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.