The Malleable Reality –
August 24, 2019 – “What I learned to do in that moment,” she explains, “was to doubt my reality; to realise that what was critical in life was the story, the veneer. And that felt like dying.” So began Grisel’s search for a way to escape her everyday life, a life that felt false and full of pressure to go along with the pretence, and instead to find a way to feel something that felt like the truth. It started with an obsession with reading books, “I would read constantly, upside down if I had to,” and then aged 13 (reaching a key developmental point when the teenage brain is primed for risky behaviour) she had her first drink. “I thought, this is how people get through life. I can pretend all this stuff, because I can have this little secret where I’m nice and warm inside,” remembers Grisel. “It was the first time in my life I remember feeling relaxed.”
Grisel swiftly progressed to the “solace” of daily drinking, smoking marijuana and regular drug use. “I loved being able to connect to my true self and I only seemed to be able to do that when I was wasted,” she explains. Unsurprisingly, she was soon in trouble at home and school, trouble that escalated through her teenage years until she was “kicked out” by her parents when she was 19 – dropping out of her first year of college at the same time. After years of trying a range of ways to stop Grisel taking drugs her family now withdrew financial support entirely. As she left home, despite her “brawny high school football player brother” crying in the street, she felt exhilarated: “I felt like all the restraints were off and things got very bad after that.”
