I don't like the drugs the drugs the drugs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EefPcht54cHello everyone I am introducing myself now. I feel guilty using up another new topic for this. What if the universe runs out of new topics? It is a finite universe, is it not? Oh well. Might as well squish the caviar between our toes. If you're gonna live, might as well live large, no?
I'm not sure how much about myself I wish to reveal in this quasi public quasi private forum. I suppose there's no need to start with my real name. What would be the fun in that. The internet's all about being someone you aren't, right? I promise not to be a complete fabrication, but just as anyone you may meet out there in the "real world" you can be sure that I won't be completely honest either, starting with myself.
I see a counselor every couple of weeks or so, and lately I was wondering if we were running out of things to talk about. I've seen her for about a year now, and we've had our productive stretches, and our non-productive stretches.
So last Friday I mentioned to her that I'd like to make better use of my time. Such a cliche thing to talk to a counselor about, right. Well one thing... holy shit... Internet Explorer doesn't like this message board... I got to the end of the text area and it's going batshit crazy. switching to note pad... I'll just cut 'n paste it in when I'm done typing.
Well one thing led to another and in pretty short order my counselor and I figured out that I'm terribly addicted to stuff. Porn on the internet, that's the obvious thing that a person might be addicted to, although I am hesitant to bring up with my hot female counselor the subject of fapping to porn on the internet. As it turns out, there's no need, for there's plenty of other addictive behaviors to chose from. I don't personally smoke weed or drink, although I have a friend who is (was) addicted to weed. He's quit cold turkey. It's been 21 days, and he's not going back.
Web sites - that is my addiction. I can see how even this message board could fit right in. You start out visiting an online magazine for the articles. You start out reading a Wikipedia article because you need information on a subject... It starts out innocently enough... Until one day you realize you've spent so many hours on the web sites that you desperately have to pee, you're dehydrated, and hungry, and you're in a daze...
Now instead of reading articles for information, you recoil from informative articles. You don't want to engage your cognitive facilities. You don't want to exercise your world view. You don't want interesting and informative articles because you're too depressed to handle them. You're not on the web anymore for information to supplement your life. You're now on the web to escape your life.
You're wasting away on a diet of AP articles. You're gravitating towards the seedy parts of the web... It's only a matter of time before you end up on sites like thesmokinggun.com or perezhilton.com. You're watching Operation Repo... You're searching Youtube for "car crash police chase explosion" You have a problem.
Well, hopefully not you. I don't wish this on anyone. But it's happened to me. I have what they call an addictive personality. I can remember as far back as 4th grade, when my family got it's first TV. We lived in Virginia, and there was the Dukes of Hazard on TV every evening, right around the time I was supposed to be doing my homework. I didn't get a lot of homework done that year.
I can remember it vividly. It wasn't your normal scenario of a kid avoiding homework. It was a kid wracked by the stress of homework (I have ADHD, so school has always been a huge problem for me) and wracked by the stress of social maladjustment, and that kid had found a drug that made it all go away. Anything can be a drug if you let it be. If that thing facilitates your escape from reality, then it's a drug.
The Dukes of Hazard was the best darn alternate reality that this kid had ever seen -- even better than the fantastic childrens books we used to read. Remember James & The Giant Peach or Charly & The Chocolate Factory? Well TV was better. Every day you got a new show.
And the way TV taps into your mind... There's something mesmerizing.. You just can't put your finger on it... You blood pressure lowers... the outside world disappears as you enter a trance like state with visions of Alf the alien and Roasanne and Thundercats HO! leading you on. And those cute little blue smurfs. All the craziness of an acid trip, with none of the life changing introspection. So you don't change. You stagnate. And stagnate I did.
I woke up Friday, or at least, I started to wake up. I've lost years of my life to addiction in one form or another. Those several hours a day... they add up over the years... they add up to nothing... nothing done, nothing accomplished... everything to be depressed about... Yeah, I always blamed the ADHD, and maybe the addictive personality developed as a response to the difficulties of ADHD, but as bad as ADHD is, addiction is way worse. I've made great progress in overcoming the ADHD in recent years, to the point where the ADHD is no longer an obstacle.. it's no longer a valid excuse.
So I talked to my friend today, because coincidentally, he had mentioned that he was starting to deal with his own addiction problems. He was addicted to weed. I never knew he was addicted. He was talking about AA. AA? For real? That got me wondering what addiction really is. I thought that addiction was something that was more... external... a drug... a drug that jumps in a seizes control of your life... a drug like Heroin... But Pot? THC?
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the preponderance of peer reviewed medical research indicates that THC isn't addictive. Porn? TV? These things aren't addictive. They're just things that you do. If the government and the right-wing religious do-gooders want you to believe that Pot is addictive, it's just because they'd rather have you watching TV and donating money to Oral Roberts than giving money to the black market, right?
It wasn't until I talked to my counselor last Friday that it really started to click for me. I understood finally that for me, for my friend, for so many of us, addiction is depression, and depression is addiction. The addiction is the escape. The addiction doesn't come from the drug, or the TV, or whatever mechanism. It comes from inside of you. This is not to say that once you get over your addiction, you won't easily fall back into it once again if you go back to that escape mechanism. That escape mechanism is learned, and practiced. For years or maybe even for an entire lifetime it's been drilled into your brain. Your brain will remember it.
It's so silly, because I'm NOT that depressed. I'm not clinically depressed. I DO have so much going for me, so many opportunities, and I'm so talented, and good looking... (heh. A little facetious egotism there.) There is so much I can do with my life. My depression is kind of like a self-generating feedback loop... I'm unhappy because I'm not where I want to be, so I am depressed, so I don't get anywhere, so I'm unhappy... And I never even realized this loop was sneaking up on me. Or maybe I've just always been stuck in this loop. Well it's all complex. There are lots of variables and challenges happening all at once. It just took a long time for all the variables to align such that the next one that was exposed and out in the open, available for me to perceive and do something about, was this addiction variable. This depression variable.
It's so strange. Who would have thought that you can be an optimistic and happy person, and yet still be depressed. But you can be. Depression can be a localized response to localized and compartmentalized stresses. We all have stresses. I need to deal with my stresses differently. I need to start by dealing with them at all, preiod.
The other strange thing, the scary thing, is realizing to what a huge extent addiction is a way of life for everyone in the culture of my country, probably in the culture of many countries all over the world.
So my friend suggested these two books. I'm not so sure about the AA book. AA still seems a little hokey to me. Maybe I'll just start by ordering the "Addictive-Personality" book. My friend said it brought him a lot of clarity, and he said it discussed the link between addiction and depression.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Addictive-Personality/Craig-Nakken/e/9781568381299/http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Alcoholics-Anonymous/AA-Services-AA-Services/e/9781893007161/Yeee haw.
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Topic: introduction of me - I don't like the drugs (Read 4457 times)