Waithera Sebatindira

Through an Addicts Looking-Glass

Throughout the last few months, I have been looking through the lens of failure, which I had previously conceived as heavily vignetted, enclosed spheres of vision, judgement and a lot of self-directed contempt. Somehow, in a jilted self-contradiction, I couldn’t accept that my body had to operate in crip nonlinearity despite myself being invested in the studies of crip alternative ways of being. Although I am beginning to understand my bodymind’s pattern — 1) stiffening joints, zoning out in the middle of a conversation, a deep dreg-like exhaustion bloating to slather the surface of my perceived sanity, 2) return of suicidal and self-harm thoughts, anger and grief spiralling, living on non active survival, 3) using poetry as adaptive device (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha), being super fixated on fellow depressed and suicidal fictional characters, 4) gradually picking up pace to function back into straight time, 5) until self-destruction repeats — the brief period of operating in straight time is more often than not enough to trick me into forgetting cripness, of frequently displacing my bodymind from the painstakingly stitched cripped life I spent my recovery in. 

The attitudes, offhand comments and work structures of nearly everyone around me scream: You won’t have value unless you make active, linear progress towards sanity, full recovery. Instinctively, my mind protests whenever I sink into my pattern 1 to 3, and I demand answers from this weary body of big dreams: ‘Why am I not getting better?’ despite, simultaneously, understanding exactly every reason why. 

Waithera Sebatindira acknowledges this ableist concept of progress, success and failure in their book THROUGH AN ADDICT’S LOOKING-GLASS: ‘[T]he notion of failing and trying again is itself folded into many of the elusive archetypes, yet it is with the understanding that failures are only acceptable when they are part of the journey to success.’ Society tells us that recovery should manifest as a certain plotted timeline of consecutive milestones, that one should achieve ‘this’ within ‘this’ amount of time, or that with ‘this’ support one should work towards full recovery so that (able-bodied and -minded) people don’t get tired of supporting them. There is an unspoken deadline for mad, crip, addicted people to accomplish the rational man’s state of lucrative sanity. 

In the context of exploring an addict’s journey to sobriety, Sebatindira delves into the topic of ‘sober failures’, the anarchist childhood-reclaiming practice of failing, and introduce (to me, at least) the metaphor of sober recovery as ‘getting your marbles back.’ The saying contains a playful quality to failing; a ‘childlikeness … unwillingness to grow up’, an open-ended disruption ‘done on one’s own terms’ of liberatory and imaginative interactions, even as we consciously employ ourselves in straight time’s adulting to meet basic subsistence. To them, ‘failure is built into the very notion of “recovery”’, particularly in contexts wherein sanity is a myth, a nonexistent state prior to addiction. Instead of a linear successive progress, the author imagines recovery as a ‘tide tirelessly reaching out to the shore and pulling away again … unceasing and timeless.’ That analogy resonates with the mangrove forest that is my lived experience; the kind of landscape which brims with life while protecting against precarity because you live in that precarious balance between ecologies. Life in the age of hyper information permeates our senses with practices of gratitude, care and commitments made to progress, and each day as we discover something slight has shifted in the landscape around us and within us, we are expected to be deeply, immensely grateful. We are making progress, they say, but even as people become more inclusive, this book is helping me (un)learn that it is perfectly okay to be honest that we need more than this, even if we don’t quite yet know what it could be.

Perhaps it is within that embracing of ambivalences which we encounter upon recovering while adapting while being included while feeling like it’s still not enough, that imagination is necessary to transcend already existing frameworks of what access could look like, as well as to pursue means of thorough forms of sovereignty beyond mere inclusion (as to include means to have excluded another alternative, mode, and piece of identity). 

To play means active participation in creating alternative futures using the building blocks of the present and the possibilities presented by the assortment of tools available within the room. Masking tape could hold together loose lego pieces; a blue eraser could be the alternative to the absence of blue in the blocks collection; crayons embedded upright in a block of styrofoam could represent the rainbow forest we imagine in a land of snow. Sebatindira proposes that ‘the ultimate value of the marble metaphor is in its potential to encourage us to construct a new conception of psycho-emotional health for ourselves — one that feels fulfilling and worth failing towards.’ It is to lose bricks from a prepackaged lego kit and organise for creative adjustments to continue — and not necessarily towards the preconstructed results illustrated on the guidebook.

The key part of this practice is the consciousness in the present, the state of playful inquiry in the future, and the malleable past. Just as play can become tiring, just as recuperation helps one function, Sebatindira reminds us that recovery can easily fall into a positivist hole. Sebatindira reorients us to finding recovery an ever-changing, pliable path which relies on context rather than having a timeline carved into stone. Ambivalence is not to be seen as a discouraging complaint or an antithesis to gratitude — because it lives beside gratitude — instead it should be used as a tool for reimagining beyond the ways we have connected with in order to sustain ourselves. 

Failure, play, ambivalence all melt into a transformative formula with which we can build upon epistemologies — or rather, “dis-epistemology” such as was proposed by Ben-Moshe. The way abolition poses a question and a plethora of ideas in answer.

fairuza hanun

Throughout the last few months, I have been looking through the lens of failure, which I had previously conceived as heavily vignetted, enclosed spheres of vision, judgement and a lot of self-directed contempt. Somehow, in a jilted self-contradiction, I couldn’t accept that my body had to operate in crip nonlinearity despite myself being invested in the studies of crip alternative ways of being. Although I am beginning to understand my bodymind’s pattern — 1) stiffening joints, zoning out in the middle of a conversation, a deep dreg-like exhaustion bloating to slather the surface of my perceived sanity, 2) return of suicidal and self-harm thoughts, anger and grief spiralling, living on non active survival, 3) using poetry as adaptive device (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha), being super fixated on fellow depressed and suicidal fictional characters, 4) gradually picking up pace to function back into straight time, 5) until self-destruction repeats — the brief period of operating in straight time is more often than not enough to trick me into forgetting cripness, of frequently displacing my bodymind from the painstakingly stitched cripped life I spent my recovery in. 

The attitudes, offhand comments and work structures of nearly everyone around me scream: You won’t have value unless you make active, linear progress towards sanity, full recovery. Instinctively, my mind protests whenever I sink into my pattern 1 to 3, and I demand answers from this weary body of big dreams: ‘Why am I not getting better?’ despite, simultaneously, understanding exactly every reason why. 

Waithera Sebatindira acknowledges this ableist concept of progress, success and failure in their book THROUGH AN ADDICT’S LOOKING-GLASS: ‘[T]he notion of failing and trying again is itself folded into many of the elusive archetypes, yet it is with the understanding that failures are only acceptable when they are part of the journey to success.’ Society tells us that recovery should manifest as a certain plotted timeline of consecutive milestones, that one should achieve ‘this’ within ‘this’ amount of time, or that with ‘this’ support one should work towards full recovery so that (able-bodied and -minded) people don’t get tired of supporting them. There is an unspoken deadline for mad, crip, addicted people to accomplish the rational man’s state of lucrative sanity. 

In the context of exploring an addict’s journey to sobriety, Sebatindira delves into the topic of ‘sober failures’, the anarchist childhood-reclaiming practice of failing, and introduce (to me, at least) the metaphor of sober recovery as ‘getting your marbles back.’ The saying contains a playful quality to failing; a ‘childlikeness … unwillingness to grow up’, an open-ended disruption ‘done on one’s own terms’ of liberatory and imaginative interactions, even as we consciously employ ourselves in straight time’s adulting to meet basic subsistence. To them, ‘failure is built into the very notion of “recovery”’, particularly in contexts wherein sanity is a myth, a nonexistent state prior to addiction. Instead of a linear successive progress, the author imagines recovery as a ‘tide tirelessly reaching out to the shore and pulling away again … unceasing and timeless.’ That analogy resonates with the mangrove forest that is my lived experience; the kind of landscape which brims with life while protecting against precarity because you live in that precarious balance between ecologies. Life in the age of hyper information permeates our senses with practices of gratitude, care and commitments made to progress, and each day as we discover something slight has shifted in the landscape around us and within us, we are expected to be deeply, immensely grateful. We are making progress, they say, but even as people become more inclusive, this book is helping me (un)learn that it is perfectly okay to be honest that we need more than this, even if we don’t quite yet know what it could be.

Perhaps it is within that embracing of ambivalences which we encounter upon recovering while adapting while being included while feeling like it’s still not enough, that imagination is necessary to transcend already existing frameworks of what access could look like, as well as to pursue means of thorough forms of sovereignty beyond mere inclusion (as to include means to have excluded another alternative, mode, and piece of identity). 

To play means active participation in creating alternative futures using the building blocks of the present and the possibilities presented by the assortment of tools available within the room. Masking tape could hold together loose lego pieces; a blue eraser could be the alternative to the absence of blue in the blocks collection; crayons embedded upright in a block of styrofoam could represent the rainbow forest we imagine in a land of snow. Sebatindira proposes that ‘the ultimate value of the marble metaphor is in its potential to encourage us to construct a new conception of psycho-emotional health for ourselves — one that feels fulfilling and worth failing towards.’ It is to lose bricks from a prepackaged lego kit and organise for creative adjustments to continue — and not necessarily towards the preconstructed results illustrated on the guidebook.

The key part of this practice is the consciousness in the present, the state of playful inquiry in the future, and the malleable past. Just as play can become tiring, just as recuperation helps one function, Sebatindira reminds us that recovery can easily fall into a positivist hole. Sebatindira reorients us to finding recovery an ever-changing, pliable path which relies on context rather than having a timeline carved into stone. Ambivalence is not to be seen as a discouraging complaint or an antithesis to gratitude — because it lives beside gratitude — instead it should be used as a tool for reimagining beyond the ways we have connected with in order to sustain ourselves. 

Failure, play, ambivalence all melt into a transformative formula with which we can build upon epistemologies — or rather, “dis-epistemology” such as was proposed by Ben-Moshe. The way abolition poses a question and a plethora of ideas in answer.

Through an Addicts Looking-Glass

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