Addiction

Addiction has to do with it-ain’t-easy. It is dis-ease. Dis-ease has to do with not being at ease; not being comfortable with something, with life maybe.

All of these thoughts occurred to me when Sr. Labonte said to me for the first time, “You know, of course, that alcoholism is a disease.” Well, of course, I didn’t know that, and I was hesitant in buying that notion. But, gradually the idea that alcoholism is a disease did sink in and I accepted it. This was long after my father had died and long after the trembling nights when he’d arrive drunk and my mother would be very upset and they would fight and I would be very afraid that life was coming to an end.

Many of my relatives have not been comfortable with life; have found life difficult and so in part I have also found life difficult and have my own addictions, to chocolate, for instance and to relationship and the desire for not being alone, and coca cola. Addiction is an unquenchable thirst.

I grew to be very angry at my Dad over stuff that happened during our lifetime together; I was ashamed of him, of me, of my mother. The days of my childhood felt like life lived under a cloud, was dark and conducive to bone-crushing depression.

Addiction is delicious and ease-inducing and soft and comfy and like a hot fudge sundae or really, really good sex; it’s an ice cream cone with jimmies and oozing chocolate mouse doused in a hot chocolate pudding. Yum!

Addiction is films 24-7, cold beer and pretzels and getting fat, fat or staying thin thin with cocaine or heroin; feeling like it’s a party all the time. And isn’t life just that, a party where you feel free, free, free and un-responsible? Let me eat what I want to eat; that’s what I live for, a fattening, overstuffing, tasty, but only for a moment, meal!

Addiction leads down the road to the nothing that comes from nothing and all that presses down from life like judgment and anger and feelings of failure and feelings of inferiority and superiority and not meeting one’s goals and dying, dying inside with self-disappointment.

Addiction is a seeking for some relief from all the pain of self denigration and feelings of not belonging and feelings of never feeling like one could belong; the utter hopelessness of it all; it’s just too much to think.

And I am going out right now to get a double chocolate chocolate muffin with diluted hazelnut combined with decaf coffee!

Actually, I had a juicy naval orange instead! Whew!

DeAnn Louise Daigle AWW by phone 3/4/08