Fill In The Blanks

My name is Bobby, and I’m a student. A person who has never been there and can never, ever understand.

Last Thursday I spent most of my afternoon sitting in on a support group for recovering addicts—all men who had been affected by homelessness. The meeting consisted exclusively of the men’s introductions and their accompanying stories, each of which had a way of humanizing their teller by describing his awareness of losing components of that same humanity to addiction. A few hours later, while referencing one of the men in conversation, I went through a classic Liberal’s Dilemma, choking up on whether to call him a heroin addict or a person with a heroin addiction.

I refer to the distinction somewhat disparagingly only because, at a certain point, hand-wringing over esoteric PC-terms is mostly just reflective of one’s luxury to do so, and the detachment from more pressing issues that enables that luxury. Though a concern with offending people is absolutely admirable, I’ve seen people stutter at merely having to use “African-American” as a term of identification—as if anything deviating from a dream of colorblindness is somehow subversive.

But back to The Dilemma. My hesitation was rooted in my own attention to a distinction, intended to emphasize the humanity of the men, and its contrast with the authoritative bluntness with which they labeled themselves as addicts or alcoholics. My name is _______ and I am a _______. Notice how even one’s name—that classic stable reminder of identity—is implicitly less permanent than the person’s status as Substance Dependent in the sentence’s formation. When people say they’re addicts, it carries seriously heavy weight. Pure permanence. No qualifier that they’re human first. Even the guys who’ve been clean long enough to qualify for preventative outreach to local schools acknowledge the centrality of that addiction to who they are before anything else is mentioned.

While I had, of course, been familiarized with this style of self-presentation through representations of AA in popular media, it was a raw, staggering experience in real life. It’s a sort of reminder of our tendency as people to embed notions of pure individuality with disassociation from any descriptive terms—an extreme (and well-intentioned) resistance to labeling. Implicit in this tendency is the idea that to really be a human, one must transcend the confines of identity-infused words. We are all more than one thing.

It does seem like a productive way to avoid stereotyping, but the reality is much more complex. A man at the meeting at one point described the profoundness of realizing that he was a Crackhead. A Crackhead, not someone with a crack habit. The distinction is not meant to be demeaning; contrarily, it implies the psychological maturity to look differently at the effects of his addiction. For him to become an observer, looking in the mirror but seeing something else—realizing both how others might see him and how that is different from how he would like to present himself to the world.

The interesting thing here is that this detachment from what some might call a sense of individuality (or a sense of ownership about one’s identity) really seemed to constitute empowerment. The self has a curious relationship with stereotypes it inevitably embodies: while I will never understand the workings of these men’s minds, I do feel that much meeting’s redemptive strength came from how the group dynamic treated the tension between one’s constant being, and to what extent that self is communicated to others (as opposed to only the “addict” face).

And that tension is so, so powerful. It took a little bit of time, but one realizes after an hour of these discussions that the purpose of self-labeling as an Addict over Person With Addiction isn’t to construct a moat around that single component of one’s identity. Instead, it’s more like the first step to conceiving oneself as functioning outside of a linear narrative, with people and things coming and going, but in the end existing for and pertaining to the constant self. Imagine instead a three-dimensional model, with a small part of identity being tossed around with each interaction with another person. Here, the self might even be more descriptive of a series of relationships than anything that could be conceived of as an entity.

Such a model might seem somehow flawed—like it gives others too much say in who an individual is. Obviously, no person or group of people can be defined by another, but I don’t think that’s quite what was going on.

More that, to the extent a person is aware that he or she is presenting his or her self to others in a certain way, that person is also aware of the difference between what that presentation communicates and what they, as individuals, perceive to be real. The existence of an authentic self is implied, and can then be strengthened through dialogue that challenges its stability (just as the Crackhead label is only painful if it is dissonant with what one feels to be true, or if it provokes thought about how susceptible that truth might be to change).

And the parameters defining that authentic self might actually change on a day-to-day basis. But the important thing is that one believes that it is there.

And, good God, did these guys believe it was there.