that is how the light gets in

Sep 26

Written By Leah Dick

intro

that is how the light gets in program.png

that is how the light gets in program (1).png

program citations

gallery

333 (i-iii)

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
3 days: “Opioid use disorder (OUD) is defined as the chronic use of opioids that causes clinically significant distress or impairment… OUD affects over 16 million people worldwide and over 2.1 million in the United States.”1
I get lost on the drive from Kentucky to Virginia, so the withdrawal symptoms start while I’m still in the car. I remind myself that it’s just three days: sweating, shaking, restless legs, no sleep, no eating, endlessly upset stomach, flu-like body aches. I don’t know yet about post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS), which will keep me from getting a full night’s sleep for months. On these first few nights, my mom keeps both our doors open at night in case I have a stroke or heart attack. It took me years to realize how selfish it was to detox without medical help and I advise against anyone else doing the same. But at that time, I just wanted to know it was the last time. I wanted to know I’d never have to feel like that ever again.

anhedonia

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
7 days: Anhedonia, Greek for “without pleasure”, describes a state that many people experience in the early days of SUD recovery. As the brain readjusts to a baseline without substances, those in abstinence-based recovery can feel gray, emotionless, flat, and a lack of interest in the common everyday activities (like spending time with loved ones, coffee, and food). This time period can overlap or succeed the intensity of initial physical withdrawal, which may increase the likelihood of return to use for some people. I can not cry or feel connection to anyone around me, any piece of media or art, and certainly not towards myself or my future, which now feels oppressively expansive and undefined.

internal external (i, ii)

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
14 days: “Recovery capital refers to resources- both internal and external- that individuals can mobilize to recover from SUDs (Cloud & Granfield, 2001)... Physical recovery capital includes physical health, health insurance, housing, food, clothing, and finances. Evidence indicates that access to these physical necessities is critical to a person’s recovery (McLellan et al., 1998; van Olphen, Eliason, Freudenberg, & Barnes, 2009).”2
Still experiencing physical withdrawal symptoms with less intensity, I was able to go to the doctor’s office for what felt like endless tests to see the impact of substance use disorder on my body, blood, organs, teeth. This is possible not just because I am still on my parents’ health insurance as a twenty two year old, but also because I have a car to drive to various doctors’ offices as needed.

hold the door

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
30 days: “Community recovery capital constitutes community resources that have been made available to people in recovery. Community recovery capital includes efforts to combat stigma, availability of treatment centers and halfway houses, and local recovery support institutions (e.g., religious institutions, 12-step clubhouses, Collegiate Recovery Communities; Harris, Baker, Kimball, & Shumway, 2007).”2
I drive across rural southwest Virginia to various church basements, dining halls, and classrooms. In each one, someone welcomes me. They tell me they’re glad I’m there. They tell me to keep coming back. The coffee is usually bitter and the cookies are almost always stale. They tell me it gets better. I start to believe them.

glass half full

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
60 days:“Emerging adults (18-25 years old), regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status, face distinctive developmental challenges marked by an impoverished sense of identity and instability (Arnett, 2000)... Emerging adults are twice as likely as adolescents or adults to develop SUD and represent more than 20% of those seeking treatment (Bergman, Kelly, Nargiso, & McKowen, 2016).”2
I know how lucky I am to even be alive. Everyone tells me so- how lucky I am to be so young in recovery, about to celebrate my 22nd birthday. Still, it feels like an out of body experience to watch from the sidelines from states away as my old friends graduate college, get in relationships, travel, secure jobs, start careers and families- while my proudest accomplishment so far is just still being alive.

the mecca

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
90 days: “Family/social recovery [capital]… may encompass family participation in treatment, having other recovering persons in one’s social network, and participation in sober leisure activities.”2
My parents ask what I wanted for my birthday and no one is more surprised than me when I say camping gear. My friends call it “the Mecca”- a state park where we spent the holiday weekend sitting in different circles: camping chairs around a campfire until the first hints of daylight, card games at picnic tables in pajamas, meetings throughout the day where people shared tragedy and hope in sixty minute stories. It is the first time in recovery that I feel true, blissful, communal joy and ease and (most importantly) fun.

body score

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
6 months: “Up to 35% of individuals who were dependent on alcohol or other drugs also have eating disorders, a rate 11 times greater than the general population.”3
Without the dopamine slot machine of narcotics, I start playing fast and loose with my food intake. Like many of the other women around me in recovery, I’ve been eating three meals a day for the first time in years, which results in a different body than I’ve experienced before. It takes a long while to see (much less adequately address) the compulsivity of SUD manifesting in a more socially acceptable but equally dangerous way. More often than not, those in my recovery community share dealing with long-standing co-occurring disorders after the immediacy and intensity of SUD-specific symptoms have subsided.

orange juice

2024, acrylic on canvas
$25
9 months: “A substantial body of research has shown the positive role that family support plays in long-term recovery (Havassy et al., 1991; Nattala et al., 2010; Walton, Reischl, & Ramanathan, 1995).”2
When I visit my hometown, I am so panicked about running into people I used with or treated poorly in active use that I essentially become a hermit for the duration of the trip. My family helps safeguard my sobriety, even if I think it has to feel like overkill to them. Or maybe it’s a relief to see me return when I say I will, eyes clear and shoulders slighted relaxed after a mutual aid meeting, after all those years of the opposite. My mother swaps vanilla extract for an alcohol-free version, painstakingly labeling the breakfast cakes I can eat on Christmas morning. My step-mom makes sure to buy bottles of sparkling apple cider for each Thanksgiving so I can toast. My friends make a bowl of “boos-free” punch alongside the rest at a Halloween party. The simultaneous and contradictory fear of either being seen or missing out subside with each small act of consideration.

the pink cloud (i, ii)

2024, acrylic on canvas
$25, $75
1 year: “...there is a clinically significant recovery in satisfaction with life, executive functions and psychological distress for polysubstance using SUD patients following one-year of abstinence. This improvement from admission to one-year, suggests that a gradual progression of treatment should be adopted to ensure that the patients have the prerequisites for receiving treatment in a broad array of dimensions.”4
I always show up to my job on time, as well as to unlock the mutual aid meeting on Wednesdays. I have a boyfriend who encourages me to write poetry, to apply to a local university. My parents meet my sponsor and are surprised to find out that my routine check-ins asking how they are weren’t mandated by anyone else in my life- it’s just something I do now. My friends in recovery congratulate me in various ways at my one year anniversary celebration, with the most outspoken veterans intoning, welcome to the real world. Now the work starts.

final girl (i, ii)

2024, acrylic on canvas
$25, $75
3 years: “During 2013–2014, fentanyl submissions in the United States increased by 426%... and synthetic opioid deaths increased by 79%.”5
It feels like every month, someone I know from my hometown dies from an overdose. During a shift at my retail job, I am stocking 2014 graduation dresses that I will look through on my break to choose for my own ceremony coming up next month. I untangle hangers and wonder why I got to be one of the lucky ones. I am not any stronger, smarter, kinder, or better than the friends who were in recovery for years and then simply made one ill-fated choice. I remember the countless overdoses I had years ago, that I woke up from, walked away from. In 2015, the FDA will approve the overdose reversal nasal spray Narcan as a prescription drug, which changes and saves countless lives each day. I still think of each of those friends to this day.

more will be revealed

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
5 years:“After 5 years of abstinence, a recovering alcoholic has approximately the same chances of lifetime relapse as a randomly selected member of the general US population has of experiencing alcoholism in the coming year.”6
On Saturdays, I volunteer at the farmer’s market and on Sundays, I attend a community yoga class in the same spot. I’ve started preparing my grad school application- maybe with a focus on something that addresses addiction on a policy level? I’m not quite sure yet. People from all over are starting to talk about overdose prevention, about recovery in headlines, on social media. It is the smallest breath of relief to be “a part of” rather than the other when I’m with my peers, my neighbors.

happy road of destiny

2024, acrylic on canvas
not for sale
11 years: “...the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a study in 14 countries to examine the relative stigma associated with some of the most stigmatizing conditions… They reported that drug use was ranked as the most stigmatized condition… stigma among individuals with SUDs has been shown to be detrimental to their psychological and physiological wellbeing and to treatment seeking.”7
The initial terror I felt when moving back to my hometown, following the end of a relationship, begins to subside as I listen to the way people talk about recovery now compared to 11 years ago. People attach their names and faces to the word, which is now viewed as a unique skill set in the form of “lived experience”. There are community events celebrating it and mourning those that we have lost, with so many people attending I can hardly believe it as my sister and I walk from table to table. When I am at the local pharmacy, there is a giant advertisement for naloxone displayed prominently at the pick-up window, the medicine now being a commonplace mainstay in many people’s first aid kits. There is so much work yet to be done but I can see change in the world around me.

everywhere, everything

2024, acrylic on canvas
sold
13 years: “...roughly 22.3 million Americans — more than 9% of adults — live in recovery after some form of substance-use disorder. A separate study published by the CDC and the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 2020 found 3 out of 4 people who experience addiction eventually recover.”8
The one constant of my recovery is that it has never been done alone. We heal in community. The further I go in my recovery, the more I discover that I am not the exception but the rule. Given the needed resources and tools (including time), we do recover. There are so many pathways to and of recovery, so many ways it can look, and so many different words to tell it the way that each of us experiences it. I am just a thread in a much larger tapestry, which I hope continues to grow more rich, more diverse, more widespread for years to come. Here’s to making sure it does.

gallery citations

outcomes

thanks to the generosity of attendees, 50% of the profits have been donated (a total donation of $430.00 as of 10/03/24) to two organizations that build recovery capital in Kentucky: Voices of Hope and the Kentucky Harm Reduction Coalition. 50% of the profits from the above works will be similarly donated on a rolling basis as items sell. Any works listed with a price above are still for sale and can be purchased by contacting me here.

video walk-through

Leah Dick