Italy’s View on Female Addicts: A Guest Blog by Violetta Bellocchio
So last year I was at this house party, secretly complaining about how everyone was lamer than advertised and no one got I was all done up as Edie Sedgwick – also, another Edie showed up and she was skinnier than me, totally annihilating the competition without even trying – and Mardi Gras is a bit of a chore when you can’t drink (or get high, or whatever), but at the same time: I had been on (mild) antidepressants for a few days then and I was supposed to buckle up and write a Nonfiction Book about Addiction in Italy, which I was Contractually Obligated to Do, but it still made me feel so dumb and short-limbed and shame-bombed I couldn’t quite bring myself to talk about it. So I smiled, I guess. There was a lot of smiling and non-committing going on.
Meanwhile, a girl dressed as Sookie Stackhouse got so drunk so fast you’d never tell she’d been sober in the first place, EVER. She couldn’t walk anymore, she couldn’t talk anymore.
I looked on, as a guest made a number of calls in the space of maybe five minutes. She needs to leave. She needs to go home, She can’t stay here. He really sprang into action, that guy. He talked the girl into leaving the party; he arranged for a cab to pick her up; he escorted her out, a small, sure hand on her back, and he got her into the cab, made sure the driver had the right address, enough money for the ride.
Later, as I thanked him for taking pity on her, he downplayed it all. He was still pretty worried about The Girl, but at least he did something. He physically extracted her from a situation that could only get worse; he made sure she could Go Home, be safe. Smart guy.
As a female partygoer put it, thus ensuring she’d always be remembered as Female Partygoer, Sookie had «a bit of a habit» with public wastedness; AND, «she’s always super embarrassed about this stuff when she thinks about it».
This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen happening to an intervention on Italian soil.
Before that night, I’d never much cared for the guy – he came off as a loud, overdramatic sort, and once he’d spent thirty straight minutes over dinner extolling the virtues of Thor’s abs, so I stopped hanging out with him, safe in the knowledge I was his female counterpart in the eyes of mutual acquaintances. (Hey: you gotta protect yourself.) After that? He was My Hero for a while.
Also, the person I’ve been calling «the girl» was in her thirties.
A thirty year old woman, getting wasted at one of those things – «a small gathering of friends», i.e. a house party packed full of people who just happened to work in the same field as her. The quickest, surest way to gain some reputation, as professional women around here are supposed – expected – … requested? – you get it: they HAVE to be able to hold their liquor, to know when to stop. How to stop. Stick three fingers down your throat, count the glasses, drink some water, pace yourself. Pacing is very important, my dear. Control yourself. Show some restraint in your lack of fucks to give.
Sookie was – is – a hard-partying lady. All business. Someone who – to the best of my knowledge – has always semi-pitied me for my abstaining ways, but still. A friend of a friend. She was the Best Man at a wedding I got invited to.
I know how it works.
I should know. I was an addict, an alcoholic, a girl who routinely binged on a bit of everything, before figuring out that binge-something was a thing now. That my lack of commitment to a single substance to abuse was par for the course, not yet another sign of my general fail at adulthood.
When I stopped doing everything bad all together, four months after turning 28, I decided my only chance of Not Ruining This For Me was shut up about the person I had been; if I kept silent and worked hard, I’d get a brand new start. I could get everything I wanted.
A few of the things I shut up about:
– being hospitalized at 25 for what my medical record called ebbrezza alcolica, so: not quite alcohol poisoning, but close? The record states, upon being admitted to the hospital, «la paziente appare agitata, disorientata» and «she refuses to speak Italian, choosing to express herself in English and Spanish».
[ – I can’t speak Spanish. At all. So I was either possessed or magically gifted, it’s kind of your call now. ]
– stumbling through very literal woods, pitch black, looking for my way out of a rave and back to a tiny train station, two hours away from Berlin; I can’t tell if a map had been drawn on my hand, but I don’t think it had.
– finding myself in Bologna in the morning, knowing I’d left Milan the previous day to see New Order play in a Turin park, and I’d made a surprising number of drunken decisions, culminating with me following a guy all the way to Bologna just to get a hotel room from 10 to 12 AM; a month later I was staring down a pregnancy test, praying I could get out of this one without giving the guy any say on the abortion I was OBVIOUSLY going to have. (No abortion in the end. Still, it’s the principle of the thing.)
– whoring myself out for the opportunity of raiding a supply closet / medicine cabinet and a 60/40 chance of scoring. (This I was always more willing to go easy on myself for; I’d say, the drugs. I remember it made me feel gritty and realistic at the time.)
– bracing for an inevitable hangover by listening to Stretch Out and Wait 19 times in a row, right before dawn, in my parents’ empty apartment.
I got clean when it crept up on me: before I could die, for real, I had to take ten-fifteen-twenty more years of this.
I lucked into a support group at 28. Didn’t touch a drink ever since. I’m one of the precious few, the lucky ones.
Of course, the way I went about being good was :
a. never admitting out loud I had been That Girl, over and over, despite staircases of evidence to the contrary;
and b. giving myself a fresh new trauma whenever I did remember something about That Girl.
Any time something she’d said and done popped back up into my head, I held my breath, I shut my eyes. I went no no no no no. It wasn’t you. It never happened.
I used to slap my hand against my head, thwack, whenever holding my breath didn’t cut it.
The price to be paid: panic attacks, anxiety attacks, long- and short-term memory loss – always a pleasure to deal with, especially when you’re writing a book about your own misdemeanors – and what my current therapist summed up as me being haunted by my past self.
Anyway.
I did end up doing that book. Giving the small advance back wasn’t an option. Also, I’d broken down in horrible public tears, in a bar, as I was listening to Muse. (And as I cried I was like, of course, it had to be Muse, can’t think of a way to make this more embarrassing.) And I tried recovering what was left of my memory. (I’d say the process was 90% getting over myself and 10% writing down what came back. Stuff comes back.) I handed it in to a nice editor, who, once again, surprised me by asking if I could «be a tad more specific here and there» – so: get more dirt on myself – rather than politely requesting to tone that shit down. And I did end up including the Sookie Stackhouse bit – Sookie who was most definitely not dressed up as Sookie; nope, she went with something waaaay more hilarious in hindsight, but you do what you do to give other people the illusion of staying anonymous – BUT: I had reasons to do it. To go public about my residual shame, the smoke clinging to my skin all over.
Last year, I didn’t feel I had the moral authority to stage an intervention of my own on The Girl – after all, my social proximity to her has always been of the friend-of-a-friend variety; I didn’t know much about the places she came from, the state she was in.
What I could do: be a stupendous nag about it. Ask about it, in a roundabout way. The Italian way.
The day after the party, I called one of those mutual friends, someone who used to party with Sookie, a good friend. An empowered slut-person right along with Sookie, albeit, MAYBE, with a SMIDGE more sense in choosing who to shack up with on a longish-term basis. (MAYBE.)
So I called That Person up, and I told them what had happened at a party That Person had only put a five-minute cameo in, and then I asked, – does it happen often to her?. (And then I asked, – is it getting worse? – )
– Oh, no – , That Person said. – Last night was an accident.
– Ok.
– She had nothing to eat. She just didn’t pace herself. She was high, too.
– Ok.
– But I don’t really hang out with her anymore.
– Ok.
– Different lifestyles is all.
– Ok.
– How are you holding up these days?
– Eh. Same bullshit anyway.
– I know what you mean.
Then I think we talked about The Dark Knight. But I’m not sure.
I’m not sure anyone ever paid me the same basic human kindness, either. It’s too fun to have a screaming mess of girl shambling around, falling on her face over and over. That’s some quality entetainment right there.
And Italy thrives on that.
Female Partygoer, Wasted.
I guess it happened once – I’d been an obnoxious, fast drunk during a radio livestream. Some guy I barely knew called the station, a little after I’d pass out, and he said, alright, you had your fun, do NOT make a podcast of it. And he was shamed for it by the livestream crowd, I’ll tell you that. They said he was acting like a policeman; they accused him of being the white knight no one had asked for. Still, he could be an intimidating kind of guy, and I was spared a permanent stain on my reputation. One of many.
But that, I never knew. He never took credit for being kind to me.
I found out by accident, a few years down the line. (His ex wife told me.) By then I was already clean.
Last year, I had lunch with That Guy. I said thanks. He was, ah, don’t mention it. But he wanted me to mention it. Kinda like he’d been waiting for It to enter the conversation. And now I could handle it, he figured – he’d done the right thing just because he knew what addiction does to a person firsthand. He’d lost people he cared about. Girls he cared about.
I still live in a country that denies alcoholism is a thing, at all; a country where binging and/or bulimia are framed as anorexia’s poor, unbecoming cousin, but the general public is more than happy to bitch and moan about the social alarm caused by compulsive drinking between underaged girls. Here, we’re supposed to quit our “bad habits”, our “embarrassing personality traits”, and shut up about it. Or, we can die out after a while, That works, too.
In the last 5 years Violetta Bellocchio’s nonfiction writing has been featured on the Italian editions of Rolling Stone, Vice and Grazia Magazine, national newspaper Corriere della Sera and monthly magazine IL mensile; She’s been a columnist on the (now sadly departed) current affairs magazine “E – il mensile di Emergency“, and has covered gender issues on a weekly basis on Rivista Studio for more than two years ending last May.
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