On Cory Monteith and What It's Like To Relapse

Cory Monteith at a press junket. via WikiCommons.

"Oh man, the guy from Glee is dead," said a friend of mine while staring down at his iPhone. It was 1:30am Sunday morning on the dance floor at Toronto’s Augusta House. As a recovering alcoholic and prescription pill addict, I rarely stay out past midnight anymore, mainly because nothing genuinely fun tends happens then. This particular night was a good friend’s birthday, so I had made an exception.

"Cory Monteith?" I asked, only because I knew that's who it would be. I knew his story. When I was just out of rehab in 2011, I met Monteith briefly at a press event. Though we didn’t exchange many words, he was polite, charming and even a bit shy, a rare and refreshing quality in an actor.

A few months later, I read an interview with Monteith in Parade Magazine in which he talked about his life as a former addict. He had gone to rehab for the first time at age 19 for drugs and alcohol after his friends and family staged an intervention. They were worried, in his words, that he "could die." He spoke candidly to the magazine about his relapses and how he eventually decided to sober up when he was caught stealing money for drugs from a family member. I had read many celebrity memoirs on addiction and recovery in an attempt to cope with my own feelings of isolation, but reading Monteith’s story was the first one that truly made me feel less alone, if only because I had met him briefly. He had seemed happy and comfortable with himself. It gave me hope that one day I would be at ease with a sober version of myself as well.  I didn't know at the time that I was about to relapse.

There's a build up to a relapse. For me, it started with feeling left out. My coworkers would drink beer on Friday afternoons around the office. My friends would "forget" to invite me to parties. After a while, I couldn't even rationalize to myself why I was staying sober anymore. I felt more alone than I had even at the height of my abuse. At least then, the bar was always welcoming, the bottle always numbing. Besides, most of the people I knew were party animals. If I needed help, so did they. I didn’t want to be the scapegoat for addiction, the one that everyone could point a finger at and say, "That, over there, is an example of someone who took it too far. We're fine.”

I was getting ready for work one morning at the gym in my office building. I was anxious about the day at hand. One of my coworkers had recently been criticizing my work, and I had the sneaking suspicion that it was her mission to weed the rehab girl out of the office. Maybe it was just speculation on my part. It didn’t really matter; I no longer felt welcome. And so that morning, while I was gurgling mouthwash, I decided to swallow it instead. It burned on the way down, and I felt comforted by that old feeling of something toxic making its way through my system, heating up and tingling on its way down. The harsh mint flavour didn’t even faze me. The buzz hit when I was putting my mascara on, and I was home.

After a few days, I was coming to work with a kombucha bottle filled with orange-coloured Listerine. I didn’t want to relapse on alcohol, so I drank something that very few people would ever consider recreational. I figured the mint smell would be my cover, since no one I knew could really know I was technically drinking again. I resented my time in rehab because I felt I couldn’t belong to any side of the situation now. The drinkers didn’t want me, and I didn’t want to be one with the sober kids. I didn’t even know who the sober kids were.

I had no clue how harsh mouthwash was, that it was 27% alcohol, or that it had tons of other poisonous ingredients that did a number on my body and brain in just days of drinking it. I was soon hospitalized briefly for suicidal acts I don’t really remember. I spent multiple days lying in a hospital bed with a guard outside in case I did anything remotely self-harming. I made a deal with myself to try one last time for the sake of my family, but that I’d quit my job, start writing the things I wanted to write and get some therapy and maybe make some new friends. I still relapsed one more time 50 days later, on a date, just because I needed to see if relapsing on wine would be any different than mouthwash. It wasn’t.

What happened next was a year of choices—choices to make new friends, choices to write stories I'd be proud of, choices to find support groups, and to even move cities. There was no magical moment, no epiphany. There was only a series of decisions that, when put all together, now amount to a girl who is okay in her own skin.

In February, I pitched Monteith as a possible celebrity interview to my editor at TheFix.com, a New York-based website about recovery. Before I put anything in motion with his publicist, Monteith relapsed and returned to rehab in April. I remember feeling shaken up. He must have had years of sobriety under his belt, though you never really know.

When Monteith re-emerged from rehab, he seemed to have the support of loved ones like his girlfriend Lea Michele. He obviously had a busy career to be excited for too, with a hit show and an upcoming movie on the horizon. So why the relapse? You can easily blame relapses on junkies just being junkies, but I don’t see it that way, mainly because I’m one of them. Even now with a year and a half of sobriety under my belt, it’s easy to understand the allure in giving up on recovery. When you say you don’t drink at parties, it always feels like you’re saying, “Hi, I’m an addict” to a room full of strangers. People seem thrown off by it. Some ask why, and some just decide you’re probably not worth talking to. Sometimes the judgment gets to you.

When I walked home from the bar on Sunday morning, it was around 2am. The toxicology reports for Monteith that revealed that he died from a mix of heroin and alcohol weren’t even out yet. They didn’t need to be. I just knew, and I was sad.

Stone cold sober, I walked past guys with half-closed eyes who predictably tried to make their desperate last moves on a girl, any girl, who walked by after last call. Drunk girls stumbled into alleys to yell into their iPhones or puke. It’s hard to tell an addict from a just a regular party kid in the early hours of the morning. The most obvious addicts are the ones like me: totally sober folks.

I don’t know what Monteith was feeling when he made his way back to his hotel last weekend where he would eventually die alone. I don't judge him for relapsing either. I get it because I've been there. It’s hard sometimes to accept sobriety, and the feeling that you’re not really going to be invited to the party anymore even when you’re physically there. Sobriety can be extremely isolating, even when the benefits of your new lifestyle are staring back at you. And isolation is lonely. On bad days, the loneliness is overwhelming, painful even, and all you really want is for the pain to stop. If there’s one thing addicts are experts at, it’s knowing how to stop pain. The problem is, sometimes when you stop the pain, it never comes back.

Previously:

My Methadone Clinic Is the Happiest Place on Earth