I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, went to undergraduate school in Evanston, and have been living in Chicago for most of my adult life. I don't know who any of you are, where you are on the globe, any of that. All I know is what the mainstream media is showing the masses about what goes on where I live vs. how things really are. The media doesn't tell you how we manage day to day or how it affects our psychological well-being. Simply put, Chicagoans have now gone completely bonkers. All we seem to do is hurt each other. Between the protesting and the gun violence and the drugs on the west side, it amazes me that anyone can find any peace of mind at all anywhere. There's just so much ugliness everywhere you turn, it consumes you.

So I say to myself: On a scale of zero to Nature Valley granola bar, how much is my city falling apart?

I gave up the drugs on June 6, 2012--Heroin, Cocaine, Ecstasy, Marijuana, the whole shot. Done. Still, I wasn't able to kick the booze. My biological mother is an alcoholic, and her mother died from complications of alcoholism. I wasn't too far behind, as my liver shut down at the ripe old age of 29. The ICU doctors told my parents that if I never drank again that I wouldn't have any permanent brain or liver damage, but that I had the liver of a 65-year-old man. After I was released from the hospital, I thought to myself, "Self, we'll just drink wine instead of vodka." Insanity. Alcohol did for me what I could not do for myself, and the only happiness I had ever known was through the bottom of a bottle. The Pinot Grigio plan didn't work out so well. (Shocker.) After two glasses I would already get the shakes and wake up in a huge puddle of sweat the next day. The misery of drinking quickly outweighed whatever joy I thought I was getting out of it. On August 18th of last year, I decided that if I was going to have anything even remotely resembling a quality of life, alcohol couldn't be part of it. This terrified me. Alcohol was my best friend. My best friend was trying to kill me, and it was winning. Once I realized this, it hit my over the head with a 2x4 and knocked me on my ass, and that was the end of it. I refuse to forfeit whatever life I have left to a glass bottle. F**k the bottle.

I'm not going to say that life is all super and full of rainbows and all that nonsense, because it isn't. Life is still hard, and people still suck. The difference today is how I deal with life and how I respond to those people. The difference is in how all medications actually work now, to the extent that they do. The best is how I'm not physically enslaved by something that doesn't give a rat's ass about me. I have my freedom back, and that means everything. Freedom.

My name is Faye, and I am an alcoholic. I am drug addict. I always have been, I just didn’t know it until I started drinking. I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, and had to take the train to and from the city. The train station that stopped by my parents’ house happened to have a bar and grill. More often than not, on my way back from each visit, I would sit at the bar for an hour or so and drink the better part of four martinis prior to boarding the train. Around the time I was 25 I was going to a lot of raves on the weekends (I thought I was cool.) My boyfriend at that time was this hotshot kid in his 20s who was not only an exceptional asshole, but happened to sell exceptionally large amounts of ecstasy. One day he and I got into an argument on the phone which left me in a fit of tears by the time I got off of the train. I sat on the stairs outside the train station and cried my eyes out in a drunken stupor in my light blue sundress, as I saw this to be the solution to the problem for some reason. From around the corner came an older African-American man, about 5’8” and built like a house. He had dreadlocks past his waistline and was dressed relatively well. He swaggered up to me and said, “Damn, baby. What a girl so pretty as you doin’ cryin’?” I, of course, gave him the entire litany of my pointless argument with the boyfriend. Based on his attire and overall manner of speech, I deduced that he might have access to something that could make me feel better. Unbeknownst to me, this gentleman happened to be an overseer for a prominent gang that had factions on both the west and south sides of the city. He said, “You ever try heroin?” I had not, so I gladly (and blindly) went with this large stranger to procure hard drugs that I had never before ingested into my body. At the time, all I could think was how fortunate I was to find a solution to my current emotional conundrum. It wasn’t until later that I realized that all he saw sitting on those stairs was a white girl that probably had money, and that by virtue of her emotional state could be easily manipulated.
The large stranger introduced himself simply as “D”, and I introduced myself as Snowflake. (There was no way on God’s green earth I was giving this man my real name. This is about the only intelligent decision I ever made through the course of my relationship with him.) D and I made our way west to Greektown, and walked into an SRO that had been around since the late 1800s. I quickly figured out that this old hotel was a cockroach-infested crack house, and the only reason the city kept it around was because it survived the Chicago fire. In order to go upstairs we had to take one of those old-fashioned elevators that have the expanding screen that you have to pull back and forth to let people on and off. The thing is, the elevator didn’t have any doors so you could see right into every floor you were passing. We got on the fourth floor and he led me into room 412. Room 412 was smaller than my bedroom, and it was his home. It strongly resembled the home of a clean and highly organized hoarder. I said, “You really do have a lot of $#%^ in here, you know that?” He replied, “Yo, listen. Shuga momma, you spend as much time as I did in an eight by 10 cell, you learn how to make $#%^ fit.” And he did.
D opened up a small refrigerator in the corner of the room and pulled out a Ziploc bag filled with little bags of beige powder. He told me to give him $10 and, in return, gave me what was known as a blow, the street standard for a $10 bag of heroin. I moved a pile of blank DVDs off of a nearby table and poured out the bag of mystery powder. I started chopping it up into two lines as if it were cocaine, only to realize that there wasn’t really much chopping to be done. I formed a line, rolled up a $20 bill, and snorted one of the lines. (I had done cocaine for years, so at this point I was highly skilled at the the roll, snort, repeat routine.) After...

[ Continued ]

There are a number of experiences that I told myself I was taking to the grave. There are certain things that no human being should ever witness, let alone personally endure. I figured it was bad enough that I’m carrying this around--I would never dare share such ugliness with another human being for him or her to carry around as well. Many humans in my life have been paid by the hour to listen to me complain, mainly about the woes surrounding my cushy, upper-class life and the family with which I share it. Paid by the hour or not, there are certain unwritten laws of humanity, the most important of which is that one does not deliberately inflict pain on another person. Ever.

I actually let part of an experience slip on just one occasion. My therapist said, “Um...wow. Faye, have you ever told anyone any of this?” Of course, I had not. That was the closest I had ever gotten to disclose any of these experiences to another human being. That changes now.

At one time in my life, for some odd reason, one of my life goals was to try every drug once. After I had my first drink, I thought to myself, “Self, if this is how good alcohol feels, you HAVE to try everything else that’s out there.” I figured that, albeit illegal, one of the greatest liberties that we had as humans was the freedom to alter our own consciousness. What a ######6 terrible idea.

The following is a series of memories from April 2010-June 2012. With the exception of the first memory, they are not in chronological order, nor are they in any particular order of importance. They are a series of experiences I collected working for one of the biggest African-American gangs in the city of Chicago. The names have been changed (obviously), but the events have not. The emotions have not. I often have people ask me how a Northwestern University graduate wound up hooked on heroin and crack-cocaine. Well, this is how.

This process is very picky. There's a part of the machine that contains copper coils that transmit the magnetic stimulation to the nerves in my brain. That part has to be perfectly placed on my head in order for the treatment to work properly. Several times throughout the 38-minute process, the nurse has to readjust it so that the coils are on my head. More often than not, I don't even realize that I've moved and she's over to my left adjusting the machine. In the beginning I would listen to music on my phone to pass the time, but I was too much of a fidgeter. There's a TV with a DVD player in there specifically for the purpose of entertaining patients, so today I brought in season two of Boardwalk Empire. We're both really enjoying it and the nurse said that I fidgeted ten times less than when I listened to music.

In terms of results, I think I'm finally starting to feel something. Basically, I'm starting to give a sh*t more. In the beginning, I just wore yoga pants to the treatments and didn't do a whole lot with my makeup and my hair. I (usually) showered, I just didn't do a whole lot with myself because I was depressed as hell. The last two days I actually had the energy and the attitude to put on some cute earrings and wear my hair down. I'm starting to care about how I look again! Likewise, I'm starting to talk to people again. I knew that the treatment could potentially send me into mania, and that's actually fine with me. I don't know if my talkativeness is a sign of mania or a sign of me betting better, but I'll take it either way.

Fun fact: I'm in grad school for forensic psychology. The psychiatrist in charge of my TMS is actually a forensic psychiatrist. He had the privilege of forensically evaluating Jeffrey Dahmer before he went to trial. I see the doctor tomorrow for a check-in, and I have every intention of picking his brain about the experience. Absolutely fascinating.