My name is Lynn Marie Smith, I’m thirty years old, and I am a recovering addict.
I am not a guru, specialist, or expert. I’m just a girl who put down the weapons of mass destruction and decided to look at this “incurable disease” of mine in a new way. After all, if my addiction was in fact something that was never going to go away, a roommate that I was stuck with for the rest of my God-given life, why not try to see it as a friend? Or as a wise sage who had something to teach me? Why not laugh and crack jokes with the little devil? Why not just invite the big bad beast in for tea and crumpets, rather than try to blow its head off with an Uzi?
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that the only way to convert an enemy into a friend is through love, not hatred or fighting. Today I am completely drug and alcohol free-but it wasn’t until I stopped fighting my addictive nature and started loving myself and everything that I am, that I begin to heal my life. Loving myself meant loving all of me-including my addiction. Yes, that’s right: I LOVE ADDICTION!
Sounds crazy right? It goes against everything we are programmed to believe. We have been taught by our parents, our religions, our politicians, and our social programs that in order to triumph and overcome we must fight, hate, battle, and conquer. Becoming free of our demons means using only those metaphors borrowed from the military or from the school of Jonathan Edwards’ power of the will. After spending many years trying this approach, playing the poor victim, blaming my alcoholic father, hating myself, fighting my addiction, and getting nowhere but more miserable, I thought there must be another way. It started off as a simple experiment, shifting myself from a state of battle to a state of acceptance, flipping the switch from Mrs. Reagan’s “Just Say No!” to my own “Just Say Yes.” Living in each moment, I chose to see my addiction as a teacher rather than a monkey on my back, and that one choice has transformed my entire life.
When I first went public with my story on MTV’s True Life and The Oprah Winfrey Show, I had such a sense of relief, a feeling of complete freedom washed over me for the first time in my life. I had spent so many years hating and condemning myself, so many years trying to hide my dirty, dark past and all of my perceived failures. And now here I was on national television letting it all hang out: the alcoholic home, the drugs, the psyche wards, the brain damage, and the misery. I was finally taking the darkest parts of myself and revealing them, embracing them, and it happened to be with Oprah holding my hand. The guilt and the shame that had controlled my life for so long began to dissolve. At last, I was no longer hiding, but was free to live. Yes, addiction is a part of me, but it is not all of me. I am not damaged or destroyed. I am not a label, diagnosis, or problem to be solved. I am me, Lynn Marie Smith, just a girl trying to find her way like everybody else.
After the MTV and Oprah shows aired, I began to receive emails, thousands of them, from people all over the world-kids, parents, teachers, inmates-all reaching out, searching, asking for advice. After my first book, Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy (Simon and Schuster, 2006) was published, and after I began to travel the country speaking to audiences about my experiences, the e-mails have continued.
The one question that I am asked the most is, “Lynn, how did you do it, how did you beat addiction?” It has taken me many years to be able to answer that question but now I am able to say, “I didn’t beat my addiction, I loved it.” The War on Drugs is a losing battle, Just Say No and Crack is Whack tried their best; it is a new world and it is time for a new way.
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke says, “…always hold to the difficult, what even now appears most alien to us will become most familiar and loyal. How could we forget those old myths which are to be found in the beginnings of every people; the myths of the dragons which are transformed, at the last moment, into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is at bottom the helplessness that seeks our help.”
Once I decided to love my addiction, my “dragon” transformed into a princess in whose soulful eyes I could see my own beautiful reflection. I continue to thank my addiction every day for helping me, for teaching me how to love and accept myself, for showing me what I don’t want, and teaching me what I still need to learn. But mostly I love addiction for giving me the gift of compassion, compassion not only for myself, but also for the millions of others out there, who are exactly like me.
This is for them.
