Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado Page A

one more thing that I knew would make me feel good. I doubt I’d do well with that. I’m not particularly strong that way.
    Self-medication is a thing that exists. We fake rest and nutrition like we fake everything else to make it through the day.Mostly, we do it with chemical assistance. I smoke because it keeps me calm, because it keeps me awake, because it keeps me from feeling hungry, because it gives me five minutes to myself, because it just feels good and I like it.
    Have you ever felt tempted to go to one of those places where you can pay to smash china? I never have, but then I never saw a reason to pay to smash things. I just did it. It feels good, really good, to break things when you’re frustrated. It doesn’t actually solve anything, but for a second you feel better. I like breaking glass. It’s therapeutic. It was my favorite part of working as a picture framer; we had to smash the flawed glass into tiny bits for disposal. More than once, I popped in to help on my day off just to smash things. It’s the same logic that explains mosh pits.
    One day, when I have nothing but free time, I will start a mosh pit for old people. I quit jumping into them only when I started to realize that I’d become the creepy old person in the corner. For years, though, mosh pits were my anger therapy of choice.
    Sex is also therapeutic when it’s blissfully mindless. Orgasms for orgasms’ sake. It makes your muscles relax, your headaches lessen. It makes the stress go away for however long it lasts. It’s kind of amazing to have some outlet, somewhere, that you don’t have to work for; that’s the whole point of having a fuckbuddy. It’s effort-free. As long as you’re attracted enough that sex is a possibility and you feel safe, that’s all that matters. Sex, done properly, makes you feel wonderfully accepted.
    It’s different from love. Maybe in the upper classes it’scalled a fling, but down here where I live it’s a pressure release, and no love or imitation Hollywood romance or delusions of long-term commitment are required. It’s not like I fuck everyone within arm’s reach, but I don’t expect to fall in love with everyone I’ve ever been infatuated with either. It’s just nice to be in a pleasant spot for a while, that’s all.
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    The coping that I and many of my friends do via medication isn’t just about emotional relief. For me at least, it’s just as much about physical pain management. I’ve stopped paying attention to how much ibuprofen I take in a day. More than I should, certainly. A reckless amount, even. I’m a pill popper, just not the narcotic sort. I start my day with ibuprofen and cold medicine, because I get sinus headaches from pretty much every part of nature and my jaw is always killing me. B 12 for energy, vitamin C as a prophylactic measure. The ibuprofen starts to wear off in a couple hours, so I take some more. Repeat as necessary. Add in a pot of coffee and maybe a guilt-ridden switch to naproxen in the afternoon for pain management, plus whatever nicotine I get in there. And if I absolutely have to sleep well, I wind up taking something that says “p.m.” on it, whatever that might be. If the pain is bad, as it often is for people with serious back injuries and dental problems like mine, alcohol or some kind of narcotics might be taken too. That, friends, is what pain management looks like outside the health care system.
    Miraculously, I’m not dead yet, and as far as I know, my liver hasn’t started to fail. My husband comes from healthy stock, the sort of people who maybe keep a bottle of aspirin around for emergencies. He was horrified at my intake, to the point that he once asked me to try not to take anything for a while to see if it would reset things for me. After a couple days I wound up in bed trying not to breathe too much because moving made the headache worse, and he’s never mentioned it since.
    I know that any actual cure of my chronic pain would have