5/29/2023 0 Comments My addiction ink![]() With that kind of self-reflection, and obstinate determination, Blakinger committed herself to prison programs and counseling, which led to recovery. Instead, these are things that keep you up all night: What does the fact that you ended up here say about you as a person? Does it mean you are bad? Or just bad at life?” “But the things that scare you in jail are not what you expect them to be. The experience was traumatic and sobering in every sense of the word. Many of us devour headlines like one that appeared atop a Washington Post blog in March 2011: “ANOTHER IVY DRUG BUST.” However, it reads differently if the busted is you, a person “decaying with a vengeance,” as Blakinger was when she read the report of her arrest.īlakinger was convicted of criminal possession of a controlled substance (six ounces of heroin in a Tupperware container) and spent almost two years in jails and prisons. She survived “with nothing more than a few fractured vertebrae, some broken ribs, a clamshell back brace and a cornucopia of new pills - a regular supply of uppers and downers I could trade for better drugs.” Her eating disorder worsened, and she attempted suicide. ![]() If I could not do that, I would close my eyes and count twinkling points of light in my mind.” If I could not see the stars, I would count ceiling tiles or specks on the floor. She writes, “I would always count the stars through every trick. I needed to stay with her I wanted her to be OK.Īt 17, Blakinger began engaging in sex for the money she needed to support her addiction. She describes mixing coke and heroin and, with hard-to-bear detail, writes, “My veins are all shot out and hard to find, so my stabs at oblivion usually involve a few hours of crying as I bleed all over the floor, leaving behind the speckled blood spatter of a crime scene.” When I read that passage, I was tempted to close the book - it’s hard to witness self-harm - but Blakinger is a gifted writer and she’d ensnared me. She began using crack and heroin and quickly developed a life-threatening substance-use disorder. I wanted to waste away, slowly and tragically.” “They are also about self-destruction that feels like success. “They say that eating disorders are about control, but it is not that straightforward,” she writes. She began starving herself “in earnest” in high school. She became obsessed with suicide: “I dreamed of death.”īlakinger drank alcohol, huffed glue, ate Tylenol 3s, smoked pot and took Adderall and Ecstasy. She was teased and bullied by fifth grade, she “discovered self-destruction,” learning from other girls how to throw up on purpose. ![]() ![]() But what reads like a perfect college résumé (indeed, she enrolled in Cornell) belies Keri’s anguish. Her Harvard-educated lawyer father drove her to skating practice, and her Cornell-educated grade-school-teacher mother gave her standardized tests “for fun” and made sure Keri tried “all the possible childhood activities,” including piano, soccer, horseback riding, gymnastics, Girl Scouts - “a smorgasbord of suburbia.”īlakinger was an A student, won writing awards and became a competitive figure skater. From the outside, Blakinger had a charmed childhood. Many families and many people have parallel narratives: one for public consumption, another the truth. Ultimately, there’s nothing comical about her descent. It’s funny at times - and I felt bad laughing about someone sinking as low as Blakinger did, but she’s sardonically witty, so I couldn’t help myself. Keri Blakinger’s brave, brutal memoir, “Corrections in Ink,” is a riveting story about suffering, recovery and redemption. CORRECTIONS IN INK: A Memoir, by Keri Blakinger
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