Diya Sethi: Addicted to life

Diya Sethi's brutally honest account of her battle against addiction shows that, contrary to common belief, long-lasting recovery is possible

Once an addict, always an addict. Even those who provide rehabilitation services buy into this common belief. In other words, an addict is always in recovery, vulnerable to relapse. Diya Sethi is living proof that this view is myopic and misinformed — if not cruel. Sethi knows what addiction is. She inhabited that world for 13 long years, fought it, lost, sunk deeper into the addition and battled it again and again until she finally found the way out of it from within and has stayed that way for the last 14 years.

The Addict: A Life Recovered is Sethi’s brutally honest account of life lived as an addict afflicted with anorexia-bulimia nervosa, a psychological condition that would make her deprive her body of all nourishment or binge eat and then purge, over and over again, until, she writes,  “my face was swollen from water retention. My teeth were full of cavities, the enamel worn thin from the acid reflux produced by vomiting and I had a oesophagus infected by a fungal overgrowth called candidiasis”. It was a disorder that found her plunging into even darker worlds — of hard drugs, from ecstasy to cocaine.

Sethi’s addiction was undoubtedly partly rooted in a personality disorder to start with — she appeared to have an innate fear of failure. She writes, “At the belligerent age of six, I was the best athlete in my age group. But when the whistle blew, I was paralysed by the possibility of failure.” If this weekness was magnified, that was partly the collateral damage of her father’s peripatetic career as an Indian diplomat. Transferred from one strange country to another, she was left with a permanent sense of displacement, always the Other and often subject to ridicule, racial discrimination and humiliation.

Indeed, it speaks volumes for her family that she was able to put her life out for scrutiny given her father’s profession (he was ambassador to Abu Dhabi and France). Her parents and her brother, their relationships with her and with one another, their fears, their strengths and their humanness are all revealed with the same searing honesty. “ Mine was self-inflicted punishment borne of escapism, The real trials and tribulations were for my family, while I sought refuge and indulged in my addictions,” says Sethi, 40.

But how do you write about being an addict when you are no longer an addict? How do you dredge up those memories of a wrenching period in your life after all those years? There is perhaps only one way. And from Sethi’s book, it appears that’s the way she went. “When HarperCollins decided it wanted to publish my story, I began to write furiously to finish what I had started — but I was no longer an addict and I was without that escape valve for all the feelings I was reinstating: fear, pain, rejection, humiliation and shame,” says Sethi. “They festered inside me and for one long year, they manifested in relentless illness until I nearly died of acute viral hepatitis.”

She would wake up at midnight, relive the episode for two to three hours and then start writing. In the process, she fell ill because she was revisiting the emotions, remembering everything she did as an addict, the lies she lived and the manipulations in which she engaged.

Sethi’s life as a diplomat’s daughter took her around the world — New York, China, Kuala Lumpur, South Africa, Abu Dhabi, France and later to England to study. And from the age of 13 for the next 13 years, wherever she went, she carried her addiction, anorexia-bulimia, with her. It was there when she “went to the palaces of the Sheikhs, where Cristal champagne cascades down man-made waterfalls”, “where each female guest received a twenty-four-carat gold necklace as a gesture of appreciation for her attendance”; it was there when she lived on campus at Regent’s College in London; and it was there when her parents moved to France where the resplendent Eiffel Tower was visible from the French windows of the study of their house that had period furniture and gilded tapestries on the walls. Her story would have sounded fantastic had it not been so agonisingly real.

There is, however, more to Sethi’s book than just the painful recounting of her life as an addict. The book questions the widely used 12-step rehabilitation programme for addicts — “not the 12 steps themselves, but the way in which the programme is being interpreted and executed,” says Sethi. She had admitted herself into a rehabilitation centre called PROMIS in Kent, England, which worked on the 12-step programme. It began by asking the addicts to admit that they were all powerless over the addiction and that their lives had become unmanageable. It then asked them to turn their will and lives over to god, as they understood god. And finally, it believed that addiction could not be reversed and the pursuit of pleasure by an addict made him vulnerable to relapse.

Sethi, instead, believes that “addiction is the result of escapism — but if an addict is taught to stop fearing his or her feelings, then real recovery can be achieved, and (this) will suspend the theory that an addict must always fear relapse into addiction.” The current rehabilitation programmes, she says, do not sufficiently penetrate the subconscious mind, which is where feelings are buried. “The approach is much more through the medium of the intellect than it is through a mind-body dynamic that can be better accessed through alternative therapies and practices.”

Sethi who had, for years, abused food, eventually came to use it to her advantage when she enrolled in a culinary school, Le Cordon Bleu London. “All my senses came alive in the kitchen. I was smelling, touching, tasting...I was feeling,” she says. Today Sethi is a consultant chef and she herself does not follow any dietary rules. “Sure sometimes I eat too much, or very little, or I drink a little too much alcohol just as anyone does... but never is there the result of a domino effect that defines addiction.”

It’s rather limiting that the book is titled “The Addict” because it also looks beyond addiction. The philosophical nuggets — some borrowed and some Sethi’s own — apply to everybody, the multitudes that live a life trapped in their identities, much like an addict. These are identities sometimes defined by our professions and which limit the world in which we interact and function. Sethi says she has managed to break that mould of “identity” for herself. It has taken her a tumultuous journey to do that, but she has survived. And her book bears testimony to it.

Did she have any apprehensions about how it would be received?  “I was so driven by the purpose of helping people that I never worried for a moment about any sense of embarrassment in telling my story,” she says. “It is the life that I lived. And I thought, if people recoil from me, well then, so be it.”

THE ADDICT: A life Recovered
Author: Diya Sethi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 189
Price: Rs 250