Who’s by your side?

It’s tough to watch A Good Person. Its laser focus and tenderness prompts Lauren Windle to recall her experience of addiction and recovery.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

An old man accompanies a young woman into a wood-panelled hall, both look aprehensive.

Morgan Freeman and Florence Pugh in A Good Person

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

I don’t watch films about addiction. When I first got clean and sober almost nine years ago, I soaked in any piece of content I could find on drugs, drug use and recovery. At the time it was just YouTube clips of Russell Brand and the occasional memoir of a starlet who turned to cocaine before discovering yoga. After going to a 10:30am showing of Amy Winehouse documentary film Amy and bawling through the entire film, I decided to call it quits. I don’t need to see horrific stories of desperation – I’ve lived one. I am not a casual observer of addiction narratives; I’ve got skin in the game.

In 2018 I went to see A Star Is Born thinking I was watching a rags-to-riches tale of an unlikely popstar. I quickly realised we weren’t there to witness the female protagonist’s ascent, so much as the male protagonist’s decent. I got back in my car and had to wait a quarter of an hour for the fit of hysterical tears to pass before I drove home. I had the same realisation watching A Good Person.

Going in I knew that I had signed up to a film with Morgan Freeman and Florence Pugh. I knew that Pugh’s character Allison “had it all” before a “dramatic accident changed everything”. The ground here sounded so well-trodden that I thought I may need my wellies to navigate it. I knew that there was some element of addiction, but I envisaged a reasonably light touch depiction of a few too many nights on the sauce.

I knew I was wrong when, about half an hour in, Allison lay on the cold bathroom floor to soothe her withdrawal from prescription opioids. She was sweating, shaking and breathless and from then on, it all felt distressingly familiar. The trajectory of her decline was too quick, too obvious, too accurate. As Allison bargained, manipulated and begged for drugs, I saw myself. As Allison looked directly into the mirror and said: ‘I hate you’ to her own glazed reflection, I saw myself. As Allison was dragged out of a stranger’s house party unable to stand up straight, I saw myself.

The hopelessness, the false starts, empty promises and rare moments of lucidity rang so true, that I would find it hard to believe writer Zach Braff hadn’t experienced his own similar hardship. Either that or the recovering addicts they hired to consult on the project deserve a bonus of investment banker proportions.

When Allison eventually reached out for help and asked a woman to sponsor her, the loving directness that came back was reminiscent of those I was given by my first sponsor. It was virtually word for word what I remember being told when I, nine days sober, made the same terrifying request. The experienced mentor told her: “Some beat it, some die.” And she’s right.

Any of my friends who went to an in-patient treatment centre were told to look around because in five years a decent number of their cohort would be dead. And they were always right. Some people give up and let the tide of addiction pull them under. They feel exactly as Allison did when she told Daniel (played by Morgan Freeman): “I’m not sure I have the will.” And when she confessed in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that: “Without [the pills] I want to die.”

In the 2015 film Amy, the one that convinced me to stick to rom-coms, there’s a scene that stuck with me. Amy had been invited to perform at the Grammy’s but was denied a visa because of her well-documented drug use. It was arranged for her to live perform in London and it would be broadcast on big screens at the event. When the date came around she was in a stint of sobriety. She performed beautifully and won five Grammys. One of her friends burst into her dressing room to celebrate the momentous achievement but all Amy said was that it wasn’t as good without the drugs.

You learn to love the cage you built around yourself and stop dreaming of more, because you are blind to anything beyond the walls you’ve created.

Getting into addiction means silencing that feeling in your Spirit that says that something isn’t right and you should go home. It’s consistently pushing through when you get a pit of your stomach urge to cut and run. Because you want the drugs, so you know you’ll have to take the chaos they’re packaged in. At some point you stop remembering that you ever felt uncomfortable, and you start to think you enjoy where you are, what you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with. You get Stockholm syndrome and life before your captor is a distant memory. You learn to love the cage you built around yourself and stop dreaming of more, because you are blind to anything beyond the walls you’ve created. You’re not happy, but what other options do you have? You could trade the misery of addiction for the misery of abstinence, but either way you’ll be miserable so you might as well do it with the drugs.

Except, that’s not true. When we’re living our lives right, we’re living them in complete freedom. Slaves to no substance or behaviour with the freedom to say yes to what we want and, crucially, the freedom to say no. It’s the present Jesus gave us in the resurrection but so many of us, myself included, hand it back like it came with a gift receipt.

I wish I’d known the dreams that would be realised, the friendships forged and the profound moments I would experience on the other side of those first, excruciating months of sobriety.

What I wish I could have told Amy at the Grammy’s, Allison in that NA meeting and myself when I first said the words: “I think I’m addicted”, is that there’s so much more than what you can currently see. I wish I’d known the dreams that would be realised, the friendships forged and the profound moments I would experience on the other side of those first, excruciating months of sobriety. I would have wanted to know that in time my grip would loosen, my knuckles would go from white back to their fleshy hue and I would be able to breathe again. It wouldn’t feel like a compromise or half a life or as though something was missing, but I would feel more fulfilled and alive than any drug would ever allow me.

A Good Person demonstrates the chronic and repetitive condition of addiction with a laser sharp accuracy that, for someone with lived experience, could burn. But it’s also a tender reminder of the power of unlikely friendships forged from a mutual understanding of adversity. It made me think of the woman who scooped me up as I backed away from my first ever support group meeting and said: “You can sit next to me.” It made me grateful for the woman who mouthed “it’s going to be OK,” at me across the table as I sat there listening with tears rolling down my face. It reminded me of the awe I felt the first time I heard someone speak about the insomnia, shame and self-hatred of drug addiction, and I realised I wasn’t the only one. The film showed the transformative effect of consistent community in a way that I hope encourages people to turn up to one of those meetings like Allison and I did. I pray that it is the turning point in many people’s lives.

Should you go and watch it? Absolutely. Just don’t ask me to go with you.

Article

Community

Culture

Football

Idolatry

Sport

19 June 2024

5 min read

The decade that defined sport

What the sports stars of today owe to the eighties.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Maradona runs in celebration, holding a hand aloft as an England player sits dejected on the ground.

Maradona celebrates, 1986 World Cup.

Dani Yako via Wikimedia Commons

If the 1980s were your formative years as a sports fan, you will carry many images with you even today. Dennis Taylor potting the last black after midnight to beat Steve Davis. Barry McGuigan defeating Eusebio Pedrosa in the ring at Loftus Road. The races between Coe and Ovett at the Moscow Olympics. The tie break between Borg and McEnroe. Botham’s Ashes. Diego Maradona versus England at the Mexico World Cup.

You will undoubtedly have other memories, though these will have been controlled by a limited number of broadcast editors. I clearly recall watching Viv Richards’ astonishing century in one cricket World Cup final against hosts England being regularly interrupted on BBC1’s Grandstand with coverage of a routine horse race meeting. The introduction of the less fusty World of Sport on ITV was a route in for some sports that faced an implicit class bias, but it was all still far removed from the 24/7 reverencing of sport today.

The eighties was an era of transition as sport began to gain a place in our cultural consciousness. It was also a decade in which the relationship between sport and politics became cemented on paths we still walk. In Everybody Wants To Rule The World, academic and journalist Roger Domeneghetti has written an entertaining and informative book subtitled ‘Britain, Sport and the 1980s’.

In our branding of the twenties as the decade of polarisation, we forget how deeply divided Britain was in the eighties. Recent commentary on the fortieth anniversary of the miners’ strike has been a reminder of this and how violent public life proved. Football hooliganism was pervasive and after a riot at a Luton Town – Millwall game in 1985, Margaret Thatcher asked of football officials: ‘what are you going to do about it?’. In a pithy and telling response, the FA secretary Ted Croker said: ‘Not our hooligans, Prime Minister, but yours. The product of your society’. Perhaps more than any other exchange, it symbolised the braiding of sport and politics, threads that endure to this day.

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers.

The argument that sport and politics don’t mix has a familiar ring for people who live with the tired old trope that religion and politics don’t either, as if our experience of culture and values are sealed off from each other. Sporting boycotts in the 1980s - from Olympics to apartheid South Africa – placed athletes in the unavoidable position of having to make decisions about participation that would reflect on their values and could affect their careers; positioning that other people were spared. These were an early taste of the moral standing afforded to sportsmen and women today; a status that somehow asks more of them, perhaps because other professions have become so tarnished and mistrusted.

Domeneghetti’s book is also a sobering reminder of how ugly and careless much of our shared life was in the eighties. The Bradford City fire and Hillsborough disaster were awful losses that showed the low priority of health and safety and the culture of institutional cover up that continues to blight the nation. The author locates these failings in the wider context of disasters like Kings Cross, Piper Alpha and the Marchioness boat as part of his bid to write a social history of sport.

Yet in a sense, Domeneghetti chose arbitrary parameters. Football in particular was on the cusp of a revolution with the introduction of the Premier League in 1992. Cultural sympathy for the game was about to change with the writings of Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch and Pete Davies in All Played Out. The nasty face of football was to be transformed into a highly marketable model.

The ugliness of the era is laid bare in the prolific and casual racism, sexism and homophobia that coursed through every sport. The Windrush’s second generation broke through in the 1980s, notably in football, but was met with staggering levels of prejudice. Anyone tempted to think this has now been eradicated hasn’t spent any real time at a football ground or on social media. Women’s sport had virtually no profile in the eighties outside of tennis and athletics and as recently as 1978, Lord Denning had ruled that an eleven-year-old girl should not be allowed to play competitive football against boys the same age even though she merited a place in her team. Meanwhile, stars like Justin Fashanu, Martina Navratilova and John Curry were targeted for their sexual orientation. It remains hard for present day athletes to identify as gay, despite the rhetoric of acceptance. Sport then, as now, held up an unerring mirror to our faces.

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers. But there is the gloss of a hyper-individualistic, neo-liberal culture. Sports stars succeed because of a combination of innate gifting (which cannot simply be replicated) and material advantage (too many Olympic medals are still awarded to wealthy and advantaged Britons). I won because I wanted it more is a dishonest assessment of sporting success in the UK and in this way also holds up a mirror to other walks of life.

The powerful personal branding of today’s athletes in many ways have their origin in the 1980s and the way the likes of Ian Botham, Carl Lewis and John McEnroe transcended their sports. The cult of the conquering superstar is a smart diversion from the reality that money usually wins. Just look at the Premier League table.