Review

Addiction

Culture

Film & TV

11 April 2023

6 min read

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

Books

Culture

Friendship

9 May 2023

6 min read

Why do we ignore the power of friendship

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A large group of friends sit at a crowded table and share a meal together.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

Elizabeth Day is a journalist, a novelist, a podcast host, a broadcaster, and a friendaholic. This isn’t a term that she uses lightly, she’s not merely delighting in some quaint wordplay here. Rather, Elizabeth has identified within herself a chronic compulsion, a psychological need, a habitual seeking out, and an emotional reliance on friendship (or, at least, what she perceived friendship to be – more on that later…)

Therefore, when she labels herself a friendship addict, she does so with every ounce of seriousness. She also describes the symptoms of her addiction with impressive levels of introspection.

‘I would get a buzz from a moment of exchange; a hit of pure friendship adrenaline. In that moment, I would feel worthwhile and liked and accepted. I wanted more of it. Then I needed more of it. Then it became something that I relied on for my own self-worth. I must be OK, the reasoning went, I’ve got so many friends.’

These intimate confessions lead Elizabeth to begin the epilogue of her book with a familiar, albeit reconfigured, turn of phrase: ‘My name is Elizabeth Day’ she writes, ‘and I’m a recovering friendaholic.’

The quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health.

Elizabeth pre-empts any criticism of what could be perceived as a ‘woe-is-me’ memoir by meeting those who may be reaching for their ‘metaphorical tiny violins’ head on. This book unashamedly takes the impact of friendship, or a lack thereof, very seriously. And so should we. Afterall, social injuries are proven to be very real and loneliness a serious determinant of health. On the opposite end of the same scale, ‘social burnouts’, which often lead to social anxiety, are becoming an epidemic, while an increasing number of mental health issues are being accredited to the profound impact of ‘toxic’ friendships. In short, it is becoming common knowledge among researchers that the quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health.

And yet, despite this - we have barely any language with which to adequately address or inspect the topic of a ‘social life’. It seems that generation after generation, we have failed to take the art of friendship seriously.

‘Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value.’

C.S. Lewis

Considering the psychology, this seems non-sensical. Why would this be?

It could be a symptom of individualism; the emphasis that our Western society places on individual success, personal goal setting and the virtue of independence. Maybe it has more to do with our inclination toward all things productive, and, to (partly) quote C.S Lewis, ‘friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value’. The other explanation could be our pre-occupation with romantic relationships, and the habit we have of idolising them over and above all other social attachments. In her book, Notes on Love, Lauren Windle powerfully reflects on this, she writes

‘maybe it’s time to stop looking for a partner who is also my ‘best friend’ and start appreciating my best friends. Maybe it’s time to stop feeling bereft of true love and realise that I already experience it. Every day.’

Whatever the reason(s) may be, we have neglected to take seriously the science of the social life, and the results of such an oversight are encapsulated in Elizabeth Day’s self-diagnosed ‘friendship addiction’, and the book that has documented it.

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life.

Elizabeth talks us through her most formative of friendships - the long-standing and the fleeting, the nourishing and the draining, the durable and the fragile – this book is an ode to them all. She introduces us to her ghosts of friendship past and present (although, once they read of their appearance in this strikingly honest book, I do worry that a couple of her friends may slip from the latter into the former category), and does so in a way that makes you, as the reader, instinctively close the book for a moment and indulge the continual urge to reflect on the mosaic of people who have entered and exited your own life.

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life for the purpose of speaking with powerful candour. She tells the intimate stories of how her addiction came to be, and how she has sought to feed her need for a thriving social life at her own expense. Elizabeth has offered herself up as a case-study of what inevitably happens when we don’t have the tools, the maps, or even the language with which to engage with the subject of friendship. As it turns out, friendship – the real kind – was not what she was addicted to, nor was it what she was accumulating. Rather, it was approval. It was the self-worth that she drew from the affirmation of others. If we, as a society, ensured that we were more socially-literate, perhaps Elizabeth could have identified the difference much sooner. Perhaps we all could.

As well as telling her own stories, Elizabeth weaves together insights from psychology, philosophy, history, and the experiences of others in differing contexts. This ensures that as many people as possible are able to find themselves in the pages of this book. And, as a result, I found Friendaholic to be the book that I didn’t know I had been missing.

It’s funny. It’s emotive. It’s generous. It’s honest. And it’s refreshingly serious about friendship. I recommend it heartily.

Nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love.

There’s just one thing that felt missing, one insight that I instinctively began to fill any gaps with. I found myself willing Elizabeth to take a biblical route (totally unfairly, I should add, as she doesn’t identify as a Christian, nor does she claim this to be a book of any religious inclination).

I wanted her to explore the Bible, because in it, she would find an abundance of evidence for almost every point she felt compelled to make. Friendship soaks the pages of the Christian Bible.

Friendaholic quotes Jesus in its very first chapter, making reference to his declaration that ‘greater love has no one than this, that someone lay his life down for his friends’, but then never picks this astonishing claim, nor the history-altering man that it came from, up again (once again- this is no criticism, if it were, it would be a mightily unfair one). The platonic love that Elizabeth takes so seriously, and that our culture doesn’t take nearly seriously enough, is claimed to be the ‘greater’ love by Jesus, who subsequently kick-started a movement which was defined by this kind of love. Friendship was weaved into the earliest expressions of what we now call Christianity/the church. Jesus’ words were, and still are, lived out with astonishing impact.

This is not to say that Christians always perceive or do friendship perfectly. On the contrary, nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love. Indeed, the afore mentioned quote by Lauren Windle has been taken from a book where she tells the story of ‘being single in a marriage obsessed church’.

It’s for this reason that I so enjoyed Elizabeth’s offering. Friendaholic felt like a literary dusting brush, brushing aside generations worth of dirt from a long-neglected jewel; the jewel being real, true, and deep friendship. The kind of friendship that is as integral to our health as food and shelter, the kind that was included in the original blueprint for human flourishing, the kind that is both dramatically underrated, and yet greater than all other human loves.

You can take it from an ancient book, or Elizabeth Day’s brand new one – as it turns out, they will tell you the exact same thing.