Day 18 Exercise 8

I am an addict.  You can throw the term alcoholic into the hat too if you want.  But bottom line I suffer from addiction.  Not just the typical drug addiction but behavioral addictions.  It’s not important to offer the nouns or verbs associated with this, I think everyone has their own idea of what I’m talking about.  Today I’m doing an exercise associated with said addiction.  (Exercise 8 from the book, “The Tao of Sobriety”, by David Gregson and Jay S. Stern, Ph.D.)  I’m conducting an interview with the committee in my head to confer and come up with some answers to my thoughts on my particular responses to my addictions.   Here is what transpired:

1.       How would you describe your relationship to your drug of choice?

It’s my Linus blanket.  Sometimes my thinking gets really harsh and I find myself going to extremes, all black, all white and I’m afraid of where it will go.  I’ve crossed the line of suicidal attempts and have a frightening fear of standing close to that edge again.  If I think of using, it distracts me momentarily and then I fixate on the using.  If the thinking is uber extreme, the drug dumbs me down.  Of course the crumbs I’m left with the next day are the seeds that can start that thinking again.  The little guilt seeds.

2.        How do you and that drug get along?  Are you friends or combatants?  Do you do that drug or does that drug do you?

It’s not a loving affair.  I do it, I get stupid and most times nod off within an hour or so.  I don’t think we’re friends, more like a 3 Stooges type of affair.  I don’t like that I make it an option and I have the usual arguments but see answer above.   I’m not sure of the last part.  I have to take meds on a daily basis for the mental illness issues and sometimes I think of it as an extreme med for an extreme issue.  When I’ve taken it as a whim though, the drug is doing me.  But 9 times out of 10 it’s the extreme “medical” causation that demands the need.

3.       How does the drug treat you? (Tell the whole story about this to yourself, not just the politically correct one.  Remember, people use drugs and alcohol because they produce results experienced as preferable to being clean and sober!)

It treats me like a bug.  There is no fulfillment, no mirth associated with the high.  It’s not even like getting high either.  Like a big brother pounding me when I get into a tug of war with myself, it beats me and I acquiesce.  It doesn’t solve anything for me, it just deadens the noise temporarily and gives me a chance to come at it another day.

4.       What does the drug generally say to you, and what is your most typical answer?  What is its answer to your answer?

Relief from your brain storm, when I’m agitated.  I’m trying to think what it says when I do it on a whim.  It usually says quite simply, why not?  I find that I don’t have a good argument to rebut that.  My answer to that is fine.  Lately I’ve found other ways to distract myself and the longer I’ve been doing that, the more success I’ve had staying clean.

5.       What rights and privileges does the drug claim to have?  What rights, if any, do you have in the matter?  (It is okay if these questions produce the same, similar, or contradictory answers.)

This is a good question.  Its rights are that when my mind was on fire, FIRE, and I couldn’t breathe and listen to it for one more fucking painful minute, it would bring relief.  The privilege it had was that it was my doctor.  It was more that I was panicking and felt the damage I would cause myself to stop thinking could be worse than just getting high.  I don’t know what my rights are today.  Of course I’d like to say, fuck you, you have no rights to my head but I just can’t say that.  They still have some reserve power for the relief that sometimes I just have to allow myself to have.  I have been ground up mentally with emotional walking death and lately with physical head ache pain approaching rockets launching in my brain.  I think, I don’t deserve to feel this pain anymore.  I can honestly say that the phenomenon of craving has ever left me.  It has in the past, the way past, but this time around, not so much.  That’s what makes this year chip so much more valuable is that I’ve wrestled seriously with the decision to jump back into it.

 

1.       I’m grateful that I still have a mind that is able to create.

2.       I’m grateful that the meds I’m on don’t make me into a zombie.

3.       I’m grateful that I have been finding the time to write.