Saturday 18 March 2017

600 days of sobriety today

mostly thinking about how i used to drink myself to sleep because my heartbeat was too loud

how i drank to still the world when it became overwhelming, to still my brain

how easy it was to create distance, from other people and myself

remembering something someone wrote about addicts and how there is a lack of true connection between us and other people and the world when we are actively addicted. "they have about them the air of elsewhere, that they're looking through you to somewhere else they'd rather be". and of course, that's exactly what we're doing. it's always been about escape. fucked up to think that at the base of it the main reason that i drank for a decade straight was because i was in so much psychic pain that the world sober was literally unbearable.

there is a widely-accepted belief that addiction is messy, loud, unavoidable. that self-harm is so strange and sad and against nature that one who carries it out must be manic, obviously quite mad, forgetting themselves, out of their minds and having public breakdowns. that it will always be unavoidably noticeable to those who interact with the addicted person.
it was always very quiet for me. it was always very methodological. it stilled the world. i'd never stopped time like that before. i've never stopped time like that since. public downward spirals are the face of addiction, but the quiet spaces are where i damaged myself the most successfully. i needed those quiet spaces. no longer feeling the weight of having to appear functional to the waking world, no longer feeling the weight of trying to keep up with a life that was outrunning me. no longer feeling any weight at all

a famous psychologist said that the goal of all life is death. that self destruction is the way in which we express our inescapable 'death instincts'. the only way to beat it is if your 'life instincts' are stronger.
mine never were.
if you chase destruction, the 'elsewhere', you'll always find it.

Sunday 12 March 2017

realising that i haven't kissed anyone in over 6 months, haven't slept with anyone in even longer

alone but not lonely

for the first time in a long time i belong completely and wholly to myself. feeling both the strength and the weight of it