Being Normal

Mark Prest

 

My feelings about my Wonderland experiences are ever changing. Recently I was at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous when a member shared their aspirational thoughts about their desire to feel “normal”. Surprisingly, this is everyday AA speak and is usually spattered with “us and them out there” or “normal folk” references – meaning non-alcoholics. I’ve always found these self-effacing comparisons unhelpful and difficult to swallow, as for me it evidences internalised stigma. When else do you hear someone with a socially acceptable health condition say such a thing? Illness is a consequence of living so they were already what they aspired to be and it’s at odds with a central AA teaching to identify with the similarities and not the differences.

 

My response is to remember something I said during Wonderland which went more or less like this: “exploring my addiction & recovery experiences in art felt normal as it speaks to my whole ‘self’, outside the usual clinical or medical dialogue surrounding the subject”. I then shared my rejection of the hindering, idealistic concept of normality, which I had just heard and that for so long had tainted how I had felt about “self”. On reflection this was a catalytic and emancipatory moment.

 

Let me explain. My every day normal was to drink and all that went with it. Waking at first light, shaking, retching, riddled with anxiety, full of fear and depression. Was there leftover booze in the fridge, was the shop open, did I have any money and how could I face leaving the house? Alcohol was my coping strategy. Once this elixir of life was inside me I was transported to UTOPIA, a place of safety and refuge. At least that’s what I thought. Eventually my self-medication stopped working, I was stuck in a paradox - I couldn’t live with or without.

 

The novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley perfectly described my Utopian Dystopian feelings when he said

 

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

 

We can only aspire to Utopia – it can never be reached.

 

On entering rehab any sense of who I was imploded. Stopping drinking was “not normal” or learning to live “life on life's terms” without the crutch of substance. It was a completely alien notion and left me feeling fragmented, broken, not knowing who I was and without identity. In reality this signalled the beginning of my recovery and the search for a new identity. I tentatively began to make sense of the broken biscuits that had become my life.

 

Quite quickly, I realised that a solution might provide itself by combining my professional background in the arts with my own addiction and recovery experiences. It made sense: art was a language I significantly understood and the work I now do with Portraits of Recovery was born.

 

Normally I initiate, develop and deliver projects, but I do not actively participate. This approach, watching others transform, always felt safer, but I was curious to experience the magic I so voyeuristically witnessed. In Wonderland I took a risk, got vulnerable and I have to be honest, sceptically took part. Artist Cristina Nuñez was pleased, as she had been trying to persuade me for a while to experience her method to, as she says, “turn my shit into diamonds”.

 

As I said, my participation in Wonderland felt normal and whole. The project’s shared and collective delivery somehow acted as a kind of glue that's helped re-frame and reconfigure my fragmented self. Art and image taking has allowed me to differently make sense and understand what is and has been happening. Taking part mirrored back respective feelings of value and self-worth. I found a different way of looking at self by recognising the aesthetic value in images that I would previously have rejected for their ugliness. I'm more certain that art can act as a strategy for recovery now. I’m utilising what's always been with me, my constant cultural assets as symbolic of central core beliefs and values. Hence I've always been valuable, had value within me, it’s just that I lost sight of this - but art and Wonderland is and has allowed me to re-visualise who I am and what I might be.

 

For me, recovery is about a process of self-normalisation, the reaching towards a new state of being as based on self-acceptance of who and what I am and including all the ugly bits. With self-acceptance comes an inner, more peaceful and quieter mind that ultimately offers freedom from the overwhelming feelings of self-confinement. It’s this newness that supports an environment and attitude for recovery to flourish and evolve. What Wonderland helped begin me to realise is that my normal can be a pile of crumbs...or a whole biscuit!

 

 

*Huxley (1849-1963), Music at Night, Garden City, 1931, 233