“If you want to know why you drink and use, quit drinking and using.”
Source: Addicted to Doom | The Fix
thefix.com
I fell down the rabbit hole of doom.
Like most alcoholics, I wake up every morning, open my eyes and think, “I’m fucked.”
I was born this way. When I was a six years old, I would make my mom promise no less than 45 times before I left in the morning that she would be waiting for me when I got off the bus, because I was petrified I’d be kidnapped. I was the last stop on the route. My driver would ask me when I would suck my thumb, “Which flavor is it, chocolate or vanilla?” He was probably making harmless conversation with a six-year-old, but in my mind, he was planning on taking me to the bus yard to murder me. No exaggeration, this is where my brain went, when I was six.
When I was 8 years old, we had a school assignment to write and illustrate a book. Most kids wrote fun-loving stories of unicorns and pirate adventures. I wrote a heartbreaking tale about a bird dying called “The Cycle of Life” that made my teacher cry.
At 10 years old, I was wandering through the Connecticut woods—half talking to the gnomes I was 100 percent sure existed and half worried about being molested by a drifter—when I came upon a man’s gravestone from early colonial America. Barely visible from decades of erosion, I could just make out, “Beloved son, father, husband.” I sat there trying to imagine his entire life, what it must have been like, what it was like back then…and as I imagined this world, I realized everything I was imagining took place in the tiny dash between those two dates. His whole life reduced to a couple of inches. At that moment I realized I was in my dash, and had an existential crisis that shook me to my newly developing core. I was inconsolable. “We’re in the dash, we’re in the dash,” I cried. My parents shook their heads and told me to try not to “be so deep,” but I’ve never looked at life quite the same way ever since.
From a very young age I’ve had to fight the fatalistic thought that none of this matters, so it wasn’t a huge surprise that I took to alcohol and drugs like a duck to water. I blacked out the first time I drank and it was glorious. Five minutes after smoking my first joint, I was buying a pipe. Marijuana gave me reprieve from the algorithm of doom that constantly unfolds in my mind; sure, I became a delusional conspiracy theorist, but at least I was CHILL AF about it all, man. The relief I got from my brain the first time I ever did heroin, just the blissful SILENCE, is a feeling that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Wow! That was deep! I often wonder why I cannot put down the champagne bottle. I just thought it was because it tastes so good and the little bubbles tickle my nose. But after reading this, I may need to re-think things a bit. Am I a ‘doom-aholic’? Maybe, maybe not but I’ll sip a bit of champagne and reflect on it.
Ha! Ha! Thanks Lou!
LikeLiked by 1 person