Death Grip (39 page)

But the story doesn't end there. I didn't kill myself, because that would mean they won. The story ends here, with me living in Gunbarrel years later feeling, on a good day, almost like my old self. It ends with me in 2007 meeting the woman I would marry, Kristin: my best and most trusted climbing partner, the love of my life, and the mother of our son, Ivan. As soon as I'm done writing, I'll head to the rock gym and climb until I'm tired and buzzing with endorphins, come home, have dinner with Kristin and playtime with Ivan, watch a horror flick without having a panic attack, read a novel or an article in
The New Yorker,
and then go to bed worn out and happy and sleep an honest eight hours (when Ivan lets us!). I'll take all this for granted because I have my health back. I know peace again. It is a true, intrinsic health that grows stronger every year, just like Alison Kellagher told me it would.

These days, I don't define myself as a “survivor of psychiatry” or a “benzo survivor” because I don't care for such labels. On the Yahoo group, many posters would add a signature that listed which pills they'd been on, for how long, at what dose, and when their final dose of benzodiazepine was and with which method they'd gone off: cold turkey (C/T), water titration, or a slow taper. (There was also an endless debate about “addiction” versus “dependency,” as many benzo folks resented being called addicts, as if it lumped them in with smack-mainlining gutter trash; in any event, your body doesn't care how you got hooked.) I never went in for that because I felt it defined me not by who I
am,
but by who I
am not
. Neither do I accept that I'm “depressed” or “anxious,” or always will be. These are reductive, clumsy rubrics for nuanced hues of the human soul, as inelegant and imprecise as using a chain saw for a root canal. I've since realized that fixing myself is simple math. Try this experiment—just try it: Start with a statement like “I'm depressed” or “I'm anxious.” Now add the word “because”: “I'm depressed because
_____
” or “I'm anxious because
_____
.” (The one caveat is, you can't write in “chemical imbalance”; see Epilogue.) From here you can do one of two things—fix the left side of the equation by medicating your “disease,” or fix the right side of the equation by addressing the core problem—scary though not impossible, especially with the guidance of an attentive partner, friend, therapist, or healer. Perhaps you're depressed because your father died or you lost a close friend. Perhaps you're anxious because you drink too much, eat poorly, and have a wicked commute through teeth-gnashing gridlock. Perhaps you hate your job and your marriage is in trouble. So you can either medicate the symptoms, which won't fix the root problem and might indeed worsen it when you build tolerance to the meds and inherit a whole new set of iatrogenic issues. Or you can fix the right side of the equation by making the needed life changes, albeit potentially tough ones. For me, it was “I'm anxious because I've prolonged a panic disorder, caused by bulimarexia and putting tremendous pressure on myself to achieve as an athlete, by becoming dependent on drugs,” and “I'm depressed because these drugs have narrowed my life to the point of inanition.” Once I chose to fix those things, to get off benzos, to quit drugging, and to eat healthier, the symptoms began to vanish and have stayed away. Also, I've come to accept that I am and always will be a dark person, what some might label a “depressive,” and to treat that as sacred. If on some days I can barely stand another's voice or cannot bear to be out in the world, it's because my mind, like a hibernating grizzly, seeks its cave or because the world is not worth being in that day. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with me. The darkness
is
me; it makes me unique and fuels my creative fire.

I cannot deny that the first three years off meds weren't filled with epic suffering, but it was a passing storm. Ask Kristin: Some days I'd sink so low all I could do was lie prone on the couch, speechless, watching talk shows with the volume turned off. Some nights I hyperventilated so badly all I could do was place my head sideways on the pillow and hope that sleep carried me off somewhere better. Sometimes I'd have panic attacks at work or in traffic or even at the cliff, obsessing over choking or over some minor fluctuation in my heartbeat. And I recognize that I remain more easily excitable—in fact, quick to anger or feel fear—having been battered by withdrawal from a central nervous system depressant. I might always have a lowered excitatory threshold. As such, I'm careful about how much danger I incur on the rock and selective about what I define as acceptable risk (i.e., no more death routes, which was inevitable anyway—I'm forty now and have a child). But I've stopped having panic attacks; that's over. I had so many during those bleak, black benzo years that I stopped caring whether I lived or died, and in doing so was freed from the fear of death that ignited the attacks in the first place. Moreover, the benzo anxiety was so profoundly horrible that garden-variety life anxiety, and even panic triggers like being on an airplane or work stress, no longer faze me. I recognize them as temporary, I work on my breathing, and I barrel on through.

My victory is not complete, but it's a victory nevertheless. I might not summit another Fourteener, but I have hiked Bear Peak, a nearly nine-thousand-foot summit in the Boulder Mountains. I've taken eight-hour walks with Clyde around the local grasslands, a solitary and meditative pleasure. And I've been able to onsight 5.13 again. The turning point came in late 2008, nearly three years after stopping benzos. That autumn, my friend Ted and I completed a 5.13 first ascent, my first Flatirons climb of the grade since my world blew up. The climb,
s00kr33m
, tackles a yellow-streaked wall on a broad Flatiron called the Slab, at the mouth of Fern Canyon, a shadowy, forested crease in the southern Boulder Mountains. You hike forty-five minutes uphill to get there. The wall faces north and sits deep in the Ponderosa, so you must take pains to warm up before attempting the harder climbs during the cooler months. Until that autumn, I often couldn't feel my fingers or toes on the rock, even on warmer days. I'd pump out or slide off, my extremities numb. But on this day in mid-November, the blood flowed warmly to my fingers and toes, and even the hike in didn't feel too strenuous.

Ted and I began across the canyon on a short, sunny 5.10, and then made our way to the Slab. We'd come close to doing
s00kr33m
earlier that week, but a blustery wind froze our digits at the crux, forty feet up on holds the size of matchsticks. Today was a rare seventy-degree day before the snow started flying, and we knew we either climbed
s00kr33m
now or waited until spring. We dropped our packs at the base, the only two climbers at the cliff, our quickdraws already hanging from the earlier attempt. I shoed up and set off, climbing through single-pad edges on a red-brown face up to the yellow streak, mulling over the crux sequence above: right-hand sloper-brick, left-hand sloper-cup, feet high, right-hand beach ball. Hold the beach ball and go again to the wrinkle, jack the left foot
way
up on the sloper cup, left hand to the razor sidepull, tuck the right foot in and deadpoint high and right to the dragon's tooth.

Yes, that was it. Do these moves with faith, precision, and authority, and you'll climb
s00kr33m.

For the moment, I focused on something other than benzo withdrawal. Now my biggest problem was overcoming seventy feet of overhanging sandstone.

Ted and I both redpointed
s00kr33m
that morning, nailing it on our first attempt. That afternoon we established a difficult boulder problem along the base of the Slab, loath to head back to town until we'd climbed ourselves out. Weak sun slanted low and watery through the pines, Clyde ran about wrestling sticks as fluffy black squirrels scolded him from the trees, the air was cool but not too cool, and autumn was winding down—where better to be than right here, shredding our fingertips? Finally, it was time to go. As we hiked down along the Shanahan Ridge Trail, the city spreading before us and its orange grid twinkling on, the sun dropped behind Fern Canyon. A crepuscular cold moved up my spine, fingers of incipient anxiety prickling the fine hairs along my neck. Sundown: the toughest time in the withdrawal years, when I'd sit sobbing and lamenting my lost, shattered life.

“Hey, Ted, can you hold on a second?” I asked.

“Sure, man. What's up?”

“I just need to get something,” I said.

We stopped on the trail. A light breeze rustled through the pines as night's black embrace spread along the eastern horizon, compressing itself along the prairie plateaus where the Great Plains wash in. I could just see the southern aspect of Seal Rock high to the northwest, a black water streak forming a runnel above
Primate
. I'd taken four milligrams of Ativan before leading
Primate
, but really the pills had done nothing—I'd been so addicted by then that the higher dose only staved off tolerance withdrawal. It temporarily made me feel
normal
. The climb had been all me—my life on the line, and I'd held it together. I'd weighed my options, made a conscious choice, and then pushed through to safety. I passed Clyde's leash to Ted and set down my backpack, the same pack I'd rummaged through so many times to find my benzo bottle. As Ted and the hound watched, I unzipped the pack, reached in, and plucked out the thing I'd been looking for.

It was a fleece jacket, to ward off the cold. I put it on, picked up my pack, and took Clyde's leash back as he nosed impatiently at the backs of my knees. The hound hates halting mid-hike; he wants to always be moving, prancing down the trail, his brindled butt bopping as he picks up one scent or the next—moving forward, alive in the moment, sniffing out the next conquest. Warmer now, we descended toward Boulder, another perfect day in the Flatirons behind us with countless others waiting to be born from the darkness.

 

EPILOGUE

Alison Kellagher lost her life in May 2010 after a cycling accident in north Boulder—she was on her bicycle until the very end. I'd moved back to town in 2007 to take a job as editor of
Climbing,
transferring with the title as it changed owners and pulled up roots in Carbondale. By chance I rented an apartment in Gunbarrel only a quarter mile from where Alison and her husband, Bill, another champion cyclist, lived. I'd see them on the two-lane roads in the eastern county, cycling in file or together on a tandem. Alison and I met up often during those years, taking Clyde on walks around the Twin Lakes near our homes or chatting via phone or e-mail. Although Alison had a full-fledged benzo-counseling practice by then, she never once mentioned charging me to talk about withdrawal; we'd become friends, and our conversations were a thing shared between friends. Alison's giving spirit and infinite wisdom carried me through those years, and I count myself fortunate to have been one of the hundreds of people she helped to heal from benzos.

Unfortunately, the psychiatric establishment tried to prevent Alison from sharing her expertise. In 2008, a Denver-area addiction psychiatrist, having found one of Alison's advertisements for benzo counseling, turned her in to the Colorado State Board of Medical Examiners for “practicing medicine without a license.” An investigator then posed as a new benzo patient to whom Alison recommended
The Ashton Manual
as a starting point, and the matter was referred to a district attorney. At no time did Alison, with a master's in psychotherapy, ever recommend to me or to anyone else what to do with our medicines or dosages. I remember her frustration at being unable to find a physician to work with, a benzo-wise GP or psychiatrist to whom she could refer patients for the prescription side of things. Alison's practice focused solely on supportive talk therapy and other means of coping with the withdrawal syndrome. Nonetheless, she faced a potential year in prison and an expensive, emotionally draining legal battle, which she did ultimately win. The biggest tragedy, however, was that the experience made Alison pull back from her practice. At one point, she'd spoken to me about coauthoring a book of survivor stories and advanced the notion, which she'd discussed with other Yahoo moderators, of a dedicated benzo-withdrawal facility. On one of my final walks with her, aggrieved by the psychiatric establishment and its litigious watchdogs, all Alison could say was, “I don't want to have anything to do with benzos ever again.”

The pills, she told me, had already taken enough of her life. Alison knew I'd been working on a magazine piece about my experience, but she passed away just one month before it appeared, in the June 2010 issue of
Outside.
Before the piece went to press, my editor there, Alex, wondered if I might call my old psychiatrist to solicit my medical records for fact-checking. I did so only with reluctance, not especially wanting to deal with Dr. Porridge again. The doctor and I played voice mail tag until he left this message:

“Hi Matt, it's Dr. Porridge. I understand that you would like a copy of your chart. Umm, which we can make available for you. There would be just kind of a nominal charge for copying … And then I would also ask that if you come across anything that's of concern to you that you schedule some time with me to review whatever you might see that concerns you. There's nothing I'm particularly worried will be concerning; there's nothing in the chart that is, I think, you know, that you and I haven't discussed along the way. But I would ask that you do that. And also, I understand that you're planning on doing some writing, I assume for a publication. I don't know if you're planning on writing about your care with me directly, but if you're writing something that uses my name or, you know, anything attributed to me then I would ask for the opportunity to review it before it's published.… Take care. Bye-bye.”