always searching

With each passing day, it becomes more clear to me that the 40-year game of addiction whack-a-mole I’ve been playing isn’t about substance at all so much as it’s about pacification. Pacification. I almost wrote ‘nurturing’ in place of that word, but it would have been in error.

I’ve not known what I needed or how to go about getting it so I’ve put a metaphorical soother in my mouth to hold back any crying I might have done (but let’s face it, crying still happened) in some half-hearted attempt to appear strong or attractive or badass, all of which worked. For a while, anyway. If these things didn’t work, then we wouldn’t use them as coping mechanisms.

That’s why drugs, sex, money, alcohol, gambling, food, jumping out of airplanes, and social media are such a problem – they work and they are powerful… that is, they work until they don’t, in which case not only do you have to go back to solving the problem and dealing with your newfound (powerful) addiction, which is hard – much easier to spin the ‘wheel of misfortune’ and find something else to; yes, pacify.

That’s what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

That’s also why junkies & fuck-ups get really into Christianity, or body building, or 12-step programs, or workaholism, or become gym rats and health freaks who find themselves running low on bare skin with which to tattoo something meaningful – this is feeling self referential now, I’d better watch it – and these things will work, too, especially if you don’t want to do the work. Nobody is going to go up to a well dressed man in a $700 suit driving an Acura and tell him he’s clearly got a problem, nor does an Olympic gold medal bring about an intervention, because these things are great achievements… as though great achievements and successes couldn’t be the result of an addiction, or at very least a fixation.

Don’t misread me, though – I’m not saying that the desire to be successful or the desire to be the best at something is unhealthy. Goals are healthy. Achieving them is fantastic. However, these accolades can serve to mask a deeper problem… such as Elon Musk’s fixation on putting people on Mars as an effort to escape his relationship with his own father, or Donald Trump’s fraudulent aspirations for success, for the same reason.

I couldn’t blatantly say something like that anymore than I could say that everyone who does intermittent fasting has an eating disorder. It’s simply not true, though intermittent fasting is an excellent way to mask an eating disorder.

I’ve been told somewhere along the path that I should not become too good at the wrong thing, because the success will keep me unhappy for the rest of my life. As much as I have done that in my professional life, it means something different now.

Now, I’m gonna keep running, and keep playing music, and keep working on cars, and keep getting tattoos, because… fuck you I won’t do what you tell me – possibly forever – but these things have to; for me, anyway, operate in conjunction with doing the brain work, and the soul work, as well as the body work.

It all has to be in alignment or the machine doesn’t run right.