My husband and I have recently been watching the series Lost on DVD. We sat snuggled on the couch together a few nights ago watching an episode from the second season called "Dave." (You can watch online here, although, unfortunately, I can't link directly to the episode. This post does contain spoilers, so watch now, if you care about such things.)In this episode, Hurley, who is a compulsive overeater, destroys a secret stash of food in an attempt to stop his destructive eating. As he was gleefully throwing food in the air, "freeing" himself, I told my husband, "That isn't going to do a thing. He'll be back there in a day, on his hands and knees, licking salad dressing off the dirt and plucking grubs off the chips." Someone in a compulsive relationship with that substance isn't going to stop because of a few gross bugs, and the cravings don't stop because the substance is gone.
I remember, early in recovery, telling my husband that I wish we just lived alone, on a planet with no other women. I wished we didn't have to do all this hard work, that we could just make the problem (women) go away. And he said, "Babe, even if I lived in that world, even if there were no women, I'd still be fucked up. I'd be a sick man living someplace else, but I'd still be sick." Damn! I hated hearing that the desert island wasn't going to work.
Later in the episode, when Hurley is on his hands and knees, licking peanut butter from a leaf, I fell a little in love with the writers for being true to his compulsions, and I forgave them for their sin of not having Charlie, the heroin addict, constantly high after finding a plane full of drugs.
But still more compelling was the way this episode externalized Hurley's illness in the presence of an imaginary man named Dave. Before the plane crash that landed Hurley on the island, he was a patient at a mental institution, struggling with the delusion that he was friends with another patient, Dave, who didn't actually exist. When he banished the delusion of Dave, he gained his release from the institution. Now he begins seeing Dave again, and when he yells that Dave is not really there, Dave responds by telling him the island isn't really there. Dave tells him Hurley is still in the mental institution and none of what he's seeing or experiencing is real, and he claims to be the part of Hurley that wants him to wake up. He takes him to the edge of a cliff and urges him to jump, so that he can wake to reality.
I had to pause the DVD, because Dave's voice in the jungle was so eerily familiar to me in my codependency: that voice that haunts me with something along the lines of, "You're crazy. What you think is reality is not reality. You don't know you're own mind. Think about it, how much sense does sex addiction make? You're jealous and paranoid. Come on. I, the addict, define reality and sanity. And if I tell you're crazy, you are. And if I tell you to jump off a cliff, you will." Hurley doesn't jump off a cliff, but he thinks about it and wonders how he can know what's real and who he can trust. And I feel like I'm spending each day of my recovery moving a little further from the edge of that cliff, but I'm not far enough from the edge yet to have steady hands or an even heartbeat during shows like that.
This post was originally published at The Second Road on August 2, 2008.
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