Contradictions I've Been Sold

A multi-faceted disease of conflict. At first there are the obvious internal dialogues, a never-ending stream of contradictory consciousness. I know something to be true, but I know this same thing to be false. I say one thing but do another.

Quite rightly this gives me a bad rep. I’m branded a liar, cheater, manipulative. It’s hard for me to argue I’ve been mislabelled when faced with such accusations, these things are true, I do them shamelessly and without second thought.

Fact: your addict, or you the addict, will have uttered the words “I want to get better, I want to stop, I am done, I never want to take a drink or a drug ever again”. Something to that effect is said or heard frequently. I mean, most normal people who’ve had one to many the night before wake up and say things like “shit I feel rough, I’m not drinking ever again”.

Swearing off alcohol the morning after can be taken with a pinch of salt, most people would admit they have no intention of going teetotal on such a whim. You might be seriously considering it though when you open your eyes, splitting headache, a trembling mess with no recollection of the previous night. So you come downstairs at midday announcing to your significant other that you’re getting too old for these hangovers. Last night will not happen again.

There is no such thing as too much Morpheus.

You chug some water, get an IV, greasy spoon brekkie, whatever your personal preference, and depending which, you start feeling better in a matter of hours to days. What’s certain is you do recover, you feel fit as a fiddle come Wednesday and despite remembering how awful you felt just a few days prior, you’re on the good side of hump day and decide you will attend your oh-so-important-social-or-work-related function of superficial surface encounters and you decide to drink to take the edge off how fucking terrible this party is. You’re not an alcoholic, you’re sensible, you drink less than the weekend before, still waking up with a hangover, just not quite of biblical standards like last time.

Liar. You broke my trust. You promised you wouldn’t do that again. Fair? Unfair? For me, somewhere in between.

We suffer from a disease from which there is no known cure. Clearly, there has been a paradigm shift in recent decades away from the idea of substance dependence as a moral failing towards its acceptance as a disease. It seems many people today generally accept addiction as a disease and addicts get better treatment and support than in days gone by, but I’m not sure how many people really believe this. Tons of addicts themselves refuse to accept addiction as a disease, so it’s understandable that normies might be skeptical too.

I accept addiction as a disease. Most diseases target specific areas of the body, this one targets the part of the brain that controls decision making. These days, I try to make rational, sensible choices in my daily life. In the past, I would wake up and wish I hadn’t. I wanted to die. At this juncture, merely taking some drugs to numb this pain seems a reasonably sensible choice when compared with the alternative. Today I do not want to die, but there is sometimes so much going on in my head, it might even be good stuff, but when it becomes overwhelming and I feel like I can no longer cope, my instinct is to shut it down.  

'Di.' Jeffrey Schaler - During masturbation one may get carried away, forget to aim, and accidentally take a jizzload in the eye, thereby blinding oneself. Medical hoax? I think not. 

In the depth of my despair, I say things I do truly mean and these things are a product of my current state of mind, environment, what I’m feeling in the here and now. Right now, I don’t feel like heroin would offer me much. I think I’ve now been on this merry-go-round long enough to accept that heroin is not the solution, it is merely a solution. A last resort in the event the plane goes down, it’s my parachute. 

I used to say this thing all the time, it went something like “I want to want it”. I don’t think anyone gets long-term sobriety if they don’t want it. For so long, I witnessed destruction happening in my life and was unfazed. I was so emotionally disconnected, I could see what was happening as if I was a bird watching from above. As I watched events unfold below, I could tell things were nasty, but my little bird brain wasn’t able to compute the feelings associated with the actions, and so I shrugged my shoulders and carried on about my business, accepting these events as simply a part of everyday existence. Destruction was normalized. My rational mind knew that something going on was abnormal, but with an inability to actually feel what was happening I was unable to connect the dots. I knew that I wanted change, but the underlying emotions which would be the catalyst to change were non-existent. Hence the phrase, I want to want it.

Do I want it today? I'm not sure I even know what it is. It’s hard to make good decisions when the irrational becomes rational. 

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Check out Dopey Podcast's exit music if you haven't heard it, Good So Bad, think it sums all this up.