Intoxicated with Intoxication Part 2

by | Jul 21, 2017 | Blog

My relationship with chemical intoxication ended poorly, as one can probably guess.

Living muddled and entranced is unsustainable. Apart from the external consequences society imposes, there are certain inherent consequences as well. Confusion is hard on our minds, it’s the opposite of how they are meant to function.

I gradually grew angrier and angrier. All the things I was suppressing and repressing and avoiding with intoxication were still there. I was just clubbing them into unconsciousness. They always woke up again, and they were mad. I pushed the people who hadn’t gotten tired of me away. I invested myself more and more in all the things that were terrible for me.

This is all pretty much math too.

Not dealing with things lets them grow and grow in the dark. It isn’t long before we have a legitimate monster on our hands.

The problem for me was that this was all combined with a very strong attachment to intoxication. This prevented me from having the insight to deal with it. So, I blamed other people and circumstances. Essentially, anything outside myself.

Predictably, this did not lead to good things.

One of the central problems with an intoxicated life (and intoxication in general) is how it sets a bar for experience that makes reality start to seem boring or painful or just unacceptable.

It creates this mindset where the things you do every day like going to work, hanging out with people, spending time with family, and having hobbies, all become a hassle because they are impediments to being intoxicated. So, you either start avoiding these things, or you bring intoxication into them.

Neither option turns out well.

I eventually quit getting intoxicated. It wasn’t rehab and AA or NA or being blinded on the road to Damascus. I think these things helped, but they weren’t the fix. An accumulation of everything I had learned over the years finally broke through the surface and allowed spontaneous recovery to appear in my life. I still struggled a few times over the years but, in general, I was free of the need for chemically-oriented intoxication (in the end, it’s all chemical though).

I moved out to the desert and got in school and started a family, which we’ll start looking at starting tomorrow. I still sought out ways to avoid simply sitting with reality as it is because I hadn’t sorted myself out yet.

I still haven’t. But I’m working on it.

Thanks for reading.

Intoxicated with Intoxication Part 1

by | Jul 20, 2017 | Blog

Now we’re talking about the kind of intoxication everyone was probably expecting, as opposed to comic books and cartoons.

I am always hesitant to even discuss this, much less actually write about it. There is this odd dynamic with it where some people think it’s cool, other’s want to make it a contest and the rest can become a little judgmental.

Just a little.

I am not looking to tell war stories or sob stories or stories at all really.

My relationship with intoxication started fairly young and lasted longer than it should have. Just like the magical worlds, a desire for something different drove this. Something not me. I loved it from the first moment I met it, but we are not friends anymore.

Intoxication took on a life of its own at some point. I couldn’t have even told you why I was pursuing it with so much dedication, but I was certainly pursuing it. I became a fake and a liar and an imposter and a poser. I spent a lot of time being and pretending to be someone I wasn’t, always because I thought anyone else would be better than me.

I was not a cool intoxicated person.

I was not fun or funny or amusing most of the time. I did not have limits or boundaries. I was annoying and difficult to deal with. I became increasingly self-absorbed and self-pitying and self-centered.

So much self, but no self-awareness.

This is actually true of most everyone who makes intoxication a way of life, they just don’t realize it because they are surrounded by other intoxicated people. If they could pay attention they would see the healthier people in their lives slowly dropping off. The lack of big blow-ups and fights makes it harder to see the drift, but it’s there.

None of this should be surprising.

When we intoxicate ourselves, we are intentionally removing the responsible parts of our brain from the equation.

We are seeking to silence things like reason and logic and the anxiety that often tells us an idea or behavior might have negative consequences. We are seeking to let go and relax, to be less inhibited. It’s why we do it. Why are we surprised when it goes bad? Why are we surprised when the people who are engaging life and reality in a real, honest way slowly lose connection with us?

It’s not judgment or them not getting it or everyone just being too uptight, man.

It’s math. It makes sense.

See you tomorrow.

Intoxication with Magical Worlds

by | Jul 19, 2017 | Blog

I was a weird kid.

And not just normal weird, but mountain weird. It’s a special kind of weird.

Part of being a weird kid included an unhealthy obsession with fantasy worlds.

Marvel Comics, pro wrestling, the Snarkout Boys, Batman, Calvin and Hobbes. That kind of stuff.

I get that this is all cool and normal for kids. I think it was one of the ways I impaired and entranced myself to avoid dealing with some things though.

I didn’t just like these fantasy worlds, they absorbed me.

I tried to find ways to bring them into my everyday world. This continued on until way to late in life.

I had a running conversation in my head with whatever thing I was into at the time. I had wrestling announcers running commentary on how I was living my life (and it was always awesome). I had this story that I started in my head to help me fall asleep when I was little, and I kept adding to it for years and years and years.

There’s nothing wrong with having an imagination or enjoying fantasy, within reason.

I think when I was younger, and into my teenage years, I chose this over people and reality. I used it to avoid dealing with things, and this always sets us up for difficulty.

I began to imprint these things over the real world, and to seek identity in them.

I saw traits that I liked in characters and tried to force them onto myself. This often came off as clunky and disingenuous. It made me awkward and hard to relate to, and led me to seek attention in the wrong ways. If I am to zero in on why I think this seemingly innocent obsession with imaginary things was detrimental to me, I would say it was because it was an outgrowth of my desire to be anyone but me. It gave me way too many ways to escape myself and avoid growing.

This is probably the most harmless of the intoxications we’ll look at in this series. I get that some people won’t understand why I am writing about it, but it is also one of the more frustrating for me. I think it stunted my maturity to some degree and contributed to a social awkwardness that really affected me when I was older.

I still like a good story though.

Intoxication and Self-Medicalization

by | Jul 18, 2017 | Blog

Self-medication.

This is the phrase I always saw associated with my intoxication.

I am a little wary of it for the most part. It seems like one of those unnecessary medicalizations that are so prevalent in the world now.

I get what they mean though.

We intoxicate ourselves because we make the mistake of thinking this existence is somehow boring. We also do it because we make the mistake of labeling some emotional states as unacceptable or as needing to be avoided. This decision often (usually) makes these states worse and prolongs them in unhelpful ways.

Self-medicating.

Yes, I drank and used drugs and everything else we will talk about this week because I was depressed and dealt with anxiety and other issues. This is a thing.

But it’s really not all that different from anything else. I was trying to escape from reality as it was. I was not accepting things that were in front of me. I was trying to deal with things without doing the difficult work. Calling it self-medication just hands it over to the medical industry, though they never helped me.

Even a little.

I am not sure it ever helped me to be told I was self-medicating.

It often just gave me a reason to keep doing it. It made me feel like I was doing something with a purpose. I am not saying this is always the case, but it was for me.

If we are not careful we can use the pursuit of a why as an excuse to keep doing the things we are doing, even if they are not healthy or helpful. It tricks our brain into thinking it is dealing with the issue.

Sometimes, we may never discover the why, but this doesn’t mean that action isn’t required.

Other times, we discover the why and find out that knowing what it is doesn’t help us at all. This isn’t a movie where finding the why suddenly brings freedom and resolution. You aren’t Sandra Bullock.

Oftentimes, why is irrelevant and we just need to make a change.

Intoxication

by | Jul 17, 2017 | Blog

I like looking up synonyms for words.

I try not to use them too often, but I like knowing what they are because they often tell us a little more about a word.

The synonyms for intoxicate are things like inebriate, befuddle, and impair. Also, things like excite, exhilarate, enthrall, delight and entrance.

When we get intoxicated we are generally seeking the latter set of effects and experiences, but they are closely tied to the former set. Part of what makes intoxication so alluring is the way it, through “befuddling” us, makes things seem much more exciting and interesting than they are.

It is weird that we need this at all.

We suddenly, through no effort (or fault) of our own, arrive in this reality.

We have to learn how to exist and survive on this planet in a hostile and crazy universe. There are all these ironclad laws built into reality. Then, there are these created rules and beliefs about why they are there. We are surrounded by other members of our own species, some friendly and others hostile. There are also thousands of other species, not to mention these weird things that grow from the ground.

It’s all wide-open, all brand new, all completely up to us.

And we react with boredom.

It is an odd thing that this life is not enough for us. It is an odd thing that we constantly try to add new things to it. That we take so much for granted. I think that this is getting worse and worse as we walk deeper into the delusion that we have conquered reality and that nature exists apart from us (or that we are above it).

This week we will look at things I have used to intoxicate myself over the years, and how I try to avoid this now.

Thanks for reading.