I was parking at the grocery store when words came up on my phone. “Did you see that there’s going to be a movie of Beautiful Boy?”
Tears threatened, “Not sure I can see it,” I wrote back to my friend. Cindy’s text, “Even the trailer made me cry.”
Beautiful Boy was published just before Ted went to treatment and I well remember reading the raw, upsetting and hopeful story. Here is the Amazon description:
What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff ’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic Sheff became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. David Sheff traces the first subtle warning signs: the denial, the 3 A.M. phone calls (is it Nic? the police? the hospital?), the rehabs. His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every avenue of treatment that might save his son and refused to give up on Nic.
Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond help.
I’m glad this movie was made and yes, I saw it. As it mimics the book and real life, we empathize with the dad; his heartache and his shortcomings. We attach to his son, and absorb the desperation of powerlessness that a child’s drug addiction wreaks on parents, reducing them to control and obsess, despair and control. Control is a soothing mechanism when we are afraid. We parents are so, so, so afraid.
Part of what the movie offers is a glimpse into the beauty of recovery — Nic’s and his parents’. 23 million beautiful Americans are in recovery.
As God tends to do, He prompts those who have suffered to stand in the gap and David Sheff has gone on to write and speak, often with his son, on addiction, and action points for prevention and recovery. His book, CLEAN: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy is also on my shelf and a worthy read.
His biggest crusade it seems, is that addiction cannot be ignored by the offhand notion that bad people take drugs. If so, we have an overwhelming and rapidly increasing population of people going bad. Michael Phelps, Keith Urban, Buzz Aldrin, the late Betty Ford — bad people. The little boy across the street with whom your child played — bad. The athlete who had a sports injury and got addicted to painkillers — bad. I cringe when I hear the punctuation a parent uses in describing their addicted child, “but he’s really a good kid.” We are not talking goodness or badness — we are talking addiction.
Last year five people died and 200 were sickened in e coli affected romaine lettuce. Romaine was removed by order of the CDC from grocery stores everywhere immediately as is appropriate of course. There are other analogies.
In the U.S. we have the equivalent of two jam-packed 747 airliners going down with overdosed bad people every week. That’s twenty-four 9/11 deaths every year. One 9/11 death toll every other week. That’s almost two filled Miller Park Brewer Stadiums dying a year. We all know a beautiful someone — or someone who knows a beautiful someone. And those are just the people who died — every dose is an overdose.
See Beautiful Boy the movie on Amazon.
Thanks you! Nice surprise to see you writing again! Please continue.
I exist with adverse-childhood-experience-related chronic anxiety and clinical depression that are only partly treatable via medication. Thus I endure an emotionally tumultuous daily existence.
It’s a continuous, discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’ and simultaneously being scared of how badly I will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires.
The lasting emotional/psychological pain from such trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside the head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others.
It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of medicating, either prescribed or illicit.
My experience has revealed [at least to me] that high-scoring-ACE trauma that essentially results from a highly sensitive introverted existence notably exacerbated by an accompanying autism spectrum disorder, can readily lead an adolescent to a substance-abuse/self-medicating disorder, including through eating.
Though I have not been personally affected by any addiction/overdose crisis, I have suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known and enjoyed the euphoric release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC. However, the self-medicating method I utilized during most of my pre-teen years was eating, usually junk food. …
A physically and mentally sound future should be every child’s fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.
But, sadly and unjustly, no such right exists. … Mindlessly minding our own business on such matters has too often proven humanly devastating.
Though not in the ‘hard-drug addict’ category, I have suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known, enjoyed and appreciated the great release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC. Yet, I once was one of those who, while sympathetic, would look down on those who’d ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and/or illicit ‘hard’ drugs.
Fortunately, the preconceived erroneous notion that drug addicts are simply weak-willed and/or have committed a moral crime is gradually diminishing.
We now know that Western pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiates — I call it by far the real moral crime — for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
Still, typically societally overlooked is that intense addiction usually doesn’t originate from a bout of boredom, where a person repeatedly consumed recreationally but became heavily hooked — and homeless, soon after — on an unregulated often-deadly chemical that eventually destroyed their life and even those of loved-ones.
Regardless, neglecting people dealing with debilitating drug addiction should never have been an acceptable or preferable political option. But the more callous politics that are typically involved with lacking addiction funding/services tend to reflect conservative electorate opposition, however irrational, against making proper treatment available to low- and no-income addicts. It’s like some people are actually considered disposable.
Even to an otherwise relatively civilized nation, their worth is measured basically by their sober ‘productivity’ or lack thereof. Those people may then begin perceiving themselves as worthless and accordingly live their daily lives and consume their substances more haphazardly.
And, quite tragically, many chronically addicted people won’t miss this world if they never wake up. It’s not that they necessarily want to die; it’s that they want their pointless corporeal hell to cease and desist.