Codependency is a word that was never spoken in my household. It was like a rule. DO NOT talk about anything that could relate to both of your parents’ addictions. Some people only had to deal with one. Unfortunately, I had to deal with both. That was the life many people grew up with, including myself. 

I wanted to turn this assignment into something I could use to not only teach people what codependency is, but also how it feels from the perspective of a classmate. As seen in the slideshow below, I’m not a very artistic person and actually had some trouble with the art side of the assignment, but I tried to make up for it with my writing.

Some of the pieces in the zine, like A Pocket Guide to Losing Your Mind, took me days to perfect and have it read the way I wanted. Others were written within ten minutes, like on page four, He Slept For Three Days Straight. That particular poem was written branching off of a poem I had already written with the same first line. The original poem was about losing someone to a car accident after they had gone into a 3-day coma.

These pieces of writing truly reflect everything that I went through growing up in a household, watching two addicts ruin their lives and possibly mine with it. I personally didn’t put any of my personal experience into the zine. Instead, I wrote about someone I watched grow up around me. I watched this girl’s mom leave the driveway and not return for weeks.

I watched her mom drive back up to her house. I watched her leave for school, getting skinnier as the weeks went on. I watched her suffer and get sadder as the months passed. She was the truest example of what people like us had to go through. She experienced it on such a large scale that it made my experience seem insignificant by comparison.

I watched her go through it and experience it with me. It was the first time I saw a girl my age grow up with a mother and father like mine. And somehow, it made me feel a little less alone.