Addiction
I come from a family predisposed to addiction. The beauty of our drug is its availability. It�s in every supermarket and every convenience store. It is sold at stands, in airports, and in almost every country. There is no legal age to possess this drug, so there is no need for fake ID�s. The high is as powerful as any street drug. It is instantaneous, often rendering the user oblivious to everything around them for anywhere from a few minutes to several days. Users of this drug are characterized by an air of preoccupation, unwillingness to interact with others, glazed eyes, and general aloofness. Deprived of their drug users often become impatient, suffering from a most unpleasant withdrawal. What is this wonderful substance capable of transporting the user to entire new worlds beyond any they have imagined? Books.
Both my parents were regular users when I was a child. As avid as any addict, Mom and Dad would climb into bed and �shoot up� with their specialized type of barbiturate. Whenever I came into their room to say goodnight I would see my parents reading. My own introduction came when I was still a baby. Mom and Dad started me slowly, first giving me a contact high by reading me stories before bedtime. I quickly developed a taste for this drug, often begging my parents for �just one more page.� I took my first real hit when I was four, from a book of Walt Disney stories. From the moment I held it in my hands and read those intoxicating words �Once Upon A Time,� I was hooked for life.
I read every chance I could. I read Highlights Magazine for Children when I was supposed to be getting ready for school. While walking to school, I read. As I reached the building, I would walk slower and slower, trying to squeeze in just a few more seconds of enjoyment. If my high was exceptionally powerful, I continued to mainline during class. Once I read to kill time before a spelling test and wound up missing the test completely.
Each afternoon I tossed the trappings of my �real life� (book bag, shoes, coat) onto the floor of my bedroom and picked up my drug paraphernalia (cookies, milk, and my trusty stuffed rabbit). Any break was unbearable. At the dinner table, where reading was a no-no, I raced through my meals, barely able to wait to be excused back into the company of Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, and Donald. After lights out, I would snatch a few more moments under the covers with a flashlight. My parents realized my surreptitious habits, but kindly looked the other way. They constantly encouraged me with trips to the library and the gift of at least one new book every holiday.
My addiction consisted solely of the words and ideas of others until my fifth grade teacher asked us to write a poem in class. Inspired by my current drug, Bunnicula by James and Deborah Howe, I wrote a poem concerning Harold the dog�s perception of his backyard in the morning. I finished the poem in half an hour and turned it in. Miss N returned it the next day with a big fat �A� written on it in red ink. I knew then that I wanted to be an author.
The concept of creating entire new worlds for others� enjoyment was a much more powerful drug than anything I had ever experienced before. Reading had become my �gateway drug� to an entirely new host of drugs like poetry, short stories, and plays. I scribbled endlessly, always searching for the next big hit. Hits were fast and fantastic at first; I used to be high for days as I dashed my way through a story. I lived entire weeks constantly buzzed by possibilities and ideas.
My first attempts at stories resulted in A�s and B�s at the hands of my teacher. I wrote a story about a curious alley cat named Scooter, a mysterious monster that lurked in swimming pools, and a statue that came to life at night. The grades were always accompanied by words of encouragement: �This is the best story about this picture,� �A good idea,� and so forth.
As time passed, however, I became somewhat jaded by my success. Hits were no longer as powerful. I began to get sloppy. As my middle school years arrived, I was churning out poorly conceived ideas with little plot and less characterization. My teachers often adorned these masterpieces of mediocrity with C�s and D�s. The messages written across the top weren�t nearly as inspiring as they were in the previous years. I was told: �This is a cop-out!� �See me!� and, the most insulting, �You quit AGAIN!� I thought my stories were just as good as the ones I�d written earlier-�more so because I was two years older and had more life experience.
Fed up with my teachers and unable to churn out new ideas that had the same punch as my earlier attempts, I vowed to stop trying all together. I barely did any work in my classes and spent designated �homework hours� reading. Any time I could, I escaped into a world where homework and studying didn�t exist. I found that world so beguiling that I began visiting it more and more, until I was reading (or thinking about reading) more than I was living in the �real world.�
By the second half of seventh grade, I was failing or getting D�s in all my classes. My social life wasn�t much better. My best friend since preschool had ditched me, and I was reduced to sitting with the rest of the �nerdy kids.� Miserable, I turned to my books again as my real life crumbled around me. I took to creating new adventures for the characters (the only friends who accepted me whole-heartedly); always with myself as the shining heroine who could do anything she put her mind to-�whether battling Cardinal Richelieu�s evil guards with D�Artagnan, or saving Bilbo Baggins from the dragon Smaug. I derived such pleasure from these copycat stories that I often repeated them endlessly, to make the feeling last as long as possible.
Unwilling to face up to the harsh reality of endless badgering from my teachers, I lied my way out of trouble. �I left it in my other bag.� �My friend was over yesterday and she must have taken my notebook by mistake.� I even employed the famous lie concerning the dietary habits of my dog.
Lying to my teachers soon graduated into lying to my parents. Whenever they asked how I was doing in school, I would say �Fine,� �Great,� �Pretty good.� I was surprised at how easy it was until I came home from school one day to find both my parents sitting at the kitchen table. In front of them was a notice from the school with all the details of my grades. As soon as I saw the return address on the envelope, my heart tobogganed into the pit of my stomach.
My parents couldn�t understand it. �Don�t you do the work?� they demanded, shaking their fingers in my face. Sure, I did plenty of work. I slayed dragons, I fought vicious monsters; I even saved a prince or two. Such adventures did not leave time for such mundane things as Art History, or Composition. The answers that came out of my mouth, however, were endless variations of the classic �I dunno.� Prompted either by despair or disgust at my balkiness, my parents pulled a last-ditch effort and enrolled me in a private school, hoping I would profit by the change of surroundings and people. They even went a step further by having me go straight to the library to do my homework after school and then wait for Dad to come get me after he got off work. I solemnly promised not to read, �Until you have finished all your homework, Janet.� This approach worked fine for the first few weeks until, unable to resist the siren call of the books that surrounded me, I began omitting small assignments or speeding through my work to have more time to read.
This arrangement was discarded when I started my new school and seemed to be doing better in my classes. I went to all my classes, took notes, paid attention, and even did my homework. That lasted for three weeks. Slowly, bit-by-bit, I started sliding back into my old ways. First, I conveniently �forgot� which pages I was supposed to read and spent precious homework minutes devouring the contents of my bookshelves. Next, I �accidentally� lost the folder that had my homework in it, but the folder with my stories was never far from my grasp. By the end of seventh grade, I was right back where I started from; only my grades had risen from F�s and D�s to D�s and C�s. Only when I learned that I might not graduate 8th grade with the rest of my class did I bear down and produce C�s and B�s. Good enough, I thought.
Throughout high school I did just enough work to get by, spending the rest of my time reading or composing new adventures for the fictional characters I read about. My own ideas fell by the wayside�I hadn�t written an original story or even had an original concept in four years. This half-hearted approach to my homework took me down a path that very nearly ended my scholastic career my freshman year of college.
At Christmas time during my freshman year of college, my GPA was 1.5. By the end of the year it was 1.12 and I was not invited to return the next fall. After my parents absorbed the latest episode of my spotted scholarly record, they informed me that I had until December first to get a full-time job and move into an apartment. Even then, I wasn�t too worried. I spent my days battling Dracula and befriending Frankenstein. I daydreamed about what my apartment would look like, and how comfortable the chairs would be for reading. I thought it would be great to have my own place, where I could read uninterrupted for hours. No need to worry about homework anymore, no more irritating teachers, no stomach twisting when the mail came. I had a good job in a factory that paid a whopping $6.50 an hour. I would be just fine.
Dad came home one day, tossed a paper at me (conveniently knocking Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit onto the floor), and told me to start looking at the �Apartment for Rent� section. He also handed me a calculator and showed me how much living on my own would cost. After my calculations, I determined that I would have a whole extra $15 dollars a month once I paid rent, bought groceries, and took care of utilities. �You won�t have time to eat apples and read all day, Janet� Dad told me. For the first time, I felt the worm of unease awaken in my stomach. No time for reading? This was a problem. Perhaps sensing my growing apprehension, Dad took me out to dinner that night, and told me I could continue to live at home if I went to our community college. I jumped at the chance and spent the rest of the meal imitating a broken-record recording of �thank you.�
That was the beginning of my final recovery. Slowly but surely, I weaned myself off the books and my copycat adventures. I went to our community college in the fall and concentrated on my classes and my friends�-my real friends, not those provided by Stephen King or Ken Kesey. Come Christmas break, I was actually looking forward to receiving my grades for the first time since elementary school. When the big moment came, Mom handed me the envelope, looking like she expected to be doused with battery acid any second. The look faded to be replaced by one of pride when I belted out my GPA of 3.5 at full volume.
Like so many other addictions, my addiction to books has extracted its price. Long hours and days of bingeing on copycat stories eroded my ability to write my own stories. I am so used to spinning endless tales that intertwine and twist back on themselves that the idea of writing something short with a definitive end mystifies me. Once able to spin original ideas off the top of my head at a moment�s notice, now I struggle to come up with an idea someone else hasn�t used first.
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