Vice City: “I think I’m finally ready to talk about it”
The decision to write about addiction has brewed since the day I knew I had a problem.
It is as part of me as anything else, and I’m starting to realize that, by writing and speaking on the subject, I gain more knowledge on understanding how it happened, why it happened, and the reasons why it’ll be something I need to deal with for the rest of my existence.
This is my story.
The change
When I started writing for The Butler Collegian in January of 2014, my life changed completely, but not immediately.
It is true that I stumbled upon the newspaper, a complete accident, because I was interviewed by then-Opinion Editor Taylor Powell, but it was a piece on Affirmative Action for her class, not the newspaper, and I still have the copy of her assignment tucked away on my computer.
I remember the interview well. Powell asked me why I didn’t mind speaking on the political subject when others she asked wouldn’t.
I said to her, “Everyone recognizes the problem, but won’t voice a solution. I think that sometimes people brush it under the rug.”
Oddly enough I can picture myself saying this matter-of-factly, admittedly self-righteous, and I believe this is one of my character flaws that serves as a prelude to the drinking.
Before ending our meeting I told her I was interested in writing, more so blogging and posting essays, many of which are buried within my profile, then she told me to apply for the newspaper.
That was the start of the journey.
My interest in writing was, for lack of a better phrase, severely underdeveloped by the start of 2014. I barely knew the difference between there/their, (I still mess that one up sometimes), my grammar was (and still can be) atrocious, yet I carried on.
Why?
Well, to be real with you I just wanted something to do. There was no magical drive that pushed me at the time. That would come much later in the process.
It started from my childhood with an interest in illustrated tales from Curious George. After that I jumped to comics. After that cartoons. After that Yu-Gi-Oh! Basically I was searching for a hobby or a talent, because I had none, and wanted one, so I chose writing because it was cheap, autonomous and cheap. I didn’t need equipment. I didn’t need class. I just needed time. And back then, time was the one thing I really had to spare.
During the spring semester I wrote my first column about being independent of Greek Life on a campus with a strong Greek presence.
It was not an attack on Greek Life, rather it was a middle ground stance, one that left the impression of me saying, “Hey, do what’s right for you!”
The bipartisan style, which was reflective of my political views at the time, helped me gain traction among some members of the staff and the few readers of the paper on Butler’s campus.
Many of the columns I wrote at the time are similar to what I do now, just with more skill and precision in the present.
I wrote editorials on Butler’s tuition, a topic I revisited later. I wrote about interracial relationships, something I’m admittedly knee-deep in. I wrote about supporting the arts, alcohol policies (ironically), student government, President Danko of Butler University (couldn’t have done that one without Colin Likas, thank you), basketball, choosing college majors, but it was my column on diversity that launched me into my first very very very very small taste of acclaim.
That column was strictly written for the sake of attacking something that only I could. As one of the few black members of the paper at the time, I went for the vein and made my words stick. I was shocked and humbled by how many people told me they loved the column, although I carry the belief that Audrey Meyer, the cartoonist who did the artwork for the piece, was the true star.
Nonetheless I was in love with writing at that moment and the power a few words could mean to someone else.
What cemented that semester for me was when a girl I did not know told me she cut out the column and the art and hung it on her dorm room wall. I never told anyone, but I cried alone after she told me that.
It reminded me of when I cut out quotes and posters of my rap heroes because I was in love with their words too.
A brief five months of bliss
After a successful semester as a columnist I became the section editor for the fall of 2014. To be honest I was extremely thrilled, and I remember telling a close friend that my end goal was to gently move one space at a time and later become editor-in-chief.
Morgan Legel joined me as assistant editor, but to be honest she was my equal, and I forever owe her for that. Fuck the assistant title. Her class experience with journalism perfectly balanced my more artistic view of writing, and we were really successful with the help of extremely talented writers: Paige Liston, Alex Bartlow, Alexis Price, Christian Hartselle and Hayley Ross, the columnists, and Audrey Meyer, a cartoonist, who repeatedly created award-winning illustrations (no really, she won everything at the awards I attended. It got tiring having to pick up her certificates so much).
So with all the items the staff attacked: Drug use, internships, date rape, more on diversity, suicide, Yik Yak, student housing, study-abroad and Ebola (remember that?), one column in October begins my hazy recollection of the events that will follow.
This column, titled “One Too Many,” was written by Alex Bartlow. I was not only his editor, but a true fan of his work, and the work of all the other columnists as well.
With him in particular, I remember him seeing me in the library once and he showed me drafts of his work hand-written on notepads and that absolutely floored me. He was very good at personalizing columns, and it impressed me that he did most of his drafts on paper. I list him as a direct influence for why I try to do drafts on paper instead of a computer as well.
But with the column in question, this particular subject, I felt, was out of his understanding.
It was about binge drinking in college. And by late-October, once a casual drinker, I tended to go overboard for the sake of it, fun and plain stupidity, so for sheer artistic expression alone I rewrote the beginning narrative of his column and made it into a story of a drunk underaged individual getting caught by campus police.
My partial ghostwrite of his column is as follows:
It is Friday afternoon. The week is finally coming to an end. The weekend is set to begin.
You have been looking forward to this since Sunday night. Monday was a drag. Tuesday was, as well. Wednesday and Thursday were slightly better, but nothing really comes close to Friday. Friday is the day you can unpack your book bag, throw away stress and plan for the eventful night to come.
After a quick power nap, you press play on your stereo and jam to the hottest songs on the net. Afterward, you text your friends, they gather quickly, you get dressed and you finally head out the door.
Before long, you are at a party downing vodka and Sprite like it’s water. The shots pour over in a continuous line, and you willingly accept. The night rolls right along and you get more and more drunk, but you keep on drinking.
No one is stopping. No one will get in your way. It is your night out and no one will slow you down.
But like a bat out of hell, the cops show up to the party. The red, white and blue lights shine through the stained windows and sticky floors. You have been caught. You were drinking illegally and there is nowhere you can run now.
Still, you try to get out of there, but tonight, the officers are right on your tail. You are caught. They sit you down, and a billion mind-numbing thoughts begin to race through your head.
“Am I going to jail? What will my parents say? Will I be able to stay in school?”
To your dismay, you wind up on social probation. Your friends see you as the drunk kid that tried to run, your parents no longer trust you and you may even have a criminal charge for underage consumption. That charge is now on your record for the entire public to see.
It is at this moment when you think back to the beginning, the Friday night when you arrived at your dorm room after that last class in Jordan Hall. Only one question exists at this moment.
“Was it all worth it?”
For the most part, the portions written after “a bat out of hell,” was Bartlow, not me, but I wanted to set the stage in a way I thought was authentic to the topic. I was just learning to become a drunk, but now that I look back on it I’m fascinated that, even though I studied this column for hours, I still didn’t take Bartlow’s advice to heart.
In the end when Bartlow noticed the changes to the beginning narrative, I told him a vague lie about editorial direction and he seemingly accepted it and nothing of the matter was brought to me again.
Since then I’ve never touched another writer’s work that extensively since, and that was the only time I ever have, but I’m one of those people that believes in signs. I should’ve read the signs.
Even the thought of alcohol in writing sparked my interest to do something completely out of line. For some reason I was attracted to the substance, and I chased it even more once 2015 was set to begin.
The news
By now, if you’re still here, you may be wondering why this topic is being written in explicit detail. The reason is that the next few months fly by in my mind and now they only exist as mini dream movies in my head. Perhaps I killed a couple memory cells in the process.
Truth be told, I wanted to be editor-in-chief, I just didn’t want the job at that particular moment. At the end of 2014 I was selected to be editor by the staff, but there was an internal push by the advisor at the time for me to run. My relationship with the advisor had always been a cool distance up to that point, but maybe she saw something in me that could add something to the paper.
To this day I only have theories.
I will graduate Butler University soon with a business degree, but that does not mean I enjoy business one bit. Economics is my concentration, and I’ve added entrepreneurship and innovation to the bill as well, but my true passion since 2014 has been art. Art. Not writing.
For me, writing is just an extension of my artistic interests. I can’t sing. I can’t rap. I try, but I can’t. And I can’t draw and I can only dance when I’m drunk. So at the moment I have writing by my side and I’m sticking to it until death. The not-so-funny piece is that I can no longer lie and act like I was so far from death in the first place.
Perhaps the advisor saw my innate passion for writing. I remember her repeatedly saying I was a “quick learner,” and I’m exactly that in only one thing: writing. I also, with the efforts of a great editorial staff, helped the opinion section become one of the more popular pieces of the newspaper. Maybe she saw leadership on that front.
Once again, I’ll stick to talented staff + talented staff = talented staff.
Nonetheless, after a editor-in-chief controversy and some staff members going their own way for the beginning of 2015, I became editor-in-chief.
I remember getting the phone call. I was with friends at a volleyball game where I excused myself to answer it. Words couldn’t describe how awfully afraid and excited I was when I heard the news. But that day I took no time to revel. I quickly bought a new binder, threw some paper in it, then planned how I was going to run the newspaper.
Still, even after speaking with past editors and receiving their blessings and advice on the job, I somewhat went into the position naive of how life-changing it could be. In my case I had no idea what I was in for, and that was my first challenge, the realization that absolutely nothing could prepare me for what was going to happen.
The days I lost myself
Not only do I show addictive tendencies, I am obsessive once I fixate on a specific idea in my head.
After becoming editor I had this notion that I was unfit to be boss and that I needed to prove myself worthy of the position.
I thought to myself: “I can’t write news. I can’t write features. I can’t write sports. All I know is columns. I can’t run a weekly on twenty fucking columns. Jesus. I need to learn news. I need to learn sports. I need to learn features. Shit. But it’s winter break, how the fuck am I gonna make up two years of journalism classes I’ve never taken in three weeks. Fuck. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the job. I should’ve declined. I probably shouldn’t have even run for the job. What the fuck was I thinking. I’m not a journalist. I’m so fucked.”
The paranoid string continues.
My first thought was to basically read every article in the New York Times and New Yorker Magazine and learn how to write everything but columns. I read the newspaper and magazine cover-to-cover online and in print. I studied the art and design, the layout, the stories, the interviews, the quotes. Everything. I left no page unturned. Each edge of the print knew my fingerprint and the most searched item on my computer was “today’s top story.”
Meanwhile, I emailed every administrator at Butler and introduced myself as the new editor and hoped for a great cooperative semester. At times it was seemingly difficult to work with the school, some of the blame I feel we should take on ourselves too, so I aimed to set forth a sign that I was mature and ready for the call. In some ways I was, but it was at a cost.
I wrote less and less, naturally, as most editors do. The goal becomes editorial direction, not writing, so my passion was set aside for business.
I focused on the quality of the writing by other members of the staff, and they showed true promise. We introduced a revamped Culture section that focused on personal stories of Butler’s finest musicians written by fellow student musicians themselves. It was my proudest moment as editor because I promised one administrator a year earlier that I would push for this one day, and indeed I had. There was some push back internally from my superior, but I would not budge on the matter and indeed I didn’t. The opinion section remained strong with Morgan’s lead. Sports maintained its edge. Culture was fantastic (thank you Sarah), but news was still my greatest concern simply because it was the section where I had the least experience and it featured the most important piece of all. The front page.
By then I made my trick. Because of scheduling issues, a busy staff (everyone has homework to do and a life to live besides a university newspaper that pays very very little) and a rotating staff, I hired more and more writers and relied on our managing editor, which meant more and more things for me to edit, but it created a safety valve so I had more than one backup story when things failed. Still, I overworked myself and my grades suffered. I failed two courses that semester. I saw friends less. I drank more.
In addition, I couldn’t sleep because all I could think about was proving myself and not failing. I took every typo and editorial mistake extremely hard as a perfectionist, a flaw I still battle today, and the drinking was aimed to put me to sleep, but I didn’t eat well throughout the day because I was constantly in the office working (sometimes I slept in the office overnight, got up, went to my apartment, showered, then went back).
You see the cycle.
Each month the drinking and my sense of reality got worse. But it was in February when the drinking reached its ultimate height. I learned on Super Bowl Sunday that year, while I was in the office skyping a friend, that I had two older half-sisters that I had no idea even existed.
My father hasn’t been in the picture since 1999, but his shadow had been over me my entire life, because we share a name, some of the same interests, and perhaps some of the same flaws.
As it is now I am Julian Wyllie jr., but most would never know that. I’ve hated my name at various moments in my life, and that day I hated it to a climax.
I remember feeling extremely alone that day. Even though I had sisters, one that I am now getting to know better, thankfully, Melisa, an extremely brilliant woman to know and the one who told me we were related, I still felt as if gin and sometimes rum were the only things that understood my irrational personality.
As it goes, I continued my success with the newspaper, helping the staff start a very cool, sometimes edgy and ridiculous video section, and I helped make the newspaper a tiny bit more informal in certain sections (like allowing curse words to attract younger readers who prefer BuzzFeed), but ramped up my knowledge of news writing by working on stories about sexual assault statistics, tuition and academics.
But the piece I was most proud of in the end was called “Finding Peace,” my last as editor-in-chief, and it discussed two students’ near-death car accidents and the lessons learned from the experience.
I’ve only told three people this, two women I’m closest with and my therapist, but I wrote that article as a metaphor for me, not them. Their stories were very real, very poignant, and well-intentioned, but my interest in making that my last story as editor was about finding peace within myself, because by that point in May I was trying to kick my addictive tendencies before the start of the summer before senior year.
The song that stunned me
J Dilla, Detroit legend, beatmaker, producer, rapper and icon, died in 2006 of a debilitating blood disease.
During the semester I was editor, particularly the more wintery portion of the campaign, I became a vinyl collector and I was still adding to my CD collection.
By this time I finally listened to and loved MF DOOM, Madlib, and some of the more underground hip hop acts, so I went for Dilla as well, naturally, to see what he was all about.
The first project I bought was his celebrated Donuts album and I had it on CD, but never played it, because I downloaded the album to my laptop but forgot to listen to it.
However, one night, as my not-so-crisp memory and psyche will show, I played the album in full and had an hallucination based around one of the songs.
No, I don’t remember, how much I drank that night. I don’t know if it was a weekday or a weekend. I don’t know the timeline of things because my journal at the time had no dates, a stupid mistake on my part, so I can’t pinpoint much of the nitty gritty details. But what I do remember is me listening to the sixth song on the album titled “Stop.”
Dilla, as a beatmaker, was a master sampler, and the very introspective cut is rumored to be a track on Dilla on himself as a dying man. Nonetheless, the meaning of the song carries my own crux at this juncture.
The song is carried by a sample of Dionne Warwick singing “you’re gonna need me one day,” and “stop, and think about what you’re doing.” Add that with the sample of Jadakiss at the beginning seemingly saying “is death real?” I lost it completely.
With the bottle in hand and no one else in the apartment I cried like never before and thought about what I was doing to myself, just as the song says.
The song that made me want to live
After the incident I don’t think I had a drink in a few days. All I could think about was why that song impacted me as much as I did. Somehow I concluded that, because I was in total disarray, I believed it was my mother speaking to me through the music telling me to “stop what I was doing.” But as revisionist history goes that’s a nice way of putting it into a narrative. In either case I thought more about the value of life and I still do to this day, almost all the time.
I think about another song that I love dearly, among all the music I’ve ever heard, called “Blue in Green” by Miles Davis.
In my opinion it’s the most beautifully solemn jazz recording ever by any artist. I think about songs like that and realize again why I love art. It’s because I don’t really know why, but I know how it makes me feel, completely in tune with the passing world around me, like a quiet observer aiming to unlock the secrets of humanity, one expression at a time.
It is the reason why I’m including this in Spin, Needle & Pop.
It is the reason why I no longer wish to carry the secrets of my addiction in kind, knowing, perhaps, that others struggle with similar mental diseases and disorders.
Anorexia, bulimia, suicidal thoughts, drug addiction, alcoholism, racism, paranoia, depression. There are so many.
I know these people. You know these people. I am one of them. I was one of them.
We are the demons we become in life. Sometimes we make matters worse on ourselves and sometimes we have legitimate reasons to stray into the dark side.
But I am here to say that a vice can be managed, never beaten, because the issues related to some of these tendencies turn them into symptoms, not the overarching problem.
For me it was loneliness, the pressures I felt to be a better man than my father, the constant fear that he, a man I used to hate but now pity, and my own insecurities that made me think drinking was the answer.
Drinking could briefly help me sleep when I stayed up late to edit articles, write articles, plan designs and do my class work. Drinking would quell the odd thoughts that keep me up at night, the constant ponderings that makes me the illustration I loved, a Curious George, a person who wants to reach the highest levels of art in humanity.
Drinking would and still sometimes helps me enjoy music more. Drinking helped me not feel as insecure about my lack of intelligence. Drinking helped me not care about worrying that I would end up alone due to my inexpressive exterior, introversion.
The same can be said of crippling thoughts and insecurities that plague many people you and I know.
Maybe you too have something you’re working on and indeed can’t find the answers to, whether it is in your head or your body or someone you love and their mind and body.
Nevertheless, the purpose of this is to not publicly shame myself and others for falling for a vice. Just the opposite.
The purpose of this deep sea 4,000 word dive is to make the claim that we are all working to make ourselves better, and that some of us will indeed fail, but it is hope that should keep the rest of us forward.
We can learn from those who pass from these issues. We can take their lives as lessons in many fashions. We, as complicated beings, are prone to malfunctions.
We are not computers with reboot switches.
Life is a process and order is to be challenged as well as maintained.
In the end, as I read this, it is for me as well as you. It is therapeutic to me, just like the therapy I get now to discuss my thoughts about life and the world, and I hope anyone who reads any of this can learn that even a sometimes successful guy like myself is at risk of falling just as horribly as anyone else of any stature.
But for now I am here. I will keep writing. I will keep addressing the world’s beauty and folly.
This is Spin, Needle and Pop, a place to share, in this case, one human’s history.
Sincerely,
Julian
Don’t forget to follow Spin, Needle & Pop.
“A space to share music of all genres, categories and histories.”
