Dear Sugar

“Dear Sugar” is an advice column that appears regularly in the online magazine The Rumpus (therumpus.net). A journal of culture (not pop culture but the other kind), The Rumpus is edited by Stephen Elliott, whose work has appeared in The Sun. Sugar’s identity is a secret, but her writing reveals her to be a woman of compassion, wit, and wisdom. The columns below are reprinted with her permission.

— Ed.

REACH
   
Dear Sugar,

I was raised in a conservative, Christian part of the South. Through the Internet and columns like yours, I’ve discovered that my life has been sheltered from views and lifestyles in other areas of the country. Our town has a population of about six thousand. The whole county has fewer than thirty thousand people.

I am a professional in real estate, and I own my own business. I’ve been married for more than twenty years and have four children. The first half of my marriage was a utopia, but my wife and I have grown apart over the last ten years. Now we simply cohabit peacefully, like siblings. Neither of us is happy, but we stay together for the kids.

Several years ago I had an accident that damaged my spine, and now I’m hopelessly addicted to the very strong pain medications that were prescribed to me. I take a month’s supply in about seven to ten days. Then I crash and have to beg or borrow from others to make it to the next appointment.

When the economy went bad, so did my business, and we lost our health insurance, so checking into rehab is impossible. I can’t depend on my wife for financial support (she doesn’t have a job), and I don’t have any other family nearby. I feel totally alone except for my children. I’ve tried everything I can think of to stop taking the drugs, from prayer to cold turkey, but nothing has worked. I’ve begun to have suicidal thoughts that I’m sure are related to the meds as much as anything else. The choices I see are:

     1.    Continue like I have been, knowing there is a good chance that it will kill me.

     2.    Find a way to go into rehab and lose the house and business.

     3.    Go to aa/na meetings in this small town. This would almost surely ruin what’s left of my
            business.

I hope you can suggest some other options, because I don’t see any of the above working out. Please give me a new perspective, Sugar.

    Signed,
    Ruler Of A Fallen Empire

Dear Ruler Of A Fallen Empire,

I’m terribly sorry for your misfortune. You listed the three options you think you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you’re fucked before you begin. I understand why you feel this way. Your situation is truly daunting. But you don’t have the luxury of despair. You can find a way to overcome these difficulties, and you must. There aren’t three options. There is only one. As the poet Rilke says, “You must change your life.”

You have the capacity to do that, Ruler. It seems impossible now, but you aren’t thinking clearly. The drugs and desperation and depression have muddled your head. If there is only one thought that you hold in your mind right now, please let it be that one. It was that thought that got me out of my own drug-money-love disaster several years ago. Someone I trusted told me what to do when I couldn’t think straight for myself, and listening to him saved my life.

You say that you don’t have the ability to kick your addiction, but you do. It’s that you can’t do it alone. You need to reach out for help. Here’s what I think you should do:

1.    Talk to a medical doctor at your pain-management clinic and tell him or her that you’ve become addicted to your medication and also that you’re depressed and broke. Tell the whole story. Don’t conceal anything. You have nothing to be ashamed of. I know your first instinct is to lie to your doctor, lest he or she cut off your drug supply, but don’t trust that instinct. It will ruin your life and possibly kill you. Trust the man inside you, who you really are, and if you can’t do that, trust me. Your doctor can help you safely taper off the drug to which you’ve become addicted, prescribe an alternative, refer you to no-cost drug-treatment programs and/or psychological counseling, or all of the above.

2.    I implore you to attend an na meeting (or an aa meeting, if that’s all that’s available in your town). Of course you’re afraid of being judged and condemned. Some people will judge and condemn you, but most won’t. Our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at one point or another. I’ve never been in a humiliating situation where I wasn’t shocked at all the “normal” people who were also in the very same humiliating position. Humans are beautifully imperfect and complex. We’re horny, ass-saving, ego-driven drug fiends, among other, more noble things. I think you’ll be comforted when you go to the aa/na meeting and see how many neighbors have problems similar to yours — including people you assumed would not. Those people will help you heal, sweet pea. They’ll support you as you face this addiction. And they’ll do it for free. I know a lot of people who have transformed their lives thanks to those meetings. Not one of them thought they were the “aa/na type” before they went. They knew that they were smarter or more sophisticated or less religious or more skeptical or less strung out or more independent than all those other hopeless freaks who went to aa or na. They were all wrong.

3.    Talk to your wife and tell her about your addiction and your depression. This might be the first item on the list or the last — I can’t gauge from your letter. Will your wife be an important advocate for you as you reach out for help, or will she be more supportive if you tell her only after you’ve made a few positive changes on your own? Either way, I imagine she’ll feel betrayed to learn that you’ve been concealing your addiction from her, and eventually relieved to know the truth. You say your marriage is “loveless,” and perhaps you’re correct that it has come to its natural end, but I’d like you to consider the notion that you aren’t the best judge of that right now. You’re a psychologically distressed drug addict with four kids, no health insurance, uncertain business prospects, and a pile of bills. I wouldn’t expect your marriage to be thriving, but the two of you have managed — after ten happy years together — to roll on for another ten “peacefully,” in spite of the enormous stress you’re under, and that’s an accomplishment that you mustn’t fail to recognize. It may indicate that the love you once shared isn’t dead. Perhaps you can rebuild your marriage. Perhaps you can’t. Either way, I encourage you to find out.

4.    Make a financial plan, even if that plan is an anatomy of a disaster. You cite money as the reason you can’t go into rehab, or even to aa/na meetings, but surely you know that the financial repercussions will be far worse if you continue on your present course. Everything is at stake, Ruler: Your children. Your career. Your marriage. Your home. Your life. If you need to spend some money to cure yourself, so be it. The only way out of a hole is to climb out. After you consult with your doctor and see what options are available to you, and after you have a talk with your wife about your situation, have a discussion about money in which everything is on the table. Perhaps you qualify for public assistance. Perhaps your wife can get a job. Perhaps you can get a loan from a friend or family member. Perhaps things won’t seem so dire once you take the first steps in the direction of healing, and you’ll be able to maintain employment while you recover.

I’m writing a book under my real name right now, and as I worked and reworked a passage in that book, your words about believing there is no way out of your situation rang through my mind. The passage is about the year I lived in Brooklyn when I was twenty-four. I shared an apartment with a man who was then my husband in a building that was mostly empty. Below us was a bodega; above us, a couple who got into raging fights in the middle of the night. The rest of the building — though full of apartments — was unoccupied for reasons that were never clear to me. I spent my days writing alone at home while my husband worked as an assistant to someone who appeared to be in the Mafia. In the evenings I waited tables.

“Did you hear something strange?” my husband asked me one night when I got home from work.

“Hear something?” I asked.

“Behind the walls,” he said. “I heard something earlier, and I wondered if you heard it too, while you were alone today.”

“No, I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

But the next day I did. Something behind the walls, and then from the ceiling. Something close, then distant, then close again, then gone. I didn’t know what it was. It sounded awful, like a baby who was extremely discreet. It could have been nothing. It could have been me. It was the exact expression of the sound my insides were making every time I thought of how I needed to change my life and how impossible that seemed.

“I heard something,” I told my husband that night.

He went to the wall and touched it. It was silent. “I think we’re imagining things,” he said, and I agreed.

But the sound kept coming and going all through December, impossible to define or locate. Christmas came, and we were all alone. The employer who probably belonged to the Mafia gave my husband a bonus. We spent it on tickets to the opera in the way-back seats: Mozart’s Magic Flute.

“I keep hearing it,” I said to my husband on the subway ride home. “The sound behind the walls.”

“Yeah,” he said, “me too.”

On New Year’s Day we woke at seven to a yowling and jumped out of bed. The sound was the same one we’d been hearing for three weeks, but it wasn’t discreet anymore. It was coming very clearly from the ceiling of our bedroom closet. My husband immediately got a hammer and started pounding at the plaster with the claw end, chipping it away in great chalky chunks that fell over our clothes. Within ten minutes he’d ripped out most of the closet ceiling. The noise had stopped during the pounding. Once there was no more ceiling, we went silent and stared up into the mysterious black innards of the building.

At first it seemed there was nothing. Then, a moment later, two emaciated kittens appeared, peering down at us from the jagged edge of the hole. They were so skeletal they should have been dead: visibly shaking with fear, caked in soot and spider webs and globs of black grease, their eyes enormous and
blazing.

“Meow,” one of them said.

“Meow,” wailed the other.

My husband and I held up our palms, and the kittens walked into them immediately. They were so light it was like holding air.

I worked and reworked this passage as I pondered you and your problems over these past weeks, Ruler, but after all that effort, I decided to take it out of my book. It was nice, but I didn’t need it. It was an odd thing that had happened to me during a sad and uncertain time in my life, and I’d hoped it would tell readers something deep about my ex-husband and me: About how in love we were and also how lost. About how we were like those kittens who’d been trapped and starving for weeks. Or maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice. I could’ve sanded the story down. I could have fit it in.

But I took it out because of you. I realized it was a story you needed to hear instead. Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks that they were wandering inside the dark walls with no way out — though surely there’s something there too — but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How, when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.

    Yours,
    Sugar

ROMANTIC LOVE IS NOT A COMPETITIVE SPORT
   
Dear Sugar,

I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman who began dating a wonderful man a couple of months ago. He’s smart, good-natured, and funny, and he definitely turns me on. I’m extremely happy to have met him, and even happier that he likes me as much as I like him. Our sex life is great, but my man has this habit of mentioning past sexual experiences. He doesn’t go into detail, and I don’t think he realizes that his stories bother me. I think he simply trusts me and wants to talk about these things.

Recently he started to tell me that he’d once been in an orgy. I stopped him and said I didn’t want to know about it. He wasn’t upset, and he respected my request, but now this image is floating around in my head. Constantly. Haunting me. I keep imagining what it was like, what he was like, what the women were like, and it’s making me sick: Sick with jealousy. Sick with insecurity. Sick with fear.

I’m not worried that he’s going to cheat on me or go have an orgy, but I do worry that I won’t be enough to satisfy him. I don’t know what to do. This image is still in my head — as are others — and I don’t know if talking with him about it will help or just make it worse.

Is this something that, if left alone, I’ll eventually realize is a natural part of his healthy sexual past, or should I tell him how it makes me feel at the risk of sounding like an irrational, insecure, jealous woman who doesn’t trust him? If I do talk to him about it, how can I keep from fanning the crazed fire that’s already burning in my head?

    Love,
    Haunted By His Sexual Past

Dear Haunted By His Sexual Past,

Hmmm. So let me see. Your boyfriend is:

     1.    Wonderful.

     2.    Smart.

     3.    Good-natured.

     4.    Funny.

     5.    Terrific in bed.

     6.    As into you as you are into him.

     7.    Trusting.

     8.    Trustworthy.

     9.    Respectful.

     10.  Interested in talking intimately with you about his life.

Am I going to have to remove my silk gloves and bop you with them, sweet pea? You aren’t haunted by your boyfriend’s sexual past. You’re haunted by your own irrational, insecure, jealous feelings, and if you continue to behave in this manner, you will eventually push your lover away.

I don’t mean to be harsh. I’m being direct because I sincerely want to help you and because it’s clear to me that you’re a good egg. I know it’s a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it’s also fantastic: you are, after all, the only person you can change.

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