Addiction Replaces The Real You With a Cheap Imitation of Yourself

While some people are genetically predisposed to addiction, most of us start out drinking or using drugs just to have a little bit of fun. Usually these behaviors are reinforced by our peer group. We tend to self-sort into certain categories. You don't have to be any particular age to start out using substances, but many of us start pretty young. Yeah, there's always some kid that finds his dad's stash or drinks his aunt and uncle's vodka and waters down the bottles to hide his trickery, or has an older brother who shares his dope. But a lot of us started, not exactly through peer pressure, but more through a curiosity. And that friend who you were never sure how he got started out smoking weed, drinking beer or whatever it was he was doing, he usually hooked us up with our first taste.

I'm not saying peer pressure doesn't exist. No question, there's a lot of things that kids, and even adults, will do to feel cool or validated. But what I called a curiosity up there, that seems to me to be the key ingredient in the birth of an addict. What feels like curiosity, it's actually a kind of emptiness. And you can try all sorts of ways to fill that emptiness. Some people may be able to find something that's actually healthy, like a sport or an intense hobby, that can fill that hole. But many of us won't find relief from any kind of simple solution. To me, it feels like curiosity because you approach each new substance like, "Hmmm... maybe this one will do it." Or, "I wonder how that would feel. I wonder what it would change." Even if you don't fully know or understand what the 'it' you're trying to get accomplished is.

A lot of drug addicts who start out with alcohol and move on to harder stuff barely notice the transition. Especially the drunks who drink to have a good time. Eventually, it becomes impossible to have a good time without drinking. Joy is literally subsumed by drunkeness. Then one day, maybe because you're drunk and your judgement's impaired, you do a couple bumps of coke, just to see if that'll do it. Maybe that's the key to having more fun. Because you've noticed that fun has been plateaued for a while now. Sure enough, that does the trick. And then eventually, you've gotta get drunk and high just to have a good time. Before you know it, what was once just a way to blow off some steam or have fun with your buddies has turned into a raging habit. You're drinking and getting high by yourself or in secret.

After a while, every day, you wake up feeling like you were in a plane crash. There's only one way to fix it and you can't find the drugs or the booze soon enough.

It's amazing how long people can go on like this, the behavior relatively unnoticed by those who care about them.

Slowly though (although not always slowly), you're not really exactly yourself anymore. All you are is one big need. You're like a question mark that needs an answer in order to exist. The question is, "I'm awake, why do I feel like this?" The answer is "Just take this and you won't feel like that anymore."

Addiction is a Manifestation of Pain

I believe that sort of like the Buddhists say, that existence is pain, life is suffering. At least in a small way, we have to acknowledge that there are a lot of people out there in the world who are in a bad way from the day they are born. I think that a lot of times, addicts have an antenna that's tuned a little more sensitively to the pain of the world, and that curiosity, that hole, is a manifestation of that pain. That's why we need to dull it. Obviously, we have to take responsibility for how the disease comes into our lives, and the choices we make once we know we have the disease have to be our own choices. But once we dip our toes into the bloody end times river of addiction, it's tough not to get swallowed up by the pain.

That's why, I think, that as we transform from Bob, or Jill, or David or Lauren, or whatever your name is, into Addict. We are letting our own personality dissolve a little bit, we are lettting ourselves be replaced by a few symptoms and a couple of base needs.

Getting sober is an act of defiance, a reclamation of your personhood, your very identity. It's a way to assert that you are alive and that you deserve to be alive.