Cheryl Strayed’s “Heroin/e” was an emotional piece in which she allowed nothing to get in between her and the writing. This piece was real, and I felt that she left nothing out- even her most vulnerable moments. I picked up on a theme of addiction and using drugs to suppress or escape the pain felt in life. Her mother started relying on morphine to make her feel better and to hide the pain of slowly dying. Strayed writes her mother’s words towards morphine: “Promise me one thing”…”That you won’t allow me to be in pain anymore. I’ve had too much pain.” She describes her mother constantly pleading to the nurses for more morphine. She tied this to her own life and how she relied on needles to infuse her body with drugs to forget the pain of her mother’s passing. She explains the feeling of heroin as she says “Heroin was different. I loved it. It was the first thing that worked. It took away every last scrap of hurt that I had inside of me.” She used heroin to fill the void in her life- a void that was created when her mother passed. Her recovery from the abuse is a long and hard journey, constantly finding herself along the way abusing more and more heroin. She had so many internal struggles forcing her to succumb to heroin use. This reminds me of Sara’s response to “War Dances”, questioning how doctors should treat those with bad lifestyle habits. A doctor may have come upon Strayed during the climax of her addiction, and may want to get annoyed of seeing her repeatedly caving into the drug use. However, it is not the heroin that is the real problem, it is the reason why she relies on heroin so heavily- to fill the emptiness after the loss of her mother.
You are so right when you say, “However, it is not the heroin that is the real problem, it is the reason why she relies on heroin so heavily- to fill the emptiness after the loss of her mother.” And when we don’t use narrative medicine, it takes much longer (if it happens at all) to get to the root of the problem.