Addiction

Do you remember those campaigns against smoking, drugs and glue sniffing when we were kids? We all remember emaciated youths with their ashy insomnia-induced eyeshadow and cosmonaut expressions on tv or even the walking life-size cigarette buds fishing the nicotine-hooked with their well-not-so-subtle literal fish-hooks. Or what about the proverbial ball-and-chain perpetually attached to shadows of real persons for whom escape is but a word that belongs only to Alice in Wonderland and other Adventures. We remember these so well, yet one wonders why no one ever bothered to warn us of addiction (which to some extent, has become an affliction) that affects more people than the usual vices and exercises an effect far greater and more devastating than the rest?

“I wish I knew how to quit you.”

That one line in Brokeback was at once pure popcorn Hollywood cheese at its finest, and also a singular moment of emotional resonance. A friend of mine has fallen recently into these all-so-familiar trappings of person-addiction. Not just any person, but the fearsome ex. Ex-date/gf/benefriends/frenefits/fuck buddy, call it what you want, it’s the ex. Ex-addiction is worst kind of person addiction.

You suffer without reprieve because in this particular person, you re-discover the joys of connecting. Connection. Connectivity. Yep, that’s right. The feeling you have when it’s effortless to converse (not speak) with another. When you don’t necessarily have the same ideas or views, but exchanging them is a source of incomparable pleasure and satisfaction. When you actually feel for the other’s misfortunes and unhappiness as if they were your own. And conversely, you revel in the other’s triumphs and felicitous fortunes without any ostensible benefit to yourself. But you suffer without reprieve because while you think you developed a certain affinity for this other, you cannot and should not expect reciprocity. Because once upon a time, you did so and that expectation consumed you alive. So you fight it. And in doing so, you fight yourself. You refuse to piece together what the individual neurons in your brain and your nerve endings in your skin are processing in fragments. It cannot and should not be. Every brush of the arm is an affront to your sensibility. Every smile must be counter-intuitively rejected.

Why not walk away? We would if we could. But choice is illusory. Most of the time, we’re stuck in a masochistic rut. Just sniffing and sniffing away at our addiction.