Hooked by Chloe Shantz-Hilkes Page B

person. In a funny way, coming off drugs and going through therapy has made him more unfamiliar to me than drugs ever did. He’s very obsessed with spirituality now, because of the support meetings that he goes to, and he can be a little pompous sometimes. I once told him that I had started drinking coffee, and he said, “You know that’s an addiction, right?” It was like he was saying, “I’m an expert on addiction, so now I can lecture you about coffee.” So in some ways, sobering up has changed him for the better, but in others it has also made him less real to me. He’s so Zen and health focused that he’s hardly anything like the dad I used to know.
    Virtually all hard drugs cause personality changes. So coming off those drugs also causes the user’s personality to change. To someone like Karl, who only ever knew his father as an addict, a sober parent can be a very unfamiliar one.
    One of the ways that I’ve dealt with finding out about my dad’s addiction is by supporting other people who are dealing with addiction issues. Whenever I have a friend who is having a problem with drugs, I tell them about my father’s experience. I tell them that drugs are a crutch and that I’ve seen what they can do. I tell them that being a functioning addict isn’t okay. After all, even though drugs don’t seem to have changed my dad’s behavior that much, I know they hurt his health. He sometimes slurs his speech or forgets words, and I think it’s because the drugs damaged his brain. He used to joke about it, but he doesn’t anymore. Now he says, “Shit. Why am I doing this?” And I know the time he spent doing drugs will affect him in the long run. So I guess this whole experience has made me more sensitive when it comes to drug problems, and has given me a feeling of responsibility to help anyone I can.

Finding out
    It wasn’t because my mom was drunk that I found out about her alcoholism. I was too naïve to realize that booze was the reason she acted the way she did. Instead, I found out because I liked to borrow her clothes. She had this big walnut dresser and there was a drawer in it that was full of scarves. One time when I was about eleven, I was rooting through this drawer and found a huge, half-empty bottle of wine. But I didn’t suddenly realize: Oh! I’m the child of an alcoholic.
    At that point, my mom was still a high-functioning addict. She was not abusive, and she wasn’t lying on the couch during the day or skipping work. But she had lots of self-esteem issues. She didn’t think she was smart enough, or good enough, or successful enough. So my theory is she drank to escape feeling shitty about herself. And although she kept her drinking under control until I was ten or eleven, it eventually became impossible to ignore.
    Many alcoholics suffer from low self-esteem, which often contributes to their decision to start drinking. Their feelings of worthlessness then make it even more difficult for them to deal with the addiction they’ve acquired.
    Things changed
    Something happened around the time I hit puberty that caused things to fall apart. I think it might have had to do with the fact that my mom had just finished a PhD. She wanted to be a successful scholar and it was a lot harder for her to do that than she had expected. So suddenly she found her career very disappointing, and all her other insecurities began to catch up with her.
    Even then, my mom hardly drank in front of my younger brother, Graeme, or me. So when I started getting older and having friends whose parents would come home from work and pour themselves a Scotch, I thought that was so strange. I was confused by the fact that they didn’t try to hide it, and by the knowledge that my mom had a problem and they didn’t, necessarily—despite drinking so openly.
    How it played out
    Although my mom didn’t drink in front of us,