Normal, everyday self-destruction

One curious commonality amongst addicts (active and recovering) is the tendency to reliably seek out ways to mess up even the best of things simply because it’s going right. It’s as if our mind cannot accept that we can live in happiness and success and it rejects the idea like a body may reject a transplanted organ. It isn’t natural to us to be happy, contented or peaceful and something buried deep within our consciousness wills us to make a huge mess of everything as early and often as possible. 

We reject that unnatural positivity and it often seems as though we have fallen in love with being miserable. The addict prefers to “wallow in the bitter morass of self-pity” (AA Basic Text or “Big Book”) and make his or her home in the comfort of self-centered sorrow. We wear our suffering like a warm blanket and take the time to remind everyone about each bit of that suffering every chance we get.

You see, we addicts are great at suffering and surviving. We’ve put ourselves through years of horrible decisions and the consequences thereof. Even once we’ve gotten clean we still feel the aftershocks of our former lives and it seems that they will never end. Once they have subsided, though, perhaps life gets TOO comfortable and by extension too boring.

We’ve made impulse control our calling card and that switch isn’t very easy to turn off. We crave that excitement as a way of escaping normalcy at times and can find no better way to get excited than to feel the familiar rush of self-destruction. It takes us back to some of the most thrilling moments of our active addiction and we are riverboat gamblers once more, even if the moment is fleeting.

We are quick to react in a horrifyingly impulsive way and even quicker to lament the effects once we regain our senses. We have then sated a two-fold hunger: that of a quick and cheap thrill and the familiar buzz of self-pity. Now we’re really at home!

Then we look around and there’s actually real no home left. It is a classic case of sacrificing the permanent on the altar of the immediate (thanks, Rob Silvers). We have indeed stepped back to a place that feels like home only to be sickened by it.

Actively working a program of recovery is one of the only ways to minimize these occurrences, but we all must scream for our higher power when we feel the itch to run a few stoplights for giggles. It comes up for me every few weeks, and that is the surest sign I need to take myself to a meeting and be surrounded by other lunatics in order to regain my sanity.

What a long, strange trip it will always be.