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.

Review

Art

Culture

26 April 2024

5 min read

Blake, imagination and the insight of God

A new exhibition focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

William Blake's illustration of God squatting down to create with his hair and beard blown to one side

Blake's Ancient of Days.

The Fitzwilliam Museum.

The exhibition William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, enables visitors to discover a constellation of European Romantic artists who sought spirituality in their lives and art in response to war, revolution and political turbulence.

The exhibition brings together the largest-ever display of works by the radical British artist, printmaker and poet from the Fitzwilliam Museum's collection, alongside artworks by Blake's European contemporaries such as the German romantic painters Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich – many of which have never been displayed publicly in the UK until now. Though they never met or connected in their lifetimes, Blake, Runge and Friedrich shared an unwavering belief in the power of art to redeem a society in crisis.

Blake believed it ‘is only the imagination’, the faculty we have neglected, which can lead us out of our self-imposed prison.

The exhibition also places Blake within his artistic network in Britain, drawing parallels with the work of his peers, mentors and followers including Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, and Samuel Palmer. In the exhibition catalogue Esther Chadwick draws attention to a little-known series of paintings in which ‘Blake is shown partaking in an immense community of like-minded intellectuals of the European Romantic generation.’ These include writers and poets associated with Runge, as well as artists and poets such as Flaxman, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Flaxman introduced Charles Augustus Tulk, a well-known Swedenborgian, to Blake, to whom Tulk later introduced Coleridge saying ‘Blake and Coleridge, when in company seemed like congenial beings from another sphere breathing for a while on our earth’.

Exhibition curators David Bindman and Chadwick have said: “This is the first exhibition to show William Blake not as an isolated figure but as part of European-wide attempts to find a new spirituality in face of the revolutions and wars of his time. We are excited to be able to shed new light on Blake by placing his works in dialogue with wider trends and themes in European art of the Romantic period, including transformations of classical tradition, fascination with Christian mysticism, belief in the coming apocalypse, spiritual regeneration and national revival.”

Independently of each other, Blake and Runge were inspired by the writings of German mystic Jacob Böhme, who, as Bindman and Chadwick explain, ‘believed that all being arises from the dynamic interplay of opposites: between darkness and light, life and death, hot and cold, male and female’. As a result, he viewed our spiritual quest as ‘the reconciliation of differences to produce spiritual and philosophical regeneration’. Bryan Aubrey has also shown that Böhme believed human beings can share in the divine imagination, through which we act ‘with, and on behalf of, the creator’. Böhme ‘equated the strong imagination with the faith that moves mountains’ while Blake believed it ‘is only the imagination’, the faculty we have neglected, which can lead us out of our self-imposed prison. Blake was, as a result, indebted to Böhme for his concept of the imagination and his doctrine of contraries.

This exhibition demonstrates that many of great Romantic philosophers and writers were seeking just such a spiritual regeneration and national revival.

Melanie Öhlenbach has argued that ‘Runge's life, his theory and works bear testimony to Böhme's importance’. For Runge, art ‘is considered as the revelation of God and the artist as its tool, while the artist's imagination creates the insight of God’. He believed it is ‘the artists' duty to re-create the diverging harmony of man and cosmos in the sense of an artistic-spiritual revolution’. She writes that due to his early death, ‘Runge managed only partly to put his ambitions into practice’, notably in his Times of Day series which represent not only the changing times of day, but the seasons, the ages of humanity and historical epochs. Similarly, Friedrich’s seven sepia drawings The Ages of Man are thought to be inspired by Runge’s interest in visual representations of time, meaning that this exquisitely delicate series is associated with the themes of change in nature, the cyclical representation of time and the temporality of human life.

The significance of these artists is, in part, as prophets within the Christian tradition. Lucy Winkett has noted that ‘Blake’s faith was in the Jesus whom he believed the Church had abandoned’. As a result, ‘he was — and still is — an internal rather than external critic of the way in which the Christian faith is practised by its adherents; and so, for those who have ears to hear, his is a prophetic rather than destructive force within the Christian tradition’. Richard A. Rosengarten states that ‘Blake wanted to stir things up because he thought the Christian revelation was meant to stir things up’. He argues that, for Blake, the ‘first step in doing so (after reading the Bible from stem to stern) was to liberate Imagination from the shackles of Reason’. This is what ‘could make us fully human again, and thus much more approximately the creatures of God that we truly are’.

Malcolm Guite suggests that both Blake and Coleridge: ‘recognised Jesus as the Divine Imagination and Love bodied forth for us and kindling afresh in us the love and imagination which is God’s lost image deep in our souls. Both men were calling for England (‘Albion’ in Blakes terms) to awaken from the sleep of materialism, greed and conquest, and to be renewed in Christ through an awakening of the spiritual imagination.’

This exhibition demonstrates that many of great Romantic philosophers and writers were seeking just such a spiritual regeneration and national revival. In our own time of war, revolution and political turbulence, it may be that this is a prescient exhibition bringing us artists who, as Winkett said of Blake, have ‘a distinctively Christian voice for our time’.

In Jerusalem, one of Blake’s illuminated books from which many plates are shown in this exhibition, Blake writes: ‘I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination – Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.’

William Blake’s Universe, 23 February 2024 - 19 May 2024, Fitzwilliam Museum.