On addiction

There are lots of reasons people become addicts. The one most often described by the media, or witnessed by the average person first hand in the streets, is the lost soul, the one who never found his or her place in society and so turned to drugs to numb the pain of loneliness or mental illness or just the suffering of toil that seems to offer no path to a better life. In other words, addiction is a response to loss of hope. Or so it would seem to the reasonable and empathetic person. As opposed to some more sinister belief, historically more commonly held, that some deep moral failing has earned them a rightful place in hell on earth.

Addiction also stems from poverty (although more often, it causes it, after its onset due to the first reason listed above). If life is miserable and characterized by privation, despotic bosses, and endless bills that never seem to get paid on time, addiction is an escape. The addicts life philosophy. And those who have a lot to escape from seem most prone to addiction. The more you use, the more you need to escape from, the notion of the “cycle of addiction.”

But that was not the reason for my addiction. There is another class of addicts: the young who start using substances for group acceptance, and then when their brains get wired to depend on the chemical into adulthood their bonds of chemical slavery grow nearly unbreakable.

Then there is the other class (among many many others I am omitting) of addict. The one who has good prospects, like doctors or lawyers, or financiers, who are even already successful professionally with stable families and a good social circle but who, late in life, come to realize they have not found their true calling, and simply fulfilled the wishes of parents, or rose to meet the expectations of success as defined by general society. They turn to drugs to numb the pain of living someone else’s life. Having responsibilities that limit the ability, or so it seems to them, to switch their course.

My addiction is a mix of some of these categories. But I think it also characterizes another shared by a not tiny minority. The desire to rise to the absolute heights of human experience. To chemically blow the mind wide open to heaven, to use my divine perch to stake my place at the helm of society. To obtain all there is to feel and experience in life. A wild craziness, a boundless energy that seems too great for my body, and that is hard to channel, physical exercise helps, but the boundless energy is matched most readily through the use of powerful simulants that endow me temporarily with the endless confidence to pursue what seems worthy of this quaking but boundless wildness. I believe there are actually a great number of addicts like me actually as I write this.

I have been offered roles professionally that might seem worthy of this boundless crazy energy. Capable of replacing the role of the drug in exhausting it. But this would be to misunderstand the nature of the energy. It is a paradoxical wild energy that cannot simply be “used up” by challenging work or exercise. I used to run a small hedge fund, for example. But I took on this challenge because the drugs I used made my body match the wild boundless energy, steadying its shiver for a moment. This ended predictably. But it was useful in its own way. It, addiction, is also a widely recognized personal deficiency. For me it is synonymous with the unchanneled boundless crazy energy that exceeds myself. A wildness I cannot control.

And I have to somehow harness it. Or return to the hell I created for myself in the depths of my addiction. Stealing from family and destroying the good things I have been given and earned.

Psychiatrists don’t help in my experience. Psychiatry looks to others to understand the infinite complexity of the self. Imagine our best guess at the chemical and astrophysical facts of our galaxy was made by averaging the theoretical properties of galaxies that lie outside our own. When the real observable facts are in front of us and even sending meteorites at our face in an effort to be noticed.

So I have given up diagnoses like “ADHD” or “manic depressive” and have decided to study myself as one might study the universe. By facing an impossibly complex puzzle with deep and systematic interest combined with an acceptance that one can only find maybe one tiny piece of ten thousand.

As Allen Watts once said, “how much of Allen Watts has ever heard of Allen Watts?” I am trying to make that conscious portion of my self just a little larger. Maybe that will be a task my boundless wild energy will be satisfied by. Or maybe I will learn to harness it in other ways. Otherwise, I have old age to look forward to (if I’m lucky) to cool this risky burden.