The Weight of Shame
The water heater in Zac’s apartment and many of his kitchen cabinets were filled with empty bottles of vodka
A few years ago, Zac lost over 90 pounds in less than two years. But the weight of the shame he carried for his alcoholism was 500 times heavier than all that weight he lost. In his blog, he talked about the shame and self-hatred he felt and told me often how ashamed he was of his alcoholism. He felt he was a tremendous failure every time he relapsed. I know that relapse is part of battling alcoholism and is incredibly common and while I was upset and so worried when Zac relapsed, I tried to remember this and tell him to show himself compassion. He never really could. I believe his shame and self-hatred kept him from going to rehab, AA meetings (or a similar secular option) or getting any other support that directly addressed his alcoholism. As far as I know, Zac always sobered up in the hospital and then might stay with a friend, once he stayed with me, and then he’d go back to his life. When he relapsed, he had lots of tricks to hide the evidence, even in his own home. When we cleaned out his apartment after his death, we found empty vodka bottles stashed deep in all his kitchen cabinets and some in his bedroom closet and other places. Almost like he couldn’t stand the visibility of throwing all those bottles away.
The shame was so bad that he was not totally honest with some of his closest friends, family or even his therapist (from what he told me). He viewed his addiction as the worse kind of failure and he judged himself as the worst of all possible humans and expected others to judge him similarly. The way he talked about himself was devastating. It was like he bottled up every ugly, horrible thing that was ever said about a person in the world and those ugly voices hung out in his brain, lying to him, telling him he was all those things and more. Part of Zac’s brilliance as a writer was that whatever cruel or demeaning thing someone might say about his opinions or writing, Zac didn’t care all that much because he had already said things to himself that were exponentially worse than what strangers on the internet might write about him.
Zac and I both struggle with low self-esteem and lack of self-compassion. One of the tricks I learned to help myself over the years was to think about what I was saying to myself and ask myself if I would ever say those things to a good friend. Zac was incredibly kind, patient and empathetic with not only his friends but so many people he encountered both professionally and personally. I asked him if he would ever say those judgmental things to his friends. “Of course not”, he said. But I know it didn’t matter because no self-help book “exercise” could convince Zac to himself that he was anything other than a weak loser or whatever the latest garbage he would whisper to himself.
Zac lost weight and carried himself differently and got some brighter clothes and took more pictures and did more things. And yet he STILL CARRIED the weight of shame. It was like he carried that rack of gym weights everywhere he went. For a few years he dropped some of those weights and maybe asked others to carry some of it. But somehow in the last year or so he piled all the weight of shame back on and it dragged him down so deep into the darkness that it eventually buried him.
If you’ve read this and are struggling with addiction, I have so much compassion for you. It’s my greatest wish that we collectively destroy the shame and stigma of addiction. I hope you have someone in your life you can share the deepest, hardest truths about your addiction. You deserve to live without shame.
