What is Addiction if not Grief Repeated?

 For as long as I’ve ever known, my mind has been a crime scene. I’ve been the detective, piecing together the clues my subconscious drops for me. I am at mercy to myself. They say your body is a temple, but mine has been desecrated inside. Mine has scratch marks that lead down to hell.

Although being able to be alone with your thoughts is a good thing, there poses a problem when the dichotomy arises that you spend a lot of time with yourself yet still do not know yourself well. Or, rather, there are things that you know about yourself that instantly float to the surface, but the things that don’t – the things that sink – don’t ever get recognized in cognition. This means it feels like there is a well inside me – some substances or activities bring certain thoughts to the surface while others tend to suppress other thoughts to the bottom. 

I know myself in the sense that I know what I shouldn’t think about to live a blissfully ignorant life. I know how to keep my insane self sane.

One thing that will fuck with everything you know about yourself is addiction. There’s this cognitive dissonance that’s intact being a neuroscience major and using drugs. I know what exactly is wrong with each drug, and since I’m not ignorant to it, I feel I am more powerful than it. But, if anything, it makes it worse, for is it not worse to be knowledgeable of where you are falling short and choosing not to fix it, than to be simply ignorant? I am not blissfully ignorant; I am skillfully ignorant.

I’ve found that my drug use has been congruent with my fear of my brain gaining full control of me. I feel I must always be a few steps in front of it. Under all the rubble, there is so much despair and so much to cry over. I knew if I didn’t control my brain with these substances, then it would control me. 

My therapist asks me why I love destroying my brain, when the brain is the one thing I love most in the world. And I think I put it the best in this unpublished poem I wrote:

“I’m scared of my brain winning

I’m scared of it being stronger than me

So I control it the only way I know how.”

Under all of it, is a fear of only being human. Drugs make you feel superhuman; that consequences and responsibilities don’t apply to you. Rules and laws don’t either. 

And, what is addiction if not grief repeated? A constant living of the person you thought you were and a constant dying of the person you found out you were? I’ve been through so many karmic death cycles in my one lifetime I’ve almost stopped counting.

I’ve nearly died eight times, either due to my hand or to happenstance. I always saw myself as a cat – that my last time would be my ninth time. I didn’t try and rush my death – it felt like the waiting was nearing its end. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait for my death like waiting for the hands on a clock to move. No, it would take me without sound or warning like it usually did and I would go all the way with it that time. I was peaceful. I wasn’t trying to rush my demise like I had previously been doing. It was the reason I started smoking cigarettes – just so I could die sooner. For some reason, all my life, I could just not die soon enough.

As one might guess, my ninth time came last month. I battled a bottle of pills, got the police called on me and ended up in a mental hospital for 8 days. And I really thought it was the end that time. All I could keep saying the following days was how immensely tired I was with life and how I couldn’t even conceive living in it again. Not after having died so many times. I couldn’t be reborn again. 

Slowly, friends my age started being attracted to me in the hospital like the left side of a magnet to a right side. None of us had the same reason for fighting life, but they were the first people I’d met in my life that were so honest about being suicidal.

Without them, I would’ve grown more insane. Every day, they pull you to the corner and ask if you want to end your life, are seeing things or want to end someone else’s life. They have a schedule for you and monitor you like they do in a prison, but at least in prison they tell you when you are going to get out. In there, I was patient 5131, not Amanda, not a person. I was a hazard. 

But in there, I realized how amazing control is when it’s used for the right things. Not to control yourself so you don’t feel pain, but when you control your life so you live the way you want. I didn’t even notice how much choosing what food you eat on a daily basis instead of having it chosen for you can boost your mood, or choosing new clothes to wear everyday, or, say, having the freedom to go out and do whatever you want. In there, it made me hate the color white. Everything was white. I wear as much color as I possibly can now to combat it. That place was everything I hated – I hated it even more than living.

The morning I was surprisingly discharged shown the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen. I even drew and colored it and I’m not an artist. God, I thought I made the world colorless myself, but I have as much power to make it colorful. 

I hate to say that they operate as a prison but they do; the mentality of these places is to make it so unbearable that you never want to be back in there. And they accomplished it, because I would rather anything else happen than be back there again. But, something they did succeed in is they made me afraid of something more than living. I know it can get worse than this freedom I have now. 

Life is a terrible, terrible thing, but sometimes good things happen. For example, I’ve found love in my life and after being in there, I see that everyone has love in their lives. Just sometimes, it’s harder to see than others. Sometimes it hides like a snail under the sand at the beach, but a wave will always come that brings that snail to the surface. Things cannot stay stagnant forever and that is a blessing and a curse.

I’m glad to say I have lived beyond my ninth near death experience and I never thought I would say that. I thought I would always be the way I was in the back of the police car – sobbing to myself muttering “Coward, coward” under my breath. Now, I believe my therapist when she calls me brave for telling her what I was feeling.

It’s a brave thing to fight for your life in such a horrible place as we are in right now. To do it for other people and not yourself… that takes an immense amount of courage and care. What I say is live for others now so you can live for yourself later. 

Being a human is a wonderful thing. I don’t feel the need to be super anymore — not superhuman or supervised. I want to be free. I imagine death is how that mental hospital was run, and suddenly, I’m not rushing to join it anymore. Death has always seemed like home to me – like we are all homesick for something we can’t put our finger on, then when we die, that’s when we realize that’s what we were looking for – but maybe it’s not something we are searching for all our lives. Maybe it’s something searching for us and we just have to not let it. 

There are so many better colors than white.