Traveling through the rural roads of East Mississippi home from another speaking engagement, I see a sign for Meridian, and think of one of its most famous natives, deciding in an instant it’s time to reconnect with Miss America. I have much to share about my journey the past dozen years and I wonder what’s transpired in her life since.
I find Susan Akin back in her hometown, living with her mother and sister. I haven’t seen her since we went separate ways in early 2011, when I was running off to California in a breakdown and she was battling addiction and a second marriage mired in conflict, struggling to get off the couch. I meet Susan and her daughter, Alex, in a fast-casual diner before noon. Most every table is taken, and Susan is looking around as we talk, seeing if anyone in her hometown notices her.
They don’t.
She smells of ash, and frustration, and she’s lost most of her teeth. Only several remain, she says. “I think it’s genetic,” she says of her missing teeth, before correcting herself. “No, I know drug use had a lot to do with it.”
Susan is her mid-fifties but looks older, by her own description. “Too many cigarettes,” she says.
Alex, a mother of two with another on the way, catches me up on her life since I last saw her, when she was a senior in high school, struggling to balance teen temptations with the damaging realities of substance misuse. “It’s true,” Alex says, explaining how she’d started smoking marijuana at the age of thirteen but “that was later than most of the group I was hanging with.”
Eventually, hooked on painkillers, she dropped out of college. She got pregnant and was prescribed suboxone, which worked to get her off opioids, but “which I’m still on,” a decade later, because suboxone allows complete functionality but is more challenging to quit than the drug it replaces; it was originally meant when it came to market as a short-term solution for weaning, but it can easily become a long-term fix. Still, it’s allowed Alex to parent and live “a normal life,” she says, and substances beyond the suboxone aren’t a part of her life.
“I can’t tell you how good it feels to see you on the other side, doing so well,” I say, and she smiles.
Alex knows that one day she’ll have to detox from the suboxone, but the withdrawals are severe, worse than with opiates, and, like many who end up on what was designed as a transition prescription to help one wean from opiates, there’s no easy way out. Life is working well, and it goes against nature to invite the devil in for the battle that’s required to stop. Still, she says, “I’m gonna do it.”
It’s Susan who has me shaken. I’m struggling to comprehend the difference since just twelve years before. When I last saw Susan, we were much the same, struggling under the weight of addiction, pretending we hadn’t bottomed out. Now, I have pliant skin and enough money to do much of whatever I want; she’s apologizing for wrinkles and living off $500 a month.
“I’m not at my best,” she says in a deepened voice, a hand near her mouth to catch falling salad as she chews.
“No,” I say, “but one thing I have learned is, it’s not over yet. You can be, at your best. If you want.”
She’s looking, and listening, closely, because nobody can tell or order us to stop and change, but seeing is believing, and I tell her about my journey, losing William, nearly losing Hudson, and about how I’d fallen to addiction but got back on my feet, including divorce and then remarriage. I tell her I’m sorry, for not seeing her struggles before, for not offering the appropriate support she needed.
“I handed you money,” I say. “That’s not what you needed.”
“I asked for it.”
“Yes, but I know now that you needed me to drive you to an AA meeting and drop you off, or ask what I could do to help besides money.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I wasn’t ready.”
“Well,” I say, “neither was I.”
Susan never did divorce her second husband, she says, but he died several years ago. She explains how she’d lived off a sparse life insurance check, drinking her dinner in alcohol and continuing opiate pill misuse until the money ran out. She has survived since then on government food subsidies, she says, with a couple of part-time jobs along the way.
“Look at my smartphone. I got it with food stamps. You can’t do everything you can with an iPhone, but I can scan the internet and send messages. The pictures it takes aren’t as good.”
She filled doughnuts with jelly on a 4 AM shift, she says, half-drunk because she hadn’t yet gone to sleep, and she did some insurance administrative work, but there’s one story she mentions as an aside that easily impresses me because I know it was a job most of us couldn’t do. She’d been on suboxone for nearly a decade, she explained, a prescription she got for the same reason as her daughter, Alex, to get off opiates. The suboxone worked, but she’d been on it for nearly a decade and insurance didn’t pay for it.
“I couldn’t afford it anymore,” Susan says, “and I couldn’t afford detox. So, I detoxed myself.”
She tells me about the longest nights, when her bones experienced something like an exorcism, speaking to her in hurtful tongues. “I was sure I was dying,” Susan says. “Hardest nights of my life.”
My eyes are moist, because I can see the pain she felt. Still, I smile.
“Well, I’m not sure I could do that. See, you are incredibly strong. If you can do that, you can do anything.”
She wants to believe, yet she doubts, explaining how with each year that passed, her regrets accumulated and her shame deepened.
“How is that possible? That I could take on more. Didn’t I have enough already?”
She tries hiding her missing teeth with a hand to the mouth, though she’d told me about the situation on the phone before. “Don’t be shocked,” she’d said.
I’m not shocked but I’m rattled, because a decade before we were in nearly the same place. Yet now, I’ve never been better, despite the pain, despite the suffering, and she’s just bottoming out, trying to decide if she’s had enough and is ready to reclaim the grit and fight that helped her claim the crown of Miss America. Despite the sadness, though, she’s still Susan—funny, caring. She’s making me laugh, explaining how she squirted jelly into doughnuts at 4 AM while inebriated, and she’s laughing, too. Her dimpled grin can’t help but erupt, which makes me smile again, because deep down inside she’s a comedienne who can’t resist humor. “I know you don’t want this,” she says, referring to herself, “but at least pretend you do,” and I chuckle, and she chuckles, showing the only one visible tooth she has in the front, a central incisor more than half decayed.
“Not very pretty, is it?” she says.
“Susan, you are and always have been a beautiful person,” I say, and mean every word. She didn’t win that crown and delight while touring the world representing it without beauty both inside and out. The decay from decades of self-medication is unmistakable, but I see a woman of unmistakable beauty and value who deserves to be seen, who deserves to be heard, who deserves a shot at life not framed by the false pretenses of a pageant. I know she has much to offer, and I hope she’ll help herself, and others, telling her story. She’s Miss America still, but for a different reason now, representing the half of this country that’s been left behind as they drown in mental-health struggles and addiction, and the shame of being less than the other half, zooming on by.
“Are you ready?” I ask. “For better?”
A sigh. “I don’t know. I mean yes, I want it. But I’m scared. It’s been so long.”
She’s thinking.
“Are you ready?” I ask again, the words a play on our alma mater’s favorite cheer.
“Hell yes,” she says at last, grinning as she answers with a follow-up line from the cheer.
“Are you?”
“I think so,” she says softly, taking the enthusiasm down, decidedly.
I’m not convinced, because she’s not convinced. The difference in sobriety or not is the finest line drawn by the conviction required for success, because it’s too hard otherwise, resisting something our brain has come to rely upon if our mind is not truly made up.
“You deserve your freedom. Let me know if you get ready. I’m here.”
“I’ll let you know,” she says.
We say goodbye, embracing with a full-on hug, the kind one gives just in case, since you may never see one another again, or not anytime soon, anyway. She walks with Alex to her car, and I get in mine, heading home, wondering if she’ll ever be ready.