Things That Occur to Me While I Watch 'Intervention'

1. Skinny people are on drugs / sober people get chubby. Corollary insight: I have body image issues. 

  

2. If anybody's still out there genuinely making documentaries on addiction, then I can't help but picture some hapless bastard anxiously showing up for his scheduled 'final interview', only to be asked a few leading questions by a guy sitting in a folding chair, handed some release papers to sign and twenty bucks for his troubles, before being told to have a nice life. This thought makes me sad. 

   

3. I am capable of a terrible sort of delusional jealousy, wherein I can remain powerfully ignorant to the presented reality of addiction and unabashedly envious of the weird, insular relationships drugged-up people form with one another. 

  

On one (of what could have been any) episode, a concerned loved one of a meth-addicted twenty-something noted, of the addict's boyfriend, that he's just kept around because she likes to feel wanted. This was clearly meant as a criticism, but (and I admit an obvious bias) I couldn't help but side with the addicts, in that I can't imagine a person not having (or feeding, when able) the powerful urge to feel wanted. 

  

And, I understand that the criticism being made is more a note on the perceived character limitations of the boyfriend (ie: the best that can be said of him is that he wants to be around), but in the same way that I harbor a sort of shameful jealousy for characters on hospital dramas who may soon leave behind a devoted spouse (unless their life-threatening case of exploding organs is treated by the gruff but lovable head of diagnostics / scrappy lady-surgeon who's got enough on her plate just trying to make it in a man's world) or the truly unfortunate teen parents of MTV reality fame, I envy the easily digestible, dramatic display of "being wanted" set, as it usually is, in contrast with failure to live up to expectations (or just live, in general, what with the exploding organs). 

Lonely people are envious of even terrible relationships. So, that's a thing.  

  

4. If I'm ever intervened upon (take notes, friends and family), I will demand that all letters be as concise as is possible and lacking in idioms, euphemisms, and appeals to any sweet, beautiful little person inside of me. Also, there's every chance I'll agree to enter treatment before listening to the letters, because that's exactly the sort of spiteful thing I'd probably do.

  

5. My urge to mock is somewhat dependent on my assumption that the addict will enter treatment at the end of the show, and for the most part, I prefer to ridicule the show's editors than its subjects. By this, I mean that it's more satisfying (or less depressing) to chortle derisively at the juxtaposition of a narrator claiming "she is an expert manipulator" accompanied by a scene of the addict flatly demanding money so she can go buy drugs than it would be to giggle at the powerlessness and humiliation felt by the addict and their loved ones. 

  

6. Also, despite what I wrote about mocking the story-telling rather than the subjects, there is something shamefully amusing about people who can't seem to grasp the purpose of an intervention, who think it's their chance to finally berate the addict into sobriety (in hopes they'll finally see that they're wrong to be addicted to drugs), and who can't grasp that their stubborn, narcissistic need to avoid blame and assert an absurd (and unfounded) air of control and superiority is the sort of pathetic dishonesty they claim to decry in the addict. I say this is amusing, but not in a way that makes it less heart-breaking... I suppose the trick is not to think about it all that closely.

  

7. I'm not sure whether having an overtly-conservative, ultra-dogmatic religious figure in one's life drives one to drugs and alcohol or if having a self-destructive, emotionally-abusive addict in one's life drives one to religious zealotry, but what I notice is that these things coincide.