Some were mad at Walter; others said they could relate to “just saying something, not really thinking about it”. Most felt the punishment was a bit strong. I jumped in only to make it clear I had not come up with said punishment. “It’s policy,” I stammered, like an anxious branch manager talking to an angry customer.
Shirley said that I deserved safety just like the rest of them. Livia said that Walter didn’t mean any harm. Jackson said he would really miss Walter, but that he also liked me and was glad I was here. “Walter says Lena is a man-hater, he read her blog, and he doesn’t feel safe being in group with a man-hater,” Gaylen said. All I could stutter was, “I don’t have a blog.”
One day, in group thereapy, Dr Mark asked us to fill out a “values spreadsheet”. It involved listing our primary values, along with the primary values of the people we surrounded ourselves with in active addiction. We were then meant to create a Venn diagram to see where they overlapped. Used to being the A student in therapeutic language, I stuck my hand up: he had me stumped. “What do you mean by values? Like, what are we … worth, as people?” Values, he explained, are one’s sense of what is important in life, what matters to them. Still stumped.
It took me 20 minutes to fill out the three spaces:
ART
FAMILY
MAKING PEOPLE FEEL SEEN
I then started in on the values of the people I’d been hanging around. This one was easier. I remembered my writing partner, Jenni, toasting a project, “Let’s get that private jet money, girl.” I remembered being pressurised to go out, even when sick as a dog, by pseudo-friends so I could show up at events where nobody really gave a fuck about me or anything I was making, just because they were excited to be my plus-one. I remembered meeting someone at a party and asking them about their kids. “They’re adorable,” they said. “Super fun.” Then they continued to pitch me a sitcom starring them.
I had a few scheduled leaves. On one, I went to the Met Gala. They had let me go, though not without some hesitation – there were long talks about whether it would be “safe”, whether I could handle the chaos of it.
I was seeing Jenni for the first time since I had left, and my stomach knotted with fear. I didn’t know why I kept fearing everyone I was meant to love; I figured it could only be shame – fear of their rightful anger. Jenni had been tending to our show alone when we had been meant to do it as a pair. It was always meant to be us as a pair. She hadn’t been communicating much, and when I wrote her a long letter of apology, she had simply responded, “I appreciate this.”
We met at her hotel at 11 for breakfast. She didn’t ask me much about where I’d been or want to hear any stories about rehab. “I’m sure it’s very funny, but you’re not meant to be getting funny stories out of this.” We drank tea, and my hands shook under the table. I wanted us to say something that might give the whole thing perspective, but she just talked about her kids and her schedule.
She was texting with a newer friend, and her eyes lit up when the messages came in – the glittering pleasure of a fun and uncomplicated bond. I didn’t feel I was allowed to say how scared I was. I also didn’t feel I was allowed to tell the makeup artist – who did me up like the OG Queen Elizabeth, with a powdered face and heart-shaped burgundy lips – that I looked like I was trying to conceal syphilitic sores; or the hairstylist that I hated the crown; or the designer that the dress was so stiff I could only shuffle.
On the red carpet, I looked wan and haunted. The whole event felt like a fever dream – cameras flashing, people shouting names that weren’t mine, champagne I couldn’t drink circulating like a joke I wasn’t in on. I told Jenni I was probably the only person there who had come just for the night – from rehab. “You’re probably not,” she said.
At midnight, I climbed into a black SUV and drove back to Massachusetts – Cinderella in her pumpkin. They made me drop my dress at the door to my room so they could search it for contraband.
. . .
During the last week of treatment, I identified as a drug addict for the first time, and so it was the first time Dr Mark asked me, “And do you want to be sober?”The day before I left rehab, Gaylen and I sat outside on the steps for hours in the sun. I sketched her, and she read her book about healing crystals. It was the first time in a long time that I could remember noticing anything about the world around me. The sun was so bright. The sky was so vast. Later, on my way to therapy, I took off running. I couldn’t believe it. All I could think was And my legs run on their own.
When I got back, Gaylen shouted “LENA! LENA!” She was pointing to a robin’s egg nestled in the grass, so blue it looked like it had been dyed. “Who put it there?” I asked. “Nobody put it there!” Gaylen said, laughing at me, her hair pink and blond and black in the sun. “It just is.”
Some names have been changed.
Famesick, by Lena Dunham, is published by Fourth Estate on 14 April. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com.
