My own struggle with addiction came to life when alcohol
went from being an add-on to the fun to a coping mechanism whenever things got
uncomfortable. This really hit home when my father passed. I have surely had my
share of difficulties, but at some point things changed from seeking healthy
forms of relief to always trying to find solace in the bottle or the gram bag.
I made a conscious choice to stop even trying to deal with life on life’s terms,
instead running far and fast from the crucial moment of confrontation when
things got tough. I was a coward in the truest sense.
Somewhere along the line, the difficulties that came into my
life became the currency with which I bought legitimacy. I couldn’t point to
any tragic abuse or abandonment in my childhood or any destitute poverty. I had
to find something to leverage into my admission to the select, sordid company
of addiction. I allowed and even promoted the few hardships I’d endured to be
in the position of identifying me. They became who I was rather than points of
inspiration or lessons about perseverance.
When your difficulties are your identity, wallowing in them consumes
your life. They become all that you are. Instead of focusing on the overcoming
of these things you become enraptured with living smack-dab in the middle of
the misery. “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” becomes the tagline of every
picture you view when looking at your life and you begin to figure that no one
has suffered as you have; this gives you the right and high privilege of living
out of all of that pain every day. Pain is all we allow ourselves to know and
by extension all we allow ourselves to be.
This self-imposed limitation is manifest every time we
drink, snort, smoke or swallow. It signifies our surrender to the abyss of negativity
that has engulfed us. At some point in the future, there’s typically a
transition whereupon we begin to compare our struggle to those of other people
in an effort to validate ourselves.
There comes a point where we must all learn to respect the
struggles of others and/or recognize that those struggles aren’t even our
business unless we make them so. Money or reputation does not equate to
happiness or success and we cannot allow ourselves to feel as though people
with money or visible privilege can’t or don’t have very real, very toxic
problems.
If anyone spends too much time living comparatively they
lose sight of that which must be the true focus of their mental effort:
improving their own life and by extension improving the lives of those in their
spiritual vicinity. As a recovering addict (or just a human, honestly) you must
be too concerned with becoming better for your own sake to spend time tearing
down anyone else. It is not your business. Your own side of the street no doubt
needs constant care in order to be anything like clean, so be concerned with
that.
Stay in your lane.
If you must break from that to concern yourself with anyone
else’s life or struggles, do it only in a constructive, helpful manner. Do not
waste one scant smidgen of energy on negative pursuit, and if you find yourself
heading down that path you must stop immediately and break away.
You’ve torn down so much in your own life (and while in
recovery that can begin to translate to a good thing) that it is time to focus
solely on building things up. Leave that destruction in your past life and
refuse to look back unless you decide to head that direction. You must put it
down and LEAVE IT THERE. You’ll be a much happier person once you do.
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