Finding the Words
Picking the right word, especially on the fly, is an art.
I’m not sure how my thoughts translated on the podcast, but here on Overcomers Approach https://www.buzzsprout.com/2278962/episodes/19008906 with Nichol Ellis-McGregor, we touched on addiction and white privilege. Since then, I’ve had lots of thoughts about it, and I’m interested in hearing what others think. I want to embody the quote by Lilla Watson - “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together,” and I’m not sure where to start.
We handle addition with shame - “those people have the problem.” Many in prisons are hooked on something, overdoses are treated as commonplace, and our homeless population is almost all either suffering from addiction or mental health crises.
I’m not sure we’re doing a great job at being humans.
I want to try to change our messed-up system of shaming and blaming people with addiction rather than helping them. A quick note on help: I don’t mean tossing those suffering with addiction into detox and or rehab that costs more than a car, only to have them come out alone, white-knuckling it with a relapse rate of 70-90%. Because that isn’t rehab, that is delaying.
Can we curiously look at how to help those stuck in the trap loving a substance thats changed their brains within the lens of helping the individual, not how it will affect the industries that are benefiting from it? Prohibition doesn’t work, and having no rules is equally ineffective. Rehab has shown to have laughable results.
Is there a way to incentivize being clean, or at least not buy into the stigma that punishing addiction leads to sobriety? What is the word for pretending to help? Because that is what I think rehabs are doing.
Speaking of words, I need a quick word to summarize who I am, rather than “I am a mom who lost my son." I want a concise word like widow or orphan. Orphan comes from Latin meaning bereft, and widow from German meaning empty. To describe a parent of a dead kid, I asked the internet and found two words. One is Vilomah from Sanskrit, meaning "against the natural order,” and the other is Shadow, a word for a parent who has lost a child, representing them as a "shadow of their former selves."
Katie Rizzo, Shadow
The Vilomah Katie Rizzo
Hold Tight, Loosely
When Mara lost her firstborn
she carried the body
as it changed from rotting flesh to
a puckered hide.
You can be
dead when your
heart is beating.
With her second
her arms remembered
to hold this one
extra tight.
You can be alive
without moving.
Unclench my fingers
around your wrist
as you
sleep in
your own nest.
Feel the cold wind from the mountain.
And remember
the trees are alive
even when their leaves
don’t rustle. - Katie Rizzo
