Sunday 19 March 2017

Groundhog Day

Baby don’t worry I’m a good disease.

Why, when life becomes half-decent again, do I feel this burning desire to fuck everything up. Not just a little bit, I want to drop a nuke on my face. It’s what I’m used to, chaos, turbulence, the ups the downs, the highs the lows. Today, everything is good. It’s not perfect, but, overall it’s moderately satisfying which is more than I could have hoped for at any point last year. And that’s just fine with me. It’s what I thought I wanted. I tell myself I want to just be normal, I just want to feel slightly-better-than-average all the time rather than bounce from stratospheric highs to desperate depths of depression regularly throughout each day.



In reality, being normal is boring. Maybe I’m not even qualified to say that, because if I’m honest I’m not normal. Do normal people fantasise about swimming out off the coast of North Korea and hoping a dirty bomb plops onto their face? I’m not sure what exactly it is about the chaos that turns me on. Maybe it was the attention at first, it gave me something to talk about when my life was full of nothing interesting whatsoever. Poor me, give me some sympathy.

People say to me, ‘play the tape through to the end’. To which I normally say, ‘thanks for that crazy deep advice buddy’ and roll my eyes. This advice is great in theory. Why would I want to go out again when I can clearly see that within a few short months I’d be back in the same miserable hole I’d just managed to climb out of? Getting out of the hole is exciting for a minute. It’s scary at first when you open your eyes after being in the dark for so long, everything looks brighter, genuine joy is euphoric, but with it flood in negative emotions, anger, grief, hate, despair. And when they do, crawling right back into that hole doesn’t seem like such a bad option. Just one more time and then I’ll be ready to come out into the world.



Today it’s different. Right now I want to get high. I’m playing the tape forward, I see that everything I have going for me right now will vaporise as that nuke detonates. Goodbye to the two months of hard work I’ve put in just staying alive, pushing through anxiety, insomnia, depression, withdrawals, physical rehabilitation. I’ve got a really decent life today, and that doesn’t sit right with me, I don’t know what to do next. My natural instinct is self-destruction.

When I let everything play out, and imagine getting back into recovery again, I see myself throwing in the towel. I honestly cannot do this again. Finally, there are good things in my life I do not want to lose. If I decide I want to walk away from what I have today, I know there will be no return. It’s not that I can’t do this again, I simply won’t. It’s no life.

No life.


Addiction vs. The Matrix

Here's something I wrote a couple months ago when I first landed back in treatment. 

Morpheus. Laurence Fishburne. Furious Styles. Call him what you want, but know that he’s a badass and speaks the truth, be it laying down the law in Boys n the Hood or freeing people’s minds in The Matrix, I wish he was my sponsor.  

Two lines from The Matrix have been going through my head today.

“You are a slave. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind. I’m trying to free your mind. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.”
Addiction is a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. You might see me sitting on the street with some bums stuffing junk in my arm, you might smell the stale shit stains on my pants, that part of addiction you see. But your neighbor might be an alcoholic, your partner might be an addict, your father might be in recovery, and you might be completely oblivious to it.  
True, we are not all born into bondage, but some are. Many of us make numerous seemingly irrelevant decisions which lead us to, over time, develop an addiction to some external thing. Without realizing, often, that we have become dependent on this in order to survive. You have your first sip of alcohol at 18 and end up in treatment centers during your 50s dealing with your alcoholism. You get hit by a car, break your hip, get on painkillers and end up on heroin when you can’t afford the pills… and heroin is so groovy that you forget everything and everyone you ever cared about.



I get sidetracked thinking about it. Heroin really is so fucking sweet if you’re ready to peace out on life. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to walk out of my parents’ house past my mother, in tears, begging me not to go. Think about it enough and it makes me think I’m a really, really bad person. What would make you stab your mother through the heart (metaphorically speaking) over and over again? Would you do it for $1 million if I put the cash in front of you? And you can’t just give her the money. You’re a selfish, drug addict, and that money is for you and you alone. Just like what the Oracle tells you.
You tell yourself she’ll be fine, she’ll get over it, but somewhere inside, you know you’re scarring her for life. Maybe you’d take the money, maybe you don’t even like you Mom, but I love mine. I can walk out the front door, or the door Morpheus has shown me, either way, I’m the one who has to walk through it. I make bad decisions for a living.   

“What you know you can’t explain but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind.”
A fucking splinter in your mind? Really picture it, having a splinter in your mind, not knowing how to get it out. Or maybe you’ve been to some meetings, done a couple rehabs, and you know what you need to do to get it out. You can “free your mind”, wake up and choose not to use every day, just for that day. You can ‘work a program’- I can’t even write those words without rolling my eyes - work? Every day? You have to be fucking kidding me, I’ll chose the easy option every time. Pop down the pharmacy and get a pair of tweezers/needles/dope.



A splinter in my mind, a dagger in my Mom’s heart, everyone is suffering. Sometimes I think it would be better for everyone if I just put an end to this now. 
I’m in detox at the moment and I’m just trying to distract myself from the splinter in my mind and the dagger in my heart.