Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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Saying that I’m a recovering meth addict sounds awfully dramatic. Instead I’ll tell you that I had a . . . thing with methamphetamine. We had an intense and twisted relationship during my early twenties.

Turns out, it had been a long time coming. When I look back on it, the story actually began with the diet pills I started taking when I was twelve. Or maybe the relationship began even sooner, when I first experienced anxiety over my body, worrying over its relative worth.

In some ways, getting hooked on meth was ultimately a good thing. It accelerated my speed use from legal-and-bad to illegal-and-devastating. What could have festered for years as low-grade speed addiction was bumped to a level that became – quite obviously – a Problem and had to be dug up and rooted out.

I’m not a fan of the “gateway drug” philosophies. I’m not going to tell you that diet pills will necessarily lead others down the path I took. But this is where telling our own stories is inherently powerful. I can share where I went, how I got there, what route I took, and someone else can share theirs.

My own substance story began in the 7th grade, when a friend and I quietly planned an excursion to the grocery store in our small town to acquire our loot. It was her idea, and I was enthusiastically on board. By this age I’d been long-practiced at fretting over the thickness of my thighs, and it was obvious that women who are valued are women who are thin. And what women are thin? Well, all the women I saw as desirable. All the women I saw on TV or in print ads. Diet pills offered a potential avenue to being one of the desirable bunch, instead of a gross pathetic fatty.

As a kid, when I looked at the then-surviving women in my family, my mother and paternal aunts, I was looking at women at various stages of obesity. My mother’s weight-loss regimens were handled quietly, without fanfare. She didn’t want my sister and me to think that we were fat, or that we should worry about our weight. She didn’t want us to get a complex. But her frustration with her own body was no secret, as she carefully weighed her portions with a kitchen scale and frowned in the mirror when inspecting her ample ass.

And when, in retrospect, I consider all the intersections of health and wealth and wellness and value and poverty and obesity – my mind spins in overload. During the ironically-labeled “lean” years when groceries were scarce and pancakes filled hungry bellies for dinner several nights a week, patterns of comfort and food and safety became further entrenched.

I know I’m not alone in having plenty to unpack when it comes to issues with food, body, self-love. And unpacking those bags publicly can have its costs and benefits. But rather than delve too far into those realms, for this post I’ll stick to the solution I acquired in the seventh grade: appetite suppressant. It was low-grade. My use was within “normal” ranges. My behavior or weight loss gave no clear warning bells. It was typical, garden-variety adolescent-girl-conscious-of-her-weight.

Of course I knew that my diet pills should stay secret. I knew that I would be deemed “too young” but I also feared the effect of not using them, of getting fat. Of being unlovable.

In high school and beyond, my choice for appetite suppressant centered on mini-thins and other ephedra products from truck stops. Again, I kept my use fairly low. Just enough to keep the hunger pangs at bay. Not enough to tweak out and attract attention.

The shift of using legal speed into using methamphetamine happened suddenly. Meth and I were introduced, and I was smitten. I felt sexy. Because skinny is sexy, right? Suddenly, I was not chagrined by the thighs I considered thunderous, and made my first homemade sex video with a boyfriend. Watching that video now, I see her jumpy eyes, the sockets beginning to sink into her skull, her hands fluttering, the vein in her neck throbbing in frantic rhythm, the insanity brewing and bubbling, barely under the surface.

On meth, the road to Crazytown is remarkably short. Quickly, I hated it. The costs were mounting. But its hook was in me, caught firmly on my jaw.

At my dealer’s house, I met other young women, and I learned that the weight-loss wasn’t a given, and not permanent. I met women whose years-long use wrecked havoc on their metabolism, endocrine system, and brain. This was obviously not a long-term solution for my alleged weight problem. I was scared. What had I gotten myself into? For a year and a half, I dragged myself over rocky terrain, banging myself up psychologically and physically.

Quitting the substance was one thing. Fear of relapse was palpable, and I did not begin to relax until I had reached three years without any uppers and strictly monitored caffeine intake.

But quitting speed eleven years ago was only the first of many steps. Getting radical is getting to the root. In future installments, I’ll start to dig around its base, seeing what I uncover, working to heal the soil in my metaphorical gardenbed.