Memoirs, Our Monthly Picks

The Battle That Taught Me Empathy: An Exclusive Guest Post from Melissa Bond, Author of Blood Orange Night, Our August Nonfiction Monthly Pick

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Melissa Bond’s extraordinary memoir of an accidental addiction and what it took to recover. The writing here is propulsive and vivid; you’re with the author through some truly nightmarish events, most especially the blood orange night of the title. Keep reading for an exclusive guest post from Melissa Bond about how her experiences have changed her perception of addiction.

Melissa Bond’s extraordinary memoir of an accidental addiction and what it took to recover. The writing here is propulsive and vivid; you’re with the author through some truly nightmarish events, most especially the blood orange night of the title. Keep reading for an exclusive guest post from Melissa Bond about how her experiences have changed her perception of addiction.

Mom taught me about addiction when I was a kid. By middle school, I remember mom with a scotch in her hand every night. I found her mirror with the dusted white sheen of cocaine in high school. My mother’s addictions filled the house like smoke, and I breathed them in, choking. 

She went to rehab when I was 17 and came out fragile as spun glass. I vowed I’d never be like her. I studied Jungian psychotherapy, Shamanism and transpersonal psychology, and I used those philosophies to construct a narrative about addiction. I wanted to understand it, but I also wanted to escape my wounded childhood. I told myself addicts were longing for the mystic, longing for connection, longing for an escape from our modern-day existential plight, but they’d taken a wrong turn. In my determination not to be like them, I convinced myself I had the map out and was immune from such a wrong turn.  

What I didn’t understand then was that all my musings were influenced by our cultural narrative about addiction. This narrative condemns addiction as an affliction of weakness, a loss of self-determination, a collapse into the shadowed vectors of desire that plague us. I won’t be that, I told myself. I’ll be strong. I’ll face all my existential threats like a Gladiator.  

In all my supposed insight, I was missing compassion. And then, at age 42, my life collapsed. After suffering from pregnancy induced pathological insomnia, I found myself hooked on one of the most powerful sedative hypnotics on the market. I’d been prescribed Ativan, a benzodiazepine like Valium, Klonapin and Xanax, for nightly use by my doctor. My marriage collapsed, my friends leaned away, and I felt more alone than I’ve ever felt in my life.   

For years I felt a shame that bled and wouldn’t heal. I condemned myself for getting hooked. Despite the fact that my dependency on the drugs was physical and not psychological, I feared the judgement of others. It was inside this incredibly broken place of shame I found the piece of compassion I’d neglected to include in my philosophical musings on the topic. Now, when I think of my mother or those hooked on opioids or the cellist I knew years back who’d succumbed to crack cocaine addiction because his demons were too big to endure, my heart surges toward them. My epic battle of becoming dependent upon and then recovering from benzodiazepines gave me the gift of an empathy I never knew I needed. Falling to my knees gave me the dirt of humility. I now know that many of us fight epic battles like this every day to survive.