If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts.
That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you.
That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too. That some male prostitutes become so accustomed to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. That a majority of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance of this datum is unanalyzable.
That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused.
That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.
That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning that they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis.
That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off.
That 99% of compulsive thinkiers' thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.
That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.
That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
No comments:
Post a Comment