People don't choose to be addicts.
Of this, I can assure you.
No one wakes up one day and suddenly has dreams of being an addict.
No one creates a vision board full of goals to be addicted.
When they go through the entire classroom on the first day of school and you have to state what you want to be when you grow up, not one kid is going to joyfully say, "I want to be an addict!"
What people DO choose is to run from pain, from heartache, from fear, from sadness, from anger, from anxiety, from abuse, from neglect, from depression...
People choose to numb their feelings.
People choose to not feel.
Whatever it is that is helping to achieve that becomes an addiction.
Addiction takes away agency and VOILA, we have an addict.
The end.
Once in recovery (which, once again, in my opinion needs to be a 12-step program AND intense psycho-therapy), we begin to feel.
We begin to see. With clear minds.
We begin to hear.
We begin to actually understand what pushed us into addiction.
And, now - we are learning to live with all of that.
Without our addiction.
Without our ability to numb the things that hurt.
We are just expected to live it and do live it clean and sober.
There is not a word in the English language to describe how hard this is.
At least I have not found it, and I HAVE found Words with Friends... so I feel like I'm pretty much an English language expert of sorts.
Counseling, for me, is essential.
I sit on that couch every Wednesday and we talk through all of the things that are falling out of the stupid closet.
Then on Sundays, I go to group where I sit with people just like me.
And we listen to one another and we talk about our own situations.
And through it all, we are learning to live without running.
And it is shitty.
Now that I see things as they really are, it sucks.
A lot.
Like a freaking sucky fish in a disgusting tank trying to suck all of the freaking disgust off of the disgusting walls of the tank... pretty sure they're getting poisoned all the while.
It sucks!
Like, no wonder I was running for 30 years!
So, we keep going.
Sober and clean.
Trekking through like a boss!
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