Allaholic?

We're all ___aholics.

Addiction has been defined as “a state of being dependent on a certain substance, which is harmful or dangerous for the physical or mental health of the person, for his social well-being and economical functioning of the subject”. When you type the word ‘addiction’ into popular search engines, you find links for various substance dependence sites. When I sift through these sites, I find little information that is helpful to me; yet, almost daily I find myself making decisions that are bad for me- decisions that are harmful for my physical or mental health for my social well-being and economical functioning. I am not taking hits of crack or lighting any pipes. My drugs are not nearly so obvious to pinpoint. They do not come in powder nor plant form. My drugs are daily decisions that I make. Decisions to which I keep running back. I know they are bad for me, but they are so beautiful in the moment, and I am irresistibly compelled toward these decisions. Since no one is over my shoulder telling me that what I have is an addiction that is may be akin to a drug addiction, and that the cycles in which I find myself are not much different than the cycles of many other addicts, I find myself going around the same mountain over and over again.

Let me give you an example. When I was 21, I was dating this guy named Alan. When Alan introduced himself, he said, “I work with computers”. I think, “Oh, a computer programmer! That’s a good job!” Turns out, Alan was a receptionist who happened to work in front of a computer. I should have gone running in the other direction from this obvious lying loser, but, unfortunately I did not. The first night we hung out was a blast. He was buying my friends and I rounds of drinks, we were hitting the dance floor hard, and he was telling me how excited he was to meet such an obviously smart and beautiful girl. He got my digits. “I’ll call you tomorrow” he promised at the end of the night. I did not hear from him the next day. I felt a little sad, but I accepted the rejection with dignity. This time. You see, I was not yet hooked. Alan eventually called with some excuse about how his dad had stopped by, and he had gotten in a fight with him and just could not talk afterward, but he added that he hoped I would please give him another chance. I did. This interchange pretty much made up our whole relationship. Sometimes the excuses were better than others. One time he actually told me he could not hang out with me because he had to help his friend clean a deer. But we went round and round this cycle for over a year. When we had a good time, it was so good. So fun. He was so attentive to me, so nice to my friends, so good at conversation and affection. But I could not have him. It would not last. And he kept me coming back and back for more. Each time I came back I had less dignity. I sacrificed more of myself. I planned my life around trying to “run” into him. I thought about him all the time. Drama from the relationship made my work suffer. Looking back there was so little real substance to our “relationship”. I was an addict seeking the next high. The next escape from my life. My reality. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I need to make sure you understand something right away. I am not an expert on addiction, and this blog is not intended to cover addiction research or literature. It will be a personal exploration of my addicitions which is intended to make you smile at points, to make you think at points, and to propose a view on life decisions that may help shape yours. As a natural observer and introspector, I have observed my repeated bad decisions (and those of my friends) and wondered why we continue to make the decisions that we do. I hope that you benefit from this blog as I know that these thoughts have greatly improved my decision making, and allowed me to be a good friend to others to help them make better decisions. I hope to be a friend to you as well. Because everyone needs a friend sometime to smack some sense in to them about their addictive habits.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Choose Agony

Song of the Day (SOTD) Aimee Mann- Momentum
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LMELxGEFHM

Momentum. What a perfect song for the stuff I'm about ready to talk about. Because this is all an effort to avoid "condemning my future to match the past". Obviously, it's been almost two years since I've blogged. And (as you will see in about 2 minutes), I am definitely still working on the same stuff. But I have made progress. I'm not going to let the momentum of my life plow over my future (I do think this is a great song though to make you feel sort of silly for being so afraid of change.. the circus chaotic instruments sort of help you realize that you're in the scary fun house of your head).

Let me set the current stage of my thought life.
Conversation with my friend:
Me: I am afraid to let go of my addictions. I am afraid not to run to them. I am afraid that there is nothing else. Is there any other way to live? I feel like I’m going to be limping through forever like this and there is nothing else.
Juli: There is. But first there’s agony. Then there’s slow throbbing pain. Then there is fierce self pride because you. Mother. Fucking. Made. It. Then there’s the gentle hum of peace and acceptance.
Me: The thing about agony is that it makes especially agonizing because it takes away your hope that anything else possible. That there is anything after it. That it will ever leave. So that’s why you keep running back to your addictions. When the choice is agony without hope of life without hope of relief or limping through your life with your addiction of choice.. the choice is simple. Addiction.
Juli: Choose Agony.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m choosing to believe my wise friend who loves me. I’m choosing to acknowledge that the way I’ve been doing things is not healthy and it’s not taking me where I want to be. It’s turning me into a needy nonpresent, texting, bingeing, clinging shell of a person. And though it’s comfortable to keep limping back to my ex? (see earlier blog for explanation of ex?) even though neither of us is in a healthy place to love sometimes it seems better to live with that than to live where I am now. So I want to text him, to email him, to hear from him… to hear some hope that my life doesn’t have to feel this way. That I can be excited about something and engaged again. But that’s not my ex? or anyone’s job. It’s my job to figure out how to make my life worth living. Even if nothing ever changes and there is no exciting. And that’s what is scary.
And it has been scary. Those addictions were a powerful way of coping with things that I felt were unmanageable. And now I'm left with debilitating anxiety with which I have no idea what to do. I have decided that I'm not going to turn to the distraction of a relationship to fix it. I have decided that I'm going to continue to chip away at learning how to eat mindfully, no matter how slow my progress seems in this area. This is agony. Right in the middle of it, I stand. Wanting to run to any available escape. But someone wise told me to choose Agony. And I feel just about as lost as humanly possible. Something in me knows I need to listen to that advice.
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