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. 

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.