Hugo Schwyzer

I mentor a wide variety of students in an equally wide variety of ways. I’m fond of all of them, but I will admit I have a keen sense of responsibility to those students whom I know are my fellow addicts. In the various Twelve Step programs with which I have been affiliated, there is a key maxim: if you want to keep something good (like sobriety), you’ve got to give it away. Call it mentoring or sponsoring or advising, it’s vital to my continued recovery that I work with other addicts. And as luck would have it, I’ve struggled with a colorful palate of compulsions, so I can usually identify with what it is that the young man or woman with whom I am working is going through. And even when I can’t always relate to the actions they’re engaged in (though I almost always can), I can connect to their feelings. That spinning cycle that carries them compulsively from ecstasy to despair is very, very familiar.

Though I often tell anecdotes about my students, when it comes to issues of addiction I shy away from blogging about what they tell me in confidence, even if I go to great lengths to disguise their identity. Their pain is not fodder for my writing. But of course, I do get inspired to blog about things that come up in these mentoring sessions, and something came up this week with one young person that brought me instantly back to a younger, not-yet forgotten Hugo.

One characteristic I see in many addicts is one that was a key part of me for many years. From the time I was a child until I was well into my thirties, I had what most addicts have: a strange mix of brutally low self-esteem and extraordinary grandiosity. For years and years my head told me that I was fat, ugly, shallow, selfish, and unloveable. At the same time, my head told me that I was incredibly strong. My strength lay in my capacity to endure what I imagined no one else could endure, because — my ego told me — if anyone else was suffering what I was suffering they would go stark raving mad. Admittedly, I did go temporarily mad on more than one occasion, but also managed to get through college, earn graduate degrees, and hold down a tenure-track job while dealing with both addiction and periodic psychotic episodes. In my grandiosity, I chalked up that success in the midst of my despair to this great strength I had.

This odd cocktail of self-loathing and hubris showed up in other ways. Though I was always a bit of a lightweight when it came to alcohol (others could drink me under the table), I was proud of my ability to, say, give a presentation in a seminar while loaded and have no one know. I once finished a term paper on St John Chrysostom while locked in a psych ward. It’s hard enough to use terms like homoousious and hypostatic union correctly in normal life, but trust me, it’s even harder to write a decent paper on patristic theology when you’re on a fairly solid dose of Haldol. When I got out of the hospital and turned in my paper (the professor none the wiser), I felt incredibly proud even in the midst of my pain — who else, I asked myself, could have done such a thing?

This mixture of arrogance and self-hatred played a big part in my relationships with women: at my most revoltingly cocky, I once remarked that with almost any woman, it was “not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when’”. I was very certain of my abililty to “get” someone into bed but equally certain of my inability to sustain a relationship. “I can have anyone I want”, I would say, “but if I do fall in love she’ll be gone within a few months.” In the end, of course, I was eventually proven wrong on both counts, a blessing for which I continue to give thanks.

Addicts understand humiliation, not humility. Truly coming to learn the latter has meant more than simply giving up addictive behavior. Getting the drugs and alcohol out of my system; working the Twelve Steps; learning to practice first celibacy and then monogamy; going through psychoanalysis; joining a church — these were the key components of my transformation. I certainly became a nicer and more honest person as a result. But even as I changed my life, I still struggled with that self-loathing/grandiosity paradigm. I remember bragging to one of the first post-sobriety girlfriends that I was “the strongest man you’ll ever meet.” I referred not merely to my ability to handle physical pain (as a self-mutilator and a marathoner with various body piercings, that had been established), but what I imagined was my endless and impressive capacity for self-reinvention and transformation. “I can survive anything”, I would say; “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, and since I’ve come so close to death so many times, it stands to reason I’m pretty damn strong by now.” Not surprisingly, the girlfriend found all of this posturing to be distasteful and rather adolescent, and she moved on in fairly short order.

I write about all this because this week, one of my mentees made a very similar remark to me about her own exceptionally high threshold for emotional and physical pain. She spoke with that familiar mix of pride and shame I know so well. I didn’t challenge her immediately, but I told her a bit of what I’ve written above about my own grandiosity, and how it was a close partner to my shame. We spoke of how humiliation and hubris can co-exist so easily, but hubris and humility cannot. We spoke of how the hardest thing for the addict is not to give something up (for most of us, the disease of addiction just makes a lateral move when we do that), but to see ourselves for who we really are: a worker among workers, a student among students, a teacher among teachers, one living creature surrounded by others of equal value. The addict is almost never just “average”, in his or her mind; he or she is either the worst (fattest, ugliest, most despicable, most loathsome, etc) or the best (the strongest, the toughest, the one with the greatest capacity to suffer and survive ever seen.) My mentee and I laughed some laughter of recognition together this week as we talked, and that was good.

I write this afternoon about all this not just because it’s on my mind, but because achieving humility has been and remains the great struggle of my spiritual life. Humility to me is not placing myself above others or below them. Humility, which takes its root from the Latin humus (earth), means seeing myself as I truly am, not as what my pride or my shame tells me about myself. It means, as a Christian, becoming convinced that God has a purpose for my life, but that discerning that purpose is difficult. Humility means that Jesus calls me to take up the cross and follow Him, but not necessarily to try and jump up on the cross He’s already been on. As Tori Amos sang many years ago, God doesn’t need another victim. When the addict brags of his or her colossal capacity to endure, to suffer, and to survive, all they are doing is claiming their status as world-class victims.

Changing the world takes pain and effort. The ability to withstand discomfort, to endure suffering, is only praiseworthy when that discomfort and suffering is a consequence of an active effort to make the world a better place. Humility is the recognition that many others have suffered as much (and probably more) than you, and their suffering has born fruit. And humility is recognising, too, that God calls us to joy as well as to the cross, to pleasure as well as self-denial. The addict wants the life of extremes — of irresponsible self-indulgence or monastic self-mortification. Humility is living in the balance.

And living in the balance, sometimes, is the hardest damn thing to do.