When you spend most of your time looking over your shoulders, worried, at times scared even, you pick up a thing or two about human psychology along the way
This particular piece was drafted at a time when I was broke, hunted by loan sharks and people who wouldn’t give me a break for my past blunders as a functioning addict. if there’s one thing I can be certain of, is that I will never achieve sobriety. It’s not just a matter of inability, it is inability along with reluctance to want to “fit in” , society looks down on addicts. Do I want to be a part of something which looks down upon not just a major part of my own existence but the entire life of my father as well?
“he wasn’t a bad man, just had bad habits along with bad friends” or something similar along the lines is something I have heard far too often growing up.
Is moderation something that addicts aspire for? from the small sample size of addicts I’ve known my life, yes, most of them. But actually practicing it is difficult, in my case impossible even. Only times that I have been known to be sober is when I’m broke, even then, that hasn’t stopped me completely. I have gone days without food, total abstinence to secure cannabis for a couple of days, was it worth it? sure. Looking back at any of such incidents, would I have done things differently with the teachings of “school of sobriety”? No. Any other response is being untruthful to the self. Very few people have the courage to admit that to themselves and even fewer to others. This was something I learned from a fellow “addict” at a rehab. Wisdom can be found in the unlikeliest of places from people “society” would consider absolute trash.
From my experience so far, one thing that stands out is that the stigma that comes with addiction only really affects people who lack either money, beauty or fame, in some cases all of these combined. You wouldn’t look down on Winston Churchill for being a functional addict, Now, would you? that would be so uncool!? Most teens and even a fair number of millennials wouldn’t have a clue about Churchill's dependence on spirits while they share their “keep calm and blah blah blah……” memes or the origins of wartime morale boosters.
I digress, history lessons aside, I want to focus on why some people make it a point to themselves to keep sobriety out of their lives and I have little interest in the “biology” or the “science” of addiction because I believe that not all things can be generalized. Categories, structures, systems require the need to accurately label things. Humans have evolved to a point where the entire existence of any individual depends on their ability to farm an abstract concept called ‘money’. Now some might argue that you could make money solely off of things that you are good at or things that you may find personally interesting, this however is a privilege that very few get to experience. I count myself in that tiny group since of all the very little money I ever made, was by doing things that satisfied my curiosity to some extent. Even then, the pursuit itself is hollow and meaningless. Then there are others who would justify work as a “service” to the society, even if that work helps multi billion dollar enterprises save money, the same kind of enterprises who pay their employees minimum wages with no benefits.
So at this point in the evolution of human society, it is fair to say that the only real purpose of “work” is to make money. I am in no way trying to discredit or question the motivations of people who work for free or do volunteer work. At the same time, you must also realize that most of such people already have another way to make money. Editors at Wikipedia, contributors of countless open source projects and various other voluntary services that people offer, and that too for free are not out of just complete altruism. In some cases, sure. This may be a pessimistic view to look at the world in such a light but I don't ask you to accept it, what this is, is an honest presentation of how I perceive life and the need for disconnecting from any, if not all existential dread that follows me around.
Now looking at this from the view of evolutionary biology, we have all but one purpose, reproduce. This in my opinion is what drives most people to discover and hold on to work. I can’t recall the exact quote or the thought but Cal Newport says something along the lines that you don’t always “find” your passion, you grow into it. Which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective; That is you must find and hold on to work which must not only provide for you but for your potential mate and offspring(s). To put it bluntly, you have no chance of sustaining an intimate/romantic relationship without money. And this is a concept that most people would comprehend by the time they are in high school.
There is an excellent explanation in Sapiens which goes on in deep to explain how every human believes in money if nothing else. And this is what I believe leads to people committing crimes, from human trafficking to assassin for hire to drug cartels and even fairly straightforward financial crimes. An adult without money is as good as a tiger with no teeth and three legs. The significance that this abstract concept called money has over our lives is something I’m certain we share with absolutely no other species. When you are at the rock bottom of powerlessness caused by a lack of ‘money’, there are a few obvious ways for the events to pan out; you could find a legitimate way of making money, in most cases, this would include hard labor/ fast food chain / or working as a janitor and so on. Sooner or later you’re faced with an existential dread again when you realize you are spending most of your time doing things you would rather not be doing. But most people would just accept this condition as part of being human. For those who end up with the ‘dread’ growing stronger, unable to accept it nor cope with it, there are a few known ways that it generally turns out. End of life, substance dependence and turning criminal. I don’t know where to find or conduct surveys of convicted and (un)convicted ‘criminals’ but excluding serial killers, psychopaths and a few other outliers, I’m fairly certain that most of these ‘criminals’ either do it for money or the need to gain some level of control caused by lack of money. We call it a global world, global citizens and all other non sense of the kind but the matter of fact is you cannot legally cross borders without money, be it for actual transportation or visa. And people with money obviously have far more power than those without it. I only know the premise of ‘crime and punishment’ but I feel a kinship with Dostoevsky regarding what turns a man into a criminal.
Now what does this have to do with sobriety you may ask? absolutely everything. Suppose you are given two choices. You have to choose the pain you experience, between emotional and physical and making a choice is mandatory. People who have experienced loss would know that this kind of pain never goes away, physical pain on the other hand heals in most cases unless you have a limb or two ripped off. There’s not a lot of ways to make existence bearable, sometimes it gets so overwhelming that people end their own existence to stop the pain. And then there are others who learn to live with it but of course, at a reduced intensity; this is what I have for a ‘justification’ of my seemingly out of control cannabis use. To be critical, I have a fairly low threshold to withstand pain, which is possibly why I couldn’t go through with hanging myself as the pain got overwhelming. Does it make me more susceptible to abusing substances? perhaps yes.
Some others might say that I just need to ‘get a life’ , ‘socialize more’ , ‘get yourself in a position to get married and have kids’ to me all of it just seems like suffering but with the bonus of having some company. The kind of company that stays with you till you die. Humans are social animals after all, like my mother used to say. And I am thankful to her ancestors because she did not die alone and was surrounded by family at the time of her death, which meant a great deal to her. Me on the other hand, not so social, perhaps anti-social even, however, not in a violent way.
Which brings me to the question, why did I end up as an addict? She did everything right in terms of providing and bringing me up. I had a fairly decent education, she worked her entire life to be able to own a house which passed down to me after her death; I can never truly reach the rock bottom of powerlessness required to turn into a criminal like I have previously described, Mainly due to my inheritance and education but that didn’t stop me from borrowing off of loan sharks where I knew I wouldn’t be repaying any time .
Rehab offers you a lot of time to introspect and convince yourself that it was the substance that makes a person worse, abstaining from it would help you be a better person. I find that hard to believe in. You are who you are and if you don’t accept it yourself you can never hope to exist peacefully, unagitated and with a clarity which for some is impossible to experience unless intoxicated. Powerlessness can be as simple as the thought that you can never speak to your mother again; although in my case it is not just a thought but reality, she died. Hypothetically I could speak to her and come up with a response close to how she might have responded based on the memories of how I knew her to be; But it can never come close to a real conversation. Unfortunately for me, this was one of several voices that I needed to develop.
I experienced psychosis and proper mental breakdown soon after my mother passed away. I was smoking heavily, leading up to and after death; cancer can be like a sucker punch. which is why the doctors at rehab attributed the psychosis to cannabis abuse. But I don’t agree with them, it wasn’t all down to the substance, part of me was already broken, susceptible to corruption. I have complete memory gaps spanning 18 months after my father passed away when I was 3 and a half years old. Except for a few flashes where I spoke nothing and a few times where I repeated what I was asked to say. Now you might say that how do I remember any of this or if this even real memory or memory formed by stories told over a period of time. Think whatever you must but I feel no need to defend my recollection of the events. What I know to be true is that I experienced mental illness of some kind then, and the psychosis I experienced after my mother’s death and a few mental breakdowns in my adulthood while she was alive was not the beginning.
The field of science which deals with memory has studies on how smell triggers old, some times repressed memories. For me, my favourite snack is packaged noodles of a particular brand. It smells the same as I remember from the time when my father was alive. Every time I eat it, It reminds me of that time, takes me back there. I’m not good with labelling in general and even worse at labelling emotions, but whatever it is I felt back then is something I can never experience again, at best what I can do is intensify my experience of experiencing the replays of the memories, cannabis does help in this case.
My experience with counsellors and psychologists at the rehab were rather dull, most of the recommendations went along the lines of accepting the past and moving on. I don’t think this works or is even possible for some. Some people are genetically predisposed to addiction, due to dependence in parents, I fall in that category and have come to terms about trying to fight or resist and I can never be responsible for another human being, I am selfish yet honest to myself about who I perceive myself to be. When we narrate our own stories to ourselves, we tend to portray ourselves as the protagonist of the story in most cases. Can’t say for certain if this applies to more people but it was the case for me for a long time. Until I accepted who I really was, who I have been and who I am now. Which eventually led me to the discovery of a song that I resonate with. Tupac was way ahead of his time.
