Anxious Agnes

If you want to understand an addict you have to start at the beginning. Where is the beginning? Who knows. They sure as hell don’t. The hole inside their soul has been used as a dumping ground so many times who can say what they find when they start digging. But we can take a guess. Discarded boxes of junk food and empty bottles. Piles of anger and sadness covered with a thick grime of fear. Old portraits of potential selves that never came to fruition. VCR tapes of dreams they used to cherish. An old couch maybe, worn out by the countless hours spent on it trying to escape the pain of life by laying as still as possible. Is it any wonder our societal fascination with zombies and vampires, when we ourselves choose to emulate being neither living nor dead just to barely pass through life? Choosing life means choosing the pain, but once upon a time, that pain came too fast and too scary looking. So we swore to avoid it. Addicts can’t handle their substances. Yes, but that’s not the point. Addicts can’t handle their emotions. Closer. But why? Because addicts can’t handle the pain. Or rather, we couldn’t handle it when it happened. We were too small and we needed to survive, so we adapted. Consciousness being as fragile as it is called it quits and revered us to the great subconsciousness, where pain got all the space it needed to hang out. Being practical-minded, we were fine with dumping pain where we couldn’t see it, as long as we got to move on with our day. To our surprise, it worked so well that we started throwing everything we didn’t like straight into the junkyard of our subconsciousness. Then, when the piles mounted to such heights it even threatened to surface to our conscious mind, we had a substance for that. The more it all rumbled, stumbled, and poked at us, the more sedative substances were needed to hold it all down. Being above human weakness, feelings were something that could always be controlled, and pain always something that could be mended. If you want to understand an addict you need to understand that they’ve been carrying a junk-filled hole inside of them that never allowed them to be human. This is why they won’t shut up about recovery. Being allowed to be human, finally, is a gift they didn’t realize they’d lost. When they find it, they want to remind everyone how amazing it is to be able to feel emotions, to be able to feel pain, and not instantly crumble. How amazing it is to be able to feel alive. #RecoveryPosse