They Said It Would Be Fun.
My alcoholism didn’t start with alcohol. My first “high” was due, in large part, to a candy striper.
Candy stripers were hospital volunteers. Working with sick people – and for free – sounded dreadful to me. Worse, they wore candy-cane-striped dresses, and I have never been the kind of girl to purposefully wear a dress.
Then I met Tikki, a free-spirited, old-soul hippie – the type of person I both idolized and feared. I would never have known Tikki was a candy striper except that one day, hanging out by the lockers, Tikki pulled a teeny tablet of phenobarbital from her pocket.
I guess candy stripers had access to the hospital medicine cabinets.
“You can’t take a whole one,” she said, her long frizzy hair swooping down over her hand, making it hard for the three of us to see the pill. “We’ll cut it.”
So we did – and I took the tiniest sliver of a drug I have ever seen in my life. I rarely even consumed baby aspirin at home, so I was terrified. I hope I don’t die, I thought, then swallowed it and went to class.
I slept through the entire afternoon of classes. Somehow I got home and fell asleep on the couch.
At dinnertime, the family piled into the car – we were going out to dinner! This rare treat was especially sad for me; I couldn’t stay awake long enough for dinner. I crawled into the back of the station wagon and slept while the family went inside to eat.
I heard my mother surmise: “She must be really tired,” implying that I had been working hard in school.
My guilt was overwhelming. I wanted to tell her I was afraid I might die, that I couldn’t lift my head off the floor. But I was afraid I’d get into trouble, so I said nothing. When we got home, I went straight to bed.
The next day, I went back to school, finally able to stay awake. “Getting high” seemed pretty awful to me. I thought, I will never take another pill again.
Mere minutes passed before I decided that other pills might be okay. I spent two years stealing pills from random medicine cabinets just to see what they did. Other than codeine, which I learned later was the equivalent of alcohol in a pill, I experienced no pleasant sensations from pills.
Most of the pills I took, I never even identified. With no internet, I just randomly popped pills with no clue. Nothing was as drastic as the phenobarbital – until someone gave me a Black Beauty. They said it would be fun. Ha! My heart beat out of my chest and I couldn’t stop panicking long enough to breathe. One Black Beauty finally frightened me enough to stop taking pills.
I’d thought pills were a safe way to get “high” without any outward signs that I was using them. But pills were too unpredictable.
Oddly, I didn’t even think about the danger incurred by taking unknown pills. I just wanted to be able to safely alter my mood – and I couldn’t do that after consuming some random tablet from some random house.
So at the ripe old age of 16, I quit taking pills altogether. Unless it’s absolutely essential, like antibiotics, I still avoid medication today.