Have you ever seen the music video for the Selena Gomez & Kygo song “It Ain’t Me”? It’s been my go-to song for the last year. At first I dug it for the beat and because it feels so buoyant; but then I realized what it was about—the first time I saw the video, I cried—it’s about addiction, the damage it can cause, and how sometimes you have to leave the person with addiction behind.
Who’s gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning?
Who’s gonna rock you when the sun won’t let you sleep?
Who’s waking up to drive you home when you’re drunk and all alone?
Who’s gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning?
It ain’t me
It’s coming up to the one year anniversary of the last night I had my ex in my life. March 1, 2017 she assaulted me in the bathroom of a Tim Hortons in Springhill, N.S. Leading up to that night was no picnic either. I’d spent the better part of three years supporting her as best I could. It was a nightmare. But nightmares get normalized quickly. The last months were particularly awful. I don’t know where to start with that.
I’ve spent the last while trying not to think of that night or about that relationship in general. And, more broadly, the relationship before that, which was also with a person in active addiction. But I guess these things seep out sometimes, and the upcoming one-year mark is making me think about it. I don’t even know if I can engage with the emotions of it; but I can maybe talk about some of the facts.
One of the reasons the video made me cry is because part of it is a hospital scene where the person with addiction lays in a hospital bed unconscious. I visited my ex many times in hospitals. One of those times occurred when I was driving her to a hospital in another town to get into its detox unit. When we were about five minutes from the hospital she started convulsing and seizing, then went unconscious and limp in the passenger seat, slumped up against me as I was driving. I thought she was dying or had died. I tried to hold her up as I raced to the hospital because I knew we were close and it was quicker than stopping and calling an ambulance. I screeched into the parking lot but it was an unfamiliar hospital in an unfamiliar town so I didn’t know where the ER entrance was. I pulled up and called 911 because I couldn’t carry her into the hospital. She came to, disoriented, but also annoyed I’d called 911. The paramedics arrived and eventually they got her to go inside. She was annoyed because now she would have to go through the ER rather than right to the detox unit. I stayed with her in the ER for a while, where she’d periodically have lengthy seizures where her whole body would convulse and she’d be unresponsive; I’d try to hold her, keep her from falling or at least make sure she didn’t smash her head too hard on the gurney. That was just one day. Many of the other days seem like a blur, but that one is in sharp focus.
I went to an appointment with a therapist through the criminal injuries counselling program for the first time this week. I had hopes it would be a place I could unload some of this stuff. But I wasn’t very impressed with the therapist (“Well, at least she’s not stalking you!” “When it’s men, they usually end up stalking the women.” Etc.). And anyway my next appointment isn’t until April, well after the one-year mark. So if you’ll indulge me, I will perhaps make periodic blog posts about the experience of loving and leaving someone with addiction.
I don’t even know what I’m saying here. The song. That day where I thought she died slumped up against me in my car in a strange town. My close friends who knew the score had already been telling me for months and months to walk away. But I kept going. Until I couldn’t, until she beat me up. I got out of the assault relatively unscathed physically; only bruises and bent glasses, a headache, some shock. And maybe it was a useful thing in a way because it was, in the end, what made me walk away and never look back. That night itself was fucked. Lies she had told me for three years seemed to come out, and any remaining belief I had in her ability to be an honest, caring person vanished. I have great empathy for people who live with substance use disorder. But for myself, I don’t have it in me anymore to support someone in active addiction. Not as a partner, a lover, a friend, or even an acquaintance.
In the video Selena Gomez walks away. Every day I am grateful that I did, too.