Monday, March 20, 2017 Volume 101 Issue 42
student printz SERVING SOUTHERN MISS SINCE 1927
www.studentprintz.com
Alum recovers from hidden addiction JACK HAMMETT
managing editor
Sunlight cradled the world like the arms of a parent, keeping the neighborhood still and hushed. Amid this quiet sits Spice World, a house which many Hattiesburg music lovers recognize as a venue for music, friendship and body positivity. George and George, a pair of yowling felines, stalked across the windblown front yard in search of food. Somewhere in the past, addiction riddled a life with heavy rain. USM psychology graduate Alissa – she prefers to not share her full name – lit a cigarette and perched catlike on the porch in a flower patterned dress. The venue is her every day, her home, her sunlit mornings and afternoons. Alissa is normal. Her life had been different before she lived at Spice World. Not many people around her had seen through her unwavering functionality, beneath which she had hidden her other pained half. In a past life, Alissa was one of many addicts who hid their substance abuse in daylight. She consistently made straightAs and the Dean’s List at Oak Grove High School and Southern Miss. Her work ethic and intelligence are not easily matched: Not every student can graduate with a psychology degree, and fewer can do so while holding a job. According to a Complete College America study, only about 20 percent of students graduate college on time. “When I took my first painkiller . . . I thought I felt love in my heart,” she said. One of Alissa’s colleagues described her as put together. Nothing in her childhood suggested she would later develop a habit. Many addicts, according to Alissa, have harsh childhoods, which she learned from Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings. She said her childhood was loving. “My family was great,” she said. “Everyone was great. We moved to America when I was in third grade, and it was the biggest f•••ing culture shock, because we moved to Alabama. It was the Bible Belt. Everybody went to church. I felt different – not being able to understand anybody because of their southern accent, nobody being able to understand me because of my English accent.” Alone in a new culture, Alissa spent her formative years dealing with anxiety and depression. She said she remembers not feeling okay with
Jack Hammett | Printz Alissa plays fetch with her dog in her backyard at Spice World in March, 2017. herself from an early age and that she was not taught how to cope with mental illness. Growing up under these conditions prevented her from seeing the effects of depression and anxiety on her daily life. Such is the case of the human eye or a camera lens – an object loses focus if it is too close. “It’s hard to see it when you’re in it,” she said. “Especially when you’re a kid. Nobody teaches kids about these things.” It was in middle school when Alissa met Katy. A multitude of factors create a lifestyle. One factor is habit formation, and habits can be transmitted between people, according to sociologists Luigi Berzano and Carlos Genova. Katy and Alissa formed a habit of shoplifting – two pairs of adolescent hands swiping thousands of dollars of merchandise from shopping mall retailers. However, Katy and Alissa understood each other, and their friendship was invaluable. “I thought, ‘This person f•••ing gets
me,’” Alissa said. “She was just as f•••ed up, just as depressed as I was – like hated herself as much as I hated myself. Looking back, I realize how f•••ed up it is for middle schoolers to talk about how they want to kill themselves. But we could relate to each other. . . . It was exciting, it was exhilarating – we would go into a store with a big beach bag, completely empty, and fill it up. We poured it all out onto the bed, looking at it, and felt alive.” The pair’s anxiety and depression worsened over time. They eventually agreed that if one decided to commit suicide, she would call the other so they could do it simultaneously. This agreement would reflect some of her future companionships, for which mutual self-harm became a basis. In high school, everything changed. Alissa’s parents decided to move to Hattiesburg. Her life would begin anew for a fourth time, an existential shift that would further affect the balance of her depression and happier moments. Her social frame was becoming subject to a fragmentation over which she had no control.
Having to leave Katy devastated Alissa. “[Katy] was the one person in my life who completely understood me, whom I could be myself around,” she said. “I remember there were lots of tears. That was the time I started self-harming. I wanted my parents to see what they were doing to me.” The family moved at the end of Alissa’s 9th-grade year. After the summer, she began 10th grade at Oak Grove High School in Hattiesburg. New Alliances On her first day, Alissa met a young woman named Sandy, who invited her to lunch. Some of Alissa’s time in Alabama, where she had occasionally drunk beer and smoked weed with unsteady friends in rural fields, shaped her alliances at Oak Grove. “When I got to the lunch table, it looked like the school’s drug crowd,” she said. “I thought, ‘Hell yeah,’ because I knew how to drink, I knew how to smoke and these could be my friends. We had something to bond over. It was an easy way to get friends.”
Southern states like Mississippi have the most painkiller prescriptions per person, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health. Alissa found her niche with the group, hanging out with them after school and hosting gatherings at her house when her parents left town. She cleaned in the mornings after, scrubbing away the remnants of the weekend’s simulated happiness. Alissa grew acquainted with painkillers in her Oak Grove days. This discovery would follow her into college. “It was like, ‘This is my favorite feeling in the world, this makes me feel alive, this makes me feel like I love myself,’” she said. “I was in a couple of abusive relationships that were centered around taking pills together. I didn’t realize how much I was being taken advantage of. I had a job, so I had money and could spend it all on drugs. I can never do painkillers again, because I loved them so much. . . . I thought these pills were making me feel love.” continued on | pg 4