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JD's Blog An Addict’s Journey in their Recovery from Addiction
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Swapping the Wilderness of Drug Addiction for the Wilds of South Africa
Lying in the early morning sun, the hyena gazed at us deceptively docilely. Her cub was mewling for milk sweetly, pushing against her furred body. They looked cute enough for a Japanese Hello Hyeny merchandise catalogue.
Obviously, I resisted the suicidal urge to exit the roofless safari vehicle. Those jaws can easily take a grown man’s hand. And African wildlife have a way of making wayward tourists into news headlines.
But still… so cuuuute.
I was on a safari with my dad this past week. Bonding trip to Sabie, far out into the bush and bordering Kruger.
A gift of recovery, as they call it, because back in active drug addiction, I wouldn’t leave the house let alone civilisation. For one thing, my drug dealer didn’t deliver outside of the suburbs.
I certainly didn’t have adventures like flying in small airplanes. I hadn’t flown in a while (unless you count drug highs), and it was fun… until take off.
I have this belief that small planes aren’t meant to fly. It’s like Gravity takes serious offense to these fragile craft; I really felt its desire to grind us into the ground. We had turbulence, a pocket of air where the tiny plane just dropped like a stone for a couple of seconds. I’d hardly ever thrown up on alcohol (some sort of natural resistance to it, I guess). But this time, sober, I reached for the barf bag. Phew. Nothing happened.
After landing on a juvenile, barely-passable runway, I got off the plane shakily. That’s the last time, I silently communed with Gravity. I will never f#%^ with you again.
From there the adventure began.
On the first day, we saw a bull elephant. He got really close to the vehicle we were in, didn’t pay us any mind. A delectable, nourishing root grew under a tree, and said tree was in his way, so he simply tusked it over. Majestic strength flowed through those ivory ploughs. Nothing stopped this elephant from getting what he wanted.
Kind of like how I, typically for an addict, didn’t let anything get in the way of me and my fix. Always hustling, making a plan, overcoming any obstacle – and just like they call a male elephant a bull, I was a bullsh!%%3r.
I related to the elephant in that way.
We also saw leopards. Out in broad daylight. I think that’s quite rare. They’re normally shy. Elusive. Shadow assassins. We stayed at an open camp – where wildlife is free to move through as they please – so having leopards close by was quite nerve-wracking. Made me always look over my shoulder while walking from the chalet we were sharing to the main areas of the camp.
Reminded me of how I used to be on the lookout for, well, a different species of animal. Pigs. Every addict’s worst fear is running afoul of the blue lights that wafted a lingering smell of crisp bacon. Nothing brings down the drug high like a night with fellow low-lifes in a pigpen.
No telling what predators you’ll find in with you.
We weren’t allowed to leave our chalets in the night, unless accompanied by staff. On the first evening, I heard the loud bellow of a hippo. Directly outside. Hippos being the single most dangerous mammal in Africa, I was a mite concerned. Jaws wider than a chasm of doom combined with a temper that flies faster than buck chased by cheetah, they kill more people in Africa than all the carnivores combined. Hippos are not your friends.
But then, I got confused. It sounded like it was coming from the other room. Oh Em Gee. My dad snores like an aquatic mass murderer.
On another exciting game drive, there was a lioness with her cubs. Again, strong suicidal urge to go pet them. The cubs were tugging at her ears, squirming around, wrestling with each other. Suicidal urges are a thing with me. That’s what active addiction does. Makes the use of drugs and alcohol seem like the natural thing to do. Do NOT PET THE LION CUBS. But we do anyway. Then we get mauled, lose something important, like a vital organ or our home, and go, “Never again will I pet a cute lion cub!” But some time passes and we’re thinking, maybe it was just that one lioness who took issue with us. The next one will be different.
Whoops, mauled again. This time, half your face is missing.
This goes on until we end up meeting the resident rangers (i.e. the counselling team) of rehabs like Houghton House – who guide us to the fresh watering hole of recovery.
So now I know not to go petting cute syringes, rubbing my nose in white drug powders, hugging bottles of alcohol, and expecting things to go well.
We also saw buffalo posing like it was their high school yearly photoshoot. Check it out. When I was in high school, my journey with drugs started with marijuana. I also lazed around like these beefy boys, but that’s what drugs like marijuana did to me: took away motivation. And motor skills. I was gawkier than a three-legged lion.
Early the Saturday morning, I blaringly rolled through the mosquito nets out of the bed. The last thing I felt like doing was going on a 5am crack-of-dawn game drive. Forcing coffee down my throat, I recalled how in active addiction, a night of drugs would have kept me sleeping, if I could, the whole day. But never mind that. Off we went, with me silently cursing the whole way.
Until we came across an antelope. Or at least we think it was an antelope. It was hard to tell. The buck was brutally attacked sometime before we arrived. By the time we got there, the lioness had already ravaged the carcass. And she was close to us. So close, I was sure I could smell her fetid breath. A cub was walking around behind her. Presumably he had his fill already.
Hungry that lioness was, ripping off pieces of flesh and gulping them down, the way an addict, starved of his drug of choice would scarf it the next chance he got, whether through the needle, the pipe, or the straw.
Then, at last, the final day had arrived. It seemed both a lifetime and a mere drop of sand in the hour glass, and we were ready for our lift back to the airport.
A ride on the roofless land cruiser through the bush to a landing strip in Middle-of-Nowhere-ville. We boarded the all-too small airplane, ready to make our ascend.
A gift of recovery, one I’m thankful to Houghton House for. I’d never have been able to explore the deep bush of Africa if I was still abusing drugs. I’d never have enjoyed life at its most primal, while mingling with guests from countries all over the world.
Drugs would have robbed me of glorious sunsets, dinners made of lively conversation with French, American, and German tourists, and trips into the veldthat revealed the jewels of Africa.
The only things I missed about civilisation were my cats, supping on meats exquisitely prepared and succulently clothed in thick gravy. Instead of the fresh, frenzied kills I witnessed at Sabie by cats of another kind.
But, my cats purr when I pet them. The others, here, take a literal arm and a leg.
Soon, I’d see them, I thought, as we lifted off to soar through the African skies. As the land’s trees and bushes became to shrink, I spied a grazing gazelle looking up as we passed by.
Contentedly, I began to snooze.
The big cats. My small cats. Now I wouldn’t exchange them for the drugs, like cat, in the world.
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The Heroes who keep me from getting high on drugs.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
Coach Carter, Denzel Washington
Dashingly feisty, she swiftly swings her light saber with the raw power of the Force against a dark, shrouded nemesis. Zhzhzhzhzhz sounds as the plasma blades clash and crackle. But she pushes her enemy back, empowered by a connection to an Energy beyond measure.
Despite the lack of Jedi training, she faces up against the villainous Kylo Ren, and more than holds her own.
Rey is my hero.
When I’m feeling pushed down by the world, facing enmity that threatens to crush my soul, I remember her and how she refuses to ever give up. She reaches for inner strength and embraces it. Like I must, so I don’t have to go back into rehab.
*
A man rises from humble beginnings. Not white, not black, he’s of two worlds. Campaigning on the streets of Chicago’s brutal politics, he brings with him hope. He rises, meteorically, to the highest office of his country. Despite nasty attacks on his character and assassination attempts on his reputation, he surpasses all, becoming the most presidential president in decades to a nation riven by a cruel culture war.
Barack Obama is my hero.
When I feel caught between my world, one which I slip so easily into, and the “real” world of mundane anxiety, I relate to him. When I try to act with integrity even when it’s so tempting to give into spite and verbal barbary, I think of how he was a noble statesman in the whirling cesspool of Washington DC. I think of how he embodies honour and is one of our age’s true gentlemen. It helps me from falling back into drug abuse and dishonour.
*
A monster, he ravaged Europe from Ireland to Italy, and beyond. He consumed more blood than a hundred humans hold. He killed and pillaged for fun. He devastated villages. He ruined great houses. Until he came upon a gypsy girl. Her death at his hands changed his life, for he was cursed with his soul. The weight of a conscience on his vampire’s mind broke him, drove him into quivering insanity. For close to seventy years, he hid away in the shadows of a sewerage system, feeding off rats.
Until he found a cause to redeem himself in his own eyes. To finally face his actions, and to own them. To become a hero for humanity.
Angel is my hero.
When the guilt for what I’ve done, in the past, during active addiction, when I consumed drugs and alcohol in such vast amounts, did actions that I felt irredeemable, like how I betrayed my own family… or those I let down when they needed me the most…
When shame and guilt threaten to cripple me, I think of Angel leading his ragtag band of misfits in one last fight against the demonic forces of evil in his show’s finale.
His courage in facing himself helps keep me from falling back to drug and alcohol abuse.
*
He dreamed of flight, as he watched birds gain lift with the beating of their wings. Designing a man-sized kite, he fought against the forces of gravity. Desperate to understand the inner workings of the human body, he dissected cadavers in a place and time where such acts were forbidden – on pain of death.
He was a man of science, developing an understanding for the natural world, with its wonderous phenomenon. He was a man of invention, as he designed machines only to be realised in a future time. He was a man of art, as he painted, over four long years, the single most famous smile in history.
Leonardo di Vinci is my hero.
His quest for knowledge is a thirst I understand. His drive to become a master in a multitude of disciplines is my own desire. When I feel the pull of inactivity and procrastination, I turn to him, so that maybe, just maybe, my own name can live on through the ages – just like his. A possibility if I keep clean from drugs and alcohol.
*
Why heroes?
I struggled to find my way after I left rehab. That’s because rehab provides you with the tools and the safe, healing environment to learn to use those tools. But when you’re out, you need to actually make use of them. Houghton House does offer continued support and therapy beyond that, making the road to recovery easier. However, I personally wage war with myself, with daily demons from within me seeking to claw me back into the hell of my own making.
I need heroes.
And I have them. They are legion.
Each one represents an ideal I aspire to in my life-or-death civil war.
I believe everyone needs heroes. Heroes are a source of inspiration, a rallying cry, a banner to fight under.
So, what was the process I used to find mine?
Well, I’m passionate about history, about politics, about sci-fi and fantasy, about the human condition. And I’m passionate about creativity.
This last one is a genetic gift encouraged from the time I could hold a crayon. My maternal grandmother was a talented painter. I remember far back into my early childhood: she was always buying canvases and paints for me to illuminate my inner universe.
Meanwhile, my grandfather had an old typewriter – which was already a relic of the past at the time – but I loved tip-tapping away on it, pretending to be a best-selling novelist, writing my next big thriller-horror-love story (girls were still very icky to me at that age).
Creativity empowered my mind’s eye, allowing for a clear vision of anything imaginable. So vivid, they became real.
When I find someone captivating – whether they’re fictional and brought to life on screen or if they are part of the powerful tides of history or they make the pages swiftly turn in a book – they enter my psyche, and become enmeshed.
(Some even come from rehab.)
They breath, they live, they think, they feel, they react. In one sense, they commune with me.
For me, they are as gods among men – embodying the best characteristics of humanity, whether it’s never giving up, like Rey, or simply never giving in, like Angel. I aspire to them. As someone who slips into his own world so easily, I always find my heroes available when I need them.
It doesn’t matter that some don’t exist, some are long-dead, and some have never even met me. It matters that I hold them in my heart.
It may seem odd, carrying them with me as I do, but what it is, is connecting to the purest form of my morals, values, and ideals. Remembering them.
Haha. Being scolded by Barack Obama makes me feel like an embarrassed school boy. I experience shame, so I endeavour to be a better me. Then we go play hoop in my lounge (sad-lol).
When I’m socially anxious, and enter a room full of people giving me long glances, I’m suddenly wreathed in a poncho, six-shooter on my hip, and a brimmed hat crowning my head, with Clint Eastwood’s Man-With-No-Name by my side.
(Not to be aggressive, but to feel a sense of self-assuredness. Clint and me, we don’t run from showdowns.)
Heroes keep me on the road of recovery from the drugs and alcohol that ravaged my body and mind. A personal rehab of heroes I take with me everywhere.
There’s even a hero directly in my life, but who also exists dualistically in my own mind. She truly grants me serenity. Moreover, enables me to question everything I do wherever I go – and thus make the right choices when I need to – in the form of ongoing therapy (including the real, but imaginary, debates we have in my head while I’m bumbling about life).
That is my therapist, one of Houghton House’s excellent counselling team. It’s through the team’s daily experiences with healing fractured, broken souls that they became heroes. Heroes with a great understanding of the terrible condition we addicts go through.
If it wasn’t for Lagertha*, and for Houghton House’s caring rehab staff in general (including the highly-empathetic counselling team, veteran nurses, the understanding admin and office peeps, the wonderful kitchen ladies, there’s too many to name), I wouldn’t have any heroes at all.
So there is hope. For anyone who’s still suffering in active addiction. And there’s more than just the chance to get clean. I found, through Houghton House’s rehab centre, there’s the chance to redeem.
I’d like to end off with my all-time favourite quote. It’s from one of my heroes formed at the ringside of my mind. Rocky Balboa, who went the distance.
It’s a good one to remember when you’re pushed down in the journey of recovery, perhaps feeling self-piteous, perhaps feeling desperate. It’s darn empowering. And it’s awesome.
“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!” – Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone
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Kung Foolery and the Art of Addiction Recovery
The mantis spreads its forearms. The snake coils itself up to strike. The tiger tightens its muscles, preparing to launch. The crane kicked ass in The Karate Kid. And the monkey broke into the Shaolin Temple’s winery, and is now doing fancy missteps like a true drunken master.
That last one was me.
A buffoon back in active addiction.
But I had a black belt in it, and so was proud. I could drink you under the table, then kumite kick it to the curb. That’s because somewhere along the path I had fallen to the teachings of a dark kung fu master. The teacher was called Master Poo Luh Choices. Those teachings, however, led to pain.
I had good teachers too.
My parents, for one, are masters of justice. They fight every day to bring balance back to the downtrodden lives of this country. They take on, through the courts, those who would criminally neglect the poor, just as the Shaolin Monks of old fought raiders and bandits with spectacular high kicks and spinning bladed staffs.
And you won’t believe the difference they’ve made to so many people.
They’re my heroes. In their sixties, like Mr Miyagi, and they’re master splinter schooling me in kindness. Something I forgot this week in my previous blog post. (Now removed, through the suggestion of a forth-coming zen instructor.)
If we extend this metaphor to warrior monk tropes in a galaxy far, far away, then Recovery is the Force that connects us and binds us to the world around us. If I just keep myself open and serene, I can avoid the tumultuousness, terrible emotions.
They bring trouble.
As Master, whatshisname, Yogurt said: I sense fear in you. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. H8ers bring sh!tst0rms, possibly on social media.
The blog I wrote this week was about my experience with the dark side regarding an attempt to hustle me.
But, no, not the other person’s dark side. That is irrelevant.
My own dark side.
See, I have another teacher, one I visit on top of a mountain in the metaphorical local of Sherpas and sheep shindigs. It’s a steady climb, and it’s an inconvenient journey. But s/he meditates there. And it’s from this vantage point they get to see the whole picture.
Anger caused by fear, and poor impulse control, kept me from seeing it.
This wise old master spoke to me… (actually over FB, since screw mountains. S/he can Instagram that sh!@ – they have wi-fi everywhere.)
…and pointed out a few things.
The blog post this week was a little too free with the details – and, to be honesty, it was more judgey than Judge Dread and Judge Judy’s love child. I made interpretations that may or may not be true.
The wise old master (literally, long white hair and I swear I can see threads of long, wispy beard) showed a vision of a world where people are desperate, and not necessarily desperate because of drugs, but because the world can be a cruel and harsh place.
Desperate, and who need help, and who don’t need judgement. Even when they try and infringe on my boundaries in some way. It would have been better to be vaguer, kept it to my experience of it, but I didn’t. I wanted to prove how clever I was in spotting the flaws in the story, how I poked holes in it, how I would never be fooled again. So there were way too many details, and way too much emphasis on the other person.
But, I had already “won” before that post went up.
Because I managed to put up some boundaries like a – Star Wars reference / Sci-Fi play-on-words, look how clever I am, whoop whoop, sigh – Force Field. I beat a desperate person’s desperate attempts to shake me down.
Then I went back to an old martial art form called I Do Your Fourth Step For You Fu.
[Explanatory note: the Fourth Step in Recovery is about
taking your own inventory
for things you’ve done wrong. You’re meant to be focused on yourselfand your actions, not with the actions of other people, even if they have brought you harm. That’s because it is your journey and it’s an accounting in order to become a more enlightened being, one who will grow as a kind and caring person who contributes to society instead of taking from it, as many addicts do in active addiction.]
Inventory taking is easy when it’s someone else. It surprised me how easily I slipped into it. Wise Old Master gently reminded me that what makes my own personal-style of writing work is: I normally talk about me. My experiences. My actions. Not someone else’s.
Not unless they’re fictional, blonde, and play the cello. And may or may not be going mad.
Which is how I feel sometimes.
The forces of emotion are overwhelming.
What this person did, and tried to do, though, doesn’t really matter. There was no harm done. I was just left shaken like a power-surged Mr Ever Ready.
The climax was an outpouring of processing on my blog.
It’s gone now. The stain of shame has been washed out white.
White like the belt I wear around my crisp new karate suit. See, I’m still young in recovery, in many ways. That’s part of what this blog is. A journey. I never considered myself a spiritual person, not in any other sense than previously convening with Johnny, Jameson, and J & B.
I guess what I’ve learnt from this is: spirituality is feeling for the other person, looking past the demon ninja masks they’re currently wearing to see their true face.
I messed up earlier this week, because I was unspiritual. And I broke a code of honour.
I hope this post helps bring balance to what I did. And how I got here is because the Wise Old Master taught me to sweep.
Like how many tourists, seeking enlightenment, sweep in the temples throughout east Asia, where a broom is a school for stilling the mind, becoming calm, centring yourself, and cleansing soul-stuff.
So I swept, and I swept, and finally, hopefully, I swept enough that now my side of the street is clean.
Maybe, just maybe, I’ll master recovery too, one day.
Because when it comes down to it, life’s like an old martial arts movie on video tape.
When you make a mistake and possibly hurt someone through mean-spiritedness…
Be Kind.
And Rewind.
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Addiction, the discord of life. Recovery, the harmony of hope.
We lose a lot in active addiction. We suffer woes to our finances, our careers, our relationships. We lose time. This week, J.D contemplates how we can use recovery to compose a new story for ourselves.
Armelle’s silken-spun blonde hair flicked with the motion of her musical bow, as the strings she played upon her cello sang bittersweet. It drowned out the night life’s vibrancy below her window.
A former lover, now fallen lost soul, was dying in a sweat-stained bed, somewhere in the bowels of the City – he’d pushed his ravaged body to the chemical edge of the precipice and this time, it crumbled into the abyss.
She still loved him, she just couldn’t watch him commit a slow suicide through a stew of narcotic poison. It had been months since she walked away, and he’d just swam in syringes that much more.
It was all too raw, so she unleashed her heart-piercing emotions through the cello.
A scratching sound, suddenly, made her pause. The bow dropped to her side.
“Missy?” More scratching. Armelle stood from the wooden chair, approached her cello case – scritch scratch. “Missy?”
She couldn’t have fitted in there.
Armelle felt a whirling wave of disorientation in her head.
Everything’s surreal…
Instead, she heard a meow from under her bed’s rumpled, unmade duvet – her sleek Siamese cat had climbed into a warm nest of her own making, escaping mid-Autumn’s sudden drop of the thermostat.
Then what..?
She – with sweat now sticking strands of blonde hair to her forehead – hunched down onto her knees, with her hand working the latch on the cello case.
Click.
Her finger tips trembled as she reached into the groove, and flipped the lid open.
A large monarch butterfly fluttered out…
It… scratched?
…followed by wing dust. Armelle’s lungs strained at the sudden intake of air. In her dizziness, she made out a faint shape… a grotesque face, no mouth, milky-white eyes vacant of a soul.
Then she felt Something… inhuman… reaching out. From beyond.
A sudden streak of blood ran out her nose, and she nearly toppled over. She steadied herself, just as the shockwave hit. Her back fell against the bed as the apartment shuddered from the quake.
“He’s here at last. The Screaming God,” Armelle murmured, as she absent-mindedly wiped the blood away with her embroidered lavender sleeve.
What? What am I saying?
Outside, cars crashed violently, voices shouted, emergency sirens shrieked.
Missy bolted out from the duvet, disappearing through the door of the half-closed closet.
Armelle had a sudden burst of tears.
In the distance, thunder. On what felt like a flimsy floor, she stood up.
Peering down through the fourth storey window, she saw her building was spared the worst of it. There was chaos below. Several structures in the commercial district had caved in. There were bellows of smoke further off.
The blue lights flashing in the streets tickled her brain.
I’m going to have a seizure. Look away, Armelle.
Glancing up, at the clouds gathering in the skies, illuminated by flashes of white, she briefly saw that face again. No mouth, but screaming.
Pulling herself away from the window, she suddenly, desperately, wanted back in her hands her cello.
*
Nah, not a dream. Or a bad acid trip. Something I’m working on. You guys get a preview. Heck, I don’t even know if it’s any good. I dunno, but I like it, I guess that’s what counts right now. It’s the basis of… I don’t know what yet… a new beginning..?
There’s a whole thing that happens, but I don’t want to reveal anymore, in case I’m onto a good wicket. I believe in this, in a way I haven’t believed in myself, during active addiction, for years.
I’m trying to play catch up with my life. I’m a writer. I’ve been in the advertising industry awhile, people I’ve known at the same level as me years ago have gone far flung into the future, now in creative management, or (gasp) wearing suits as execs. Meanwhile, I’m in exile.
And my ex, my one true who slipped through because of my addiction-related selfishness, is now having her second kid with her happily-wedded husband. Everyone is moving on. Except me.
Cue the violins.
*
That’s one thing I need, my own sound track. I kind of have one in my head, and it has a musical score for every situation, every mood. It’s an orchestra, with specific instruments taking lead depending on what’s going on.
Heavy percussions when I’m feeling like an adventurer – and I’m on a mission to achieve some great goal for the day: like groceries!
Piano when I’m reminiscing on the past stories of my life.
The stringed instruments when I’m sad, but it’s a really beautiful sadness.
The horns when I’m happy – I especially like trumpets and bugles.
I’m the conductor of my life. And in addictive addiction, especially when I was hanging from alcohol withdrawal, my baton was all shaky from jittering hands.
In addictive addiction, I fell behind the marching band as everyone else’s lives moved forward.
I now find Facebook causes cacophony, just from the pure envy and the sense of mourning for a life I could have had. Especially when I see young, just recently sprouting families.
Addiction, drugs and alcohol, cost me financially, it cost me growth in my career, it cost me friends, it cost me health, it cost me time.
I burned my down my bridges, then napalmed the ashes.
But it’s really okay. Houghton House was there to help. Not just in getting clean from drugs and alcohol, but in ways to cope with the new life awaiting me – and surpassing the obstacles that my active addiction consequences put in my path.
See, there’s a little song that everyone listens to. They move their feet to it, they fall into a rhythm with it, they sing in harmony with it. They follow it, and it brings joy to their lives.
I’m out of tune, and it depressed me. I couldn’t get it. Addiction made it worse.
But I now hear something else. For most of my life, I’ve heard it, in the background, and barely noticed it. It’s mellow, then it starts to rise, I hear it pulsating, a beat grows louder, a voice lifts and lilts, and then a viola harmonises with a violin, and it sets… me free?
Sometimes, you have to give up on what everyone else is listening to.
Hence, I’m accepting I probably won’t get far in my industry, not anymore. There’s a lot I may never have that other people take for granted. I don’t see a family in my future.
Now instead I’m composing a new future, one that starts with a young woman, and her musical instrument, and how she faces a world gone mad, struggles with madness herself, but all she knows for sure is that as long as she carries her inner song, she’s going to be okay.
And so, Armelle sits back on the wooden chair. And with her bow against the strings of her cello, she begins to play.
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recovery from addiction, recovery from alcoholism
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Wolf or Man: the choices we make in addiction and in recovery.
What do our favourite characters from childhood have to do with the drugs and alcohol killing our inner child? And why does one of Houghton House’s directors carry a wand? J.D investigates this week. Through a wolf. With a mouse.
I’m a sheriff.
And I walked into a bar this week. I know, I know, stay too long in a barber shop and you get a haircut. But I didn’t drink, the choices we make in addiction and in recovery. I was there on official business. I needed to get ahead of a case where someone got beheaded – and the Woodsman, drunken sot, had answers to very important questions. After all, his axe happens to be very decapitatey.
I was going to try Good Cop. But…
…then some hoodlum, Grendel*, got in my way. Tried to stop me from having my little chit chat with suspect numero uno.
Maybe I could have gone about it differently, but I decided not to take any of Grendel’s sh!^. After I shoved him aside, things got ugly… fast. Grendel dropped his human-guise, becoming the gargantuan monster he truly was, and grabbed me by my shirt with his humongous marble-grey hand. I was smashed onto the floor, and then hurled against the wall, right next to the pool cue rack.
That’s when I let out the wolf inside, breaking a cue in half, and hammered it into his massive shoulder – and followed that up with a jawbreaker, because now I’m half transformed into a howling mad lupine.
A couple more furious fist-smashes, and then a jackhammer kick, and he crashed through the pool table, stunned, the fight flung out of him.
I now had a choice: break off his arm, or walk away.
I chose to walk away. Because, the Fables of Fabletown already distrusted me: there was the whole Three Pigs real estate crash, not to forget predations on girls wearing red riding hoods. I’m the Big Bad Wolf, but I desperately wanted to earn their trust. Like the trust I lost in active addiction.
As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve been playing a computer game. Something I do time to time in-between writing and other creative pursuits and not having a life.
It’s called The Wolf Among Us. The game is set in 1980s New York, where a community of Fables have founded a neighbourhood that’s shielded through magic from the mundane world’s eyes. They’ve fled their various homelands during the Exodus, and now try eke out a living here.
You live a couple of apartments down from Mr and Mrs Beast; constantly chastise Mr Toad – a slumlord – for not using his three-foot amphibian-hiding Glamour; sometimes find one of three littles pigs sleeping on your couch; and work with Snow White – the assistant to the deputy major Ichabod Crane** – to find a killer from within Fabletown.
Mr and Mrs Beast are having marital difficulties – you could get involved if you want, but I personally didn’t. Mr Toad casts a beady eye on his tenants; getting information from the self-serving prat makes playing Bad Cop tempting. Colin the pig never fails to remind you your debt for blowing his house down. And you’ve got a thing for Snow White – not that anyone could blame you: underneath the ice princess veneer, she’s a kind-hearted civil servant who wants to do her best for the Fable community.
Meanwhile, you’re both man and beast. And the choices you make throughout the game lead to one becoming stronger than the other.
Addiction is like that. I’ve made a lot of poor life choices. Some of them could have resulted in very, very bad things happening to me. I, by the grace of whichever deity you believe in, haven’t been locked in jail, haven’t lost everything I own, haven’t been exiled by my family, haven’t died – unless this blog is being typed out by John “I See Dead People” Edwards.
I still have hope.
Because, fortunately, I chose to go to Houghton House, and get help. I didn’t always choose to listen. Which just made things more difficult for me, but I’m a kind of a (har har funny, not funny) lone wolf that way.
Alex Hamlyn, one of the directors at Houghton, made plenty of bad choices himself in active addiction. A wolf of ravenous hunger came out, and he nearly died in a remote part of India using copious amounts of drugs. Legend has it that he was so full of narcotic poison, the mosquitoes biting him exploded like little fireworks of blood.
When he got clean, he made a choice to help people, in the way he’d been rescued from drugs, thanks to folks as caring as him. Now he’s got over 22 years clean time, and he’s spent it taming the wolf in others.
He chose to open a drug and alcohol rehab for the chemically dependent, not an easy thing to start up. But if he didn’t, I – and a lot of people I’ve met through traversing the road of recovery – wouldn’t be in line for a fairy tale ending.
He’ll kill me for saying this, but he’s a Fairy Godmother to many addicts. I personally think the pixie wings suit him.
We’re not bad people. We addicts are consumed by our own terrible hungers. But we don’t have to be beholden to bad choices of the past. We don’t have to let the wolf out anymore.
There’s the real chance for a happily ever after, because – through places like Houghton House – you get to write how your own story of drug dependency ends, and so finally close the book on active addiction forever.
*Known for hunting Vikings in mead halls.
**Known for being chased by Headless Horsemen.
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Active Addiction and True Friendship in recovery
So long, and thanks for the memories in recovery.
J.D had “friends” in active addiction, but being free from drugs brought him true friendship in recovery, one of whom he said goodbye to this week.
In active addiction, I met a lot of people I thought were my friends. My best friend was my drug dealer. When I had no cash left to give him, I used my petrol card. We’d be sitting at the garage, as an attendant filled up the tank, and I’d tell him about what was going on in my life.
He used to give advice.
Ironically enough, when I asked him if he could get me (the now-completely illegal sleeping drug) Mandax, he lectured me about where it would lead. “You will lose everything,” he said.
I mean, white powder is fine, according to him, but white tablets? That s%!& will cost you more than waking hours.
(White powder, for the record, will also take everything. The only things it gives back is a septum holier than the Bible and cardiac arrest.)
True friendship in recovery- way better.
I have a particular friend, a Mediterranean chap, who I’ve gotten quite close to.
We wound up at the same halfway house, and have been roommates now for over six months. This week he moved on.
Halfway houses, such as the one that Houghton House has available for recovering addicts, are great places to re-enter society after treatment for addiction. They provide the structure necessary to help rebuild one’s life.
As I also have a mood disorder with the intensity of ten typhoons, I easily let routine slip by. Before I know it, I’m consumed by dreams of singing Valkyries in silver breast-plates, and waking up at a reasonable time is the last thing on my mind.
At the beginning of the year, I had direction-issues. Tough economy being what it is, I struggled to find a job. The few interviews I went to, I fumbled like an epileptic juggler. Then political events conspired to bring darkened storm clouds, and I struggled to see silver linings anywhere.
Enter Samuel*.
Formerly addicted to Walter White grade narcotics, he came into Houghton House, like the rest of us, bereft of hope.
While there, and with significant help from a member of Houghton’s great counselling team, he managed to fight off most of his demons.
Houghton House isn’t just about stopping drugs. It’s about finding the traits in you that will help you win against active addiction.
Case in point: in active addiction, in order to make ends meet, and to support his marijuana habit, he started his own business. Some addicts steal your silver, sofa, and kitchen sink. He went into a trade. It went well, because he had hope.
Of course, that fell apart in the end. Active addiction takes no prisoners. He lost everything. Possessions, places to live, people who cared for him. Even the car he was sleeping in, one night, was borrowed by four men carrying guns and never returned.
Jessa*, an addiction’s trained social worker, took a sliver of light, and ignited something deep within the darkness of his soul. Hope burned again.
When he came to share the room with me, he carried that torch with him.
I was devastated by what I saw as impending doom, for myself, and the world around me. Deep depression is the place circus clowns go to die. Recovering addicts are especially vulnerable to the dangers there, when they feel sorry for themselves.
He helped change me and my view.
He said, “Perception is Reality.” When you see the world as dark, it doesn’t just seem dark. It is dark. When you see the world as light, it is light. That was his message.
He reinforced positivity.
It can be hard to simply change your view by thinking positive thoughts when you’re inundated by negative ones.
So, he suggested I give myself to a positive world. Sound more airy than several mushroom-seated fairies? There’s an expression in the 12 Step Fellowships: “Fake it till you make it.”
He had a better one: “Faith it till you make it.”
That leap of faith that things will work out may or may not put you in Contact with a Grand Intelligence in Charge of The Universe©.
(This is obviously religious belief dependant.)
But it was like I was being reprogrammed by a benign computer technician.
Black mood lifted to sun-spun silk. Suddenly, I had more energy, I was more productive, and I was enthusiastic about opportunities.
I owe him a great debt for his role on my road of recovery.
He’s left the halfway this week. Our time as roommates is at an end.
Will we stay in contact, meet up with each other, or fade away as our lives move along different water currents? Who knows. But what I do know is, he was there when I needed him the most.
Just as my dark hunger for destructive drugs attracted a drug dealer into my life, my need for hope brought Samuel into my recovery.
It makes a world of difference who you have around you. It could mean dank despair or enthusiastic joy.
As Samuel said:
“Perception is Reality.”
So, mould your reality with the right people.
They can bring with them hope.
& true friendship in recovery.
*Not their real names.
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Tales of Active Addiction: Madness of the Ninja Poet
J.D recounts an episode of his active addiction, one that led to him getting the help he needed.
Poetry recitals don’t get more bizarre than this. I was standing in my entrance hall with just jeans on, brandishing a samurai sword while spitting angry stanzas at the front door. I was swinging the sword in curved arcs around me as I recited the lines to those outside trying to break in, “The violin strings have been unplucked; their stirring souls have gone mad and run amuck!” followed by the rest of it, the theme being:
An orchestra falling apart.
Just as my life had done. I was grieving the death of Walter, my cat, who, it felt like, was my child – he had a long dormant virus from the cattery I got him from. I had been in a hostile work environment after getting into a corporate knife fight with someone with more taste for ruthlessness than Hannibal Lector. And my strict diet of drugs and alcohol fuelled an addiction gone ravenously out of control.
A cocktail for craziness, and I didn’t so much go over the edge as rocket boosted off the darn thing.
Naturally, my family were concerned when I declared a holy war on the world, so they tried to get me committed to a psych ward. Being as responsible as a typical addict, I found it hard to commit to a new relationship, especially one with loonies, shrinks and overly manly orderlies.
So, one afternoon, as I lay trying to get some rest, there was a loud knock on the door, and a polite request, as polite as a border collie gone rabid, to open the heck up. When I refused to comply, they broke the lock. Suddenly, with the strength of ten Spartans, I bounded through the apartment and flipped over the dining room table, crashing it against the door – just as they attempted to open it, and push through.
I shouldered back, and with the table wedged there, they could barely open a centimetre before Le Resistance forced them to give up.
My white cat, Balton, my teenage kitten, who I adopted to help heal the hurt of Walter’s loss, scrambled whilst the melee, leaping out the one-story window. I rushed to it, in time to see him scuttle out the gate in the garden below.
An agonised scream issued forth from me, and I ran to the study to grab the samurai sword, and stood spewing words, as my father looked through the key hole in horror.
Poetry I shouted, like a war cry. Funnily enough, I was given the nickname ‘ninja poet’ when I was in high school, but I doubt anyone envisioned I’d get an addiction problem, and it would result in this.
The reason I’m mentioning this incident is because I was reminiscing this week. I was going through some old photographs and found one of a teddy bear. He was wearing a small, red boxing glove, while seated on a window sill, looking out of the brown, wooden shed through a window, to the blue and green world outside.
I took that picture with my iPad at the clinic for the sanity-challenged. But the psych ward wasn’t enough. It helped repair my mind. I later went to Houghton House, to repair my soul.
(As a side note: I found Houghton’s counselling team very knowledgeable about mental illnesses like bipolar disorder. They also have relationships with various clinics, who will recommend them as the best treatment centre for addiction. My doctor, especially, was enthusiastic when I told her I wanted to go there.)
We all have in our life stories multiple strands of chaos woven together by a loom of lunacy.
You might wonder, how did they get me? This guy, modelling last summer’s jeans in the throes of active addiction, was kind of dangerous.
I wish I was dangerous. It has a certain risqué sexiness to it. But Balton helped save me.
For years, I practiced with that darn thing. Good cardiovascular workout, really, swinging cold steel like a samurai. (This was a replica sword, by the way, the kind they use for movies – it couldn’t even slice bread.) Put on some action music from an intense movie trailer, and you really get the blood pumping. My cat would watch bemused. Sometimes, I felt judged.
Now, hours after the initial attempt to breach the door failed, the emergency team and my family considered calling the police to get involved. I think this would have ended my story in a gripping newspaper headline. Perhaps deadline is more like it.
It had grown dark, the Sun casting her last rays through my window. I still had the sword in my hand, like a child holding his teddy during a lightning storm. All I wanted to do was look for my cat, but I was terrified I’d be carted off the moment I stepped through the door.
Then I heard desperate meowing outside my bedroom window. I ran to it and looked down. There was this little blue-eyed creature who wanted back into his home. I couldn’t deal anymore.
So I picked up the phone. Like a terrorist negotiating the release of hostages, I got them to agree to pick up my cat from the garden below, in exchange for me.
Then I surrendered. I dropped my sword on the floor, grabbed a cat carrier bag, and walked through the barricade, before opening the door and stepping outside. Carrying no suitcase, nothing, just the cat carrier bag, I begged them to find him.
Meanwhile, off I went to the psych ward in a pretty ambulance, lights flashing and all.
My parents found Balton, and took him to stay at a relative, with cats of her own, who he became best friends with.
Pets tend to be ill-treated in active addiction, and end up with neurotic behaviours. I’m proud to say my cat had a tranquil personality, and a friendly one, where he would introduce himself to strangers without being skittish.
I took care of him, because sometimes even drugs won’t destroy who you truly are. For those reading this, those still stuck in the throes of active addiction, you’re a good person, maybe you’ve done bad things in addiction, but maybe your goodness shone through despite everything. Hold onto that, and get help, for your loved ones’ sake.
He had a lovely, trusting way about him. Had. Because, and I will never forgive myself, one of this relative’s cats had the feline leukaemia virus. Contractible as easily as by the nose-bumping cats do when they greet each other. It is always fatal. A gentle cat who fought a battle against his illness as long as he could, for another year. Then, the day eventually came when I walked, with a heavy heart, into the veterinary hospital carrying him in his carrier bag.
His illness now caused him pain, and we decided prolonging his life any longer was selfish. I didn’t want to let go, but it was time to. I was there with him the whole way through. When the vet said it was time to say goodbye, I kissed his little white, furry, forehead. I used to pick him up when I got home from work, and did it all the time. This was the final time.
He meowed, so confused, at the tube inserted into his slender leg, his baby blue eyes looking to mine for answers. Then the vet asked if I was ready. I wasn’t, but this was now about him.
She plunged the lethal dose of anaesthetics into him, and barely a second later, he turned rigid, tongue out his mouth, and fell over. He had gone from my loving, soft, little creature, who would nip me on the nose in the mornings while I was half-sleeping, as he kneaded the pillow, to just a thing.
“Do you want to touch him? Some people find it comforting,” the vet said.
“There’s not point now,” I replied. “He’s gone…”
He’s gone.
Samurai were said to be the fiercest of warriors, who showed no signs of human ‘weakness’.
They didn’t cry. They certainly didn’t bawl like a summer thunderstorm had erupted in their tear-ducts.
But I’m no samurai. Thanks to my time at Houghton House, I don’t need to be. I don’t have to constantly fight against the world anymore. I was free.
My little white cat gave me the greatest gift one can have bestowed.
The only way I could win the war against active addiction was to wave the white flag of surrender.
For me, I no longer need to carry arms because that war is over.
I hope yours is too.
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Going Into The Matrix of Addiction
“Denial is a big part of drug matrix of addiction. And I certainly deluded myself a lot during active addiction. What I believed of myself. And what I believed of others, which included being deeply distrustful.”
by J.D
In The Matrix, young hacker Neo is in search of the truth about the world he lives in. Finally, after he makes contact with the mysterious Morpheus, he’s offered a choice: the red pill, which will show him what Reality really is, or the blue pill, which will allow him to live the comforting lie he always has.
I think addicts would have taken both pills. We being all about excess.
Now living in Recovery, thanks to the help of Houghton House, I need to control my desires for excess. Too much sex leads to carpal tunnel syndrome. Too much gym leads to too much real sex, which leads to too many crabs. Too much cake in the morning leads to insulin injections. Too much broccoli leads to too many hippy-flavoured farts.
Too much time on my computer leads me to feeling like I’m living in a virtual world, same as Neo. But that’s okay. Being an addict, I’m a natural blue piller, and I prefer that “reality’.
But that was taken away from me recently. I discovered I had a particularly nasty bit of malicious code (malware) on my laptop. Trying to get rid of it nearly drove me over the edge of sanity.
This actually happens, for one reason or another, fairly often. Imagine, if you will, a ninja. Dressed from head to toe in black, with only cruel eyes showing, and an ability to hide completely in the shadows. Able to bypass the guards at J.D Castle, while going about the business of espionage and the possible assassination of your financial affairs through stealing credit card details.
That’s a rootkit. Called “root” because they gain access to your root directory, they can make changes on your computer as if they were you. They also, like that popular (but dangerous) kid from high school, will organise a party at your house while your parents are away – the kind of party that makes you think, “Maaaybe this wasn’t a good idea.”
Then they invite the most unsavoury bunch of delinquents they can think of. For instance, viruses, those replicants who infect your machine much the same way as floating bits of DNA would infect your body and give you a cold. Or, if you’re a guy, man-flu.
Agent Smith was very much a virus in this respect. Hugo Weaving, the actor who played him, is Australian. And as anyone who follows the Hollywood scene would know, the Australians have been multiplying like viruses there for eons.
Viruses on your computer are just part of the line-up. Think also keystroke loggers, trojan horses, adware, spyware, elopewithyourdaughterware.
My machine would constantly go on the fritz. Applications I’d load up would hang. Haaaaang for a very long time. Or the screen would flash, as if to say: “I’m about to explode in your face!”, and then go back to normal: “Juuust kidding!”
This is incredibly stressful as my computer is how I make my living. I can’t go back to typewriters. What would I do without spellcheck? Ut wouldm’t look prretty.
Back to the rootkit metaphor, finding the f#$kers is really difficult. Deleting them more so. And they hide the existence of all the other malware so it’s like your parents are now back from holiday. They see their prize poodle floating away on a dagga cloud, but they don’t see the circle of reprobates puffing on the porch. They can’t understand why the pool is the colour of beer with a floating crate in the middle (and it isn’t that colour just because of the beer). Your parents certainly don’t see the cause of the broken bed in the guest room. They just know they never, ever want to take a blue light in there.
I spent a lot of time and energy trying to get rid of this thing, which I was barely able to detect. The logs your Windows system keeps will have their entries deleted by the rootkit to hide its nefarious activities. But Karspersky, my anti-virus programme, does keep its own logs, and they appear as incorruptible as an isolated government official on Mars. Through them, I saw dodgy entries of executable files being downloaded and run, files with names like imperfectlylegithehheh.exe.
I took it to a company I for the sake of decency won’t name here, but let’s call them Incredibly Incompetent. (Wait for my post on Hello Peter for more.) A gent there was asked to do a clean reinstall of the operating system. That’s when a copy of Windows is booted up through an external DVD drive, and the entire hard drive is formatted before placing a completely fresh installation of Windows on it.
Clean reinstall. I think that’s a lot like what Houghton House did for me. My own operating software was faulty thanks to the rewiring that happens through drug abuse and addiction. They performed the reboot I needed, to take me out of The Matrix-like fabrication I had spun myself into.
Denial is a big part of drug addiction. And I certainly deluded myself a lot during active addiction. What I believed of myself. And what I believed of others, which involved a deep distrust of them.
If anything, I’ve become a bit too trusting of people now as I walk the journey of recovery. This chap didn’t do a clean reinstall. He merely hit a button I could have pressed, and reset my system. Heck, I could have done the clean reinstall anyway, I just didn’t have access to a clean computer to download the Windows install files needed.
Enough of this technical talk. I found out later he lied, because the rootkit came back and when I revisited him, he let slip. Rootkits have this ability to hide in another section of the computer – and a system reset isn’t going to kill them. So they can then reinfect you. But, they “blue pill” you into thinking everything is fine. For awhile. Eventually, just as Neo sensed something was wrong with his world, I sensed something was wrong with mine.
Finally, I found my Morpheus. He wasn’t as suave as Lawrence Fishburne, but he wielded the screwdriver that opened my laptop’s casing like a katana, and after removing the hard drive, he cleansed it in a bullet-time salvo strike that decimated all enemy code into ashes. Of course, there could still be a rootkit lurking in the motherboard’s firmware. It could be blue pilling me into thinking I’m safe. I don’t trust oddities in my laptop’s behaviour anymore. I am more suspicious of sudden quirks than a counsellor at Houghton sniffing naughty behaviour (oh yeah, you’re not allowed to insert your “USB” into anyone’s port at any treatment centre – one of the reasons is, it could ruin your chances of keeping clean, more on this in a different blog post).
But at least I don’t live in the manufactured (by chemicals) world of active addiction. Like Neo, I’ve been liberated from my personally made Matrix.
Because at Houghton House, they teach you the truth about your matrix of addiction.
And the truth shall set you free.
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My Shield Against the Demons of Active Addiction.
A mass of demons, far as one can see. Glimmering malice in their eyes as they rush forward, relentlessly charging.
But before them, stands a single man.
Muscular, blue, spandex costume, with an iconic five-pointed star on his barrelled chest, Captain America swings his arm, and in a blinding speed, his large round shield, made of the near-indestructible vibranium alloy, shoots at an angle and ricochets off dozens of these demons’ heads – causing them to explode in fire and brimstone – before spinning back to his outstretched hand.
Yet, the demons still come, and yet he still unwaveringly faces them.
This is my most recent dream of the most noble of the Avengers. Why is he so recurring? Maybe because I always get a sense of feeling safe in these dreams, protected by a symbol of selfless struggle in defence of the defenceless.
I guess I fear falling to my own demons. I struggle with them every day. And not just with Addiction, but my bipolar disorder – which is caused by how my malfunctioning frontal cortex processes emotions.
And I do get so, so emotional…
There was an advert I saw off YouTube. An award-winning ad.
The music that plays throughout is soulful and a little sad. An old man lives in an apartment with his dog. The ad starts off with the veracious canine leaping onto this older gentleman’s bed and licking his face with great affection. Now awake, the old man enjoys a cup of tea while petting his best friend. And then, goes out into the city, with his sweet-natured animal companion always by his side.
The old man walks about, stopping off at places such as a bakery or a cafe, and his best friend sits waiting patiently outside.
The ad cuts to the old man in his apartment, watching TV on a sofa, his dog beside him. Suddenly, he holds his head in pain. Next, our ears hear the whine of an ambulance’s siren, as the old man sees, through its backdoor window, his loyal companion chasing desperately after him.
The old man is wheeled into a hospital on the ambulance’s stretcher, with medical staff attending to him. One of the medics closes the hospital’s doors just as the dog tries to come through.
The sad, but soulful, music continues to play. There is a quick flit of scenes, all with the dog waiting close by the hospital entrance, to show time passing. Waiting patiently for the human he loves. Day. Night. Sunshine. Rain.
The dog rests his head on the ground, and we can feel his weariness, but undying loyalty.
And then, finally, the hospital glass doors are opened, and a woman is wheeled out by her family. The dog gets up, no longer mournful, and runs to her, putting his paw on her lap. She strokes his face as she smiles.
The screen fades to black and we see:
Become an organ donor.
I watched it while around people I work with. I started choking and rushed to the bathroom, where, once out of sight, huge blobs of tears streamed down my face.
I tried my best not to think of that ad for the rest of the day. When I came back to my desk, my work partner looked at me knowingly, and then said – as his eyes darted back to his computer monitor – “Quite an ad.”
I just nodded, suddenly struggling to breathe.
Most people were moved by that ad. But I nearly dried into husk from the water lost through my tear-ducts. That’s my experience of living with an intense mood disorder, which I once used strong spirits to inure myself from. Alcohol did the trick. Till it eroded away my life, and I drowned in demons I couldn’t deal with in a functional way.
Now I’ve learnt how to live with bipolar. Even though every emotion is overwhelming. Anger threatens to boil into an all-consuming rage. Love throws me headfirst into an enveloping ecstasy of madness. Anxiety reverberates the world around me – I can’t breathe, I can’t do anything, but silently scream desperately to escape. And sadness spins into a storm of misery, quenching the sun from the sky.
And the worst. Rejection, from anyone, especially friends or romantic partners, is like being cast out of Eden, forever. Feeling like your soul was laid bare and found severely wanting.
Using substances became such a demonic way to control or suppress my emotions. Now I cope with them through writing, by painting, and photography. I cope with them by following the suggestions of Houghton House’s staff. And of course, through implementing, in my own way, the tenants of recovery.
When I was in my darkest place, in the depths of active addiction, when the horde was overcoming me, Houghton House rescued my soul. And now, because I continue to see my councillor every week, she stands by me, making sure I always hold a shield made of indestructible hope, ready to be hurled spinning against the darkness.
I don’t know if I’ll ever defeat my demons. But I’ll be damned if I ever give up the fight.
Living a life of recovery, that is my shield. It helps me become something I never thought I could be: to myself, a hero.
For standing against our demons no matter what…
We are all heroes.
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An Addict’s Journey in their Recovery from Addiction
Welcome to Houghton House’s new blog, which features an addict’s journey in their recovery from addiction, as written by recovering addict J.D.
Every week, he’ll regal personal experiences and insights as he makes his way through a life of sobriety.
Winter Has Gone
God knows what Season 7’s epic finale will bring (I haven’t seen it yet, so no spoilers). But I’m sure Game of Thrones will never be the same. Like in all the other seasons.
Remember when Ned Stark was like, “WTF? But I’m the main character!” as he kneeled before the chopping block, about to get a short, back, and sides? The nature of the show’s twisty-turny narrative structure revealed itself then. And, of course, GoT has since built up quite the army of devoted fans, moi included, who just have to imbibe the next episode, as it happens.
Game of Thrones is basically TV crack. If you smoke that sherbet, you’re going to have more.
Reminds me of active addiction, obviously, where I had to play head-games with myself just not to take another hit of white gold. “Save it for later.” “Make it last.” “Don’t sell your child into slavery quite yet.” These are the kind of conversations I used to have with myself.
Thanks to Houghton House, now the only white thing I chase is Jon Snow. Totes hot.
Fortunately, my nasal passageways aren’t under assault by white walkers any more, since my time in Houghton House taught me a few important things:
Rule 1. Don’t use.
Rule 2. Don’t f’ing use, ever!
Rule 2. is especially helpful to me, as I’m one of those addicts who needs to be swatted around the cranium a few times for the message to sunk in. It’s now been close to a year since I walked out Houghton’s gate a free man. And by free, I mean, don’t count decadent desserts, video games, or Tinder. Nor, obviously, binge watching my favourite TV shows.
Because I know I can’t control my addiction. It’s like the KGB. In Mother Russia, Addiction control you. And in everywhere else. Even Westeros, and this isn’t a spoiler I promise, Tyrion WILL eventually die of a sexually transmitted disease. Or liver failure. Let that be a lesson to you. Oh, he’s having fun now, but just wait until he’s on his deathbed, moaning, ‘My little Tyrion is burning hotter than wildfire!’
Which reminds me. If you have a sex addiction. And it’s getting out of hand (see what I did there?) maybe it’s time. You called. The H-Team.
They do help with process addictions, and if you don’t know what process addictions are, this is a quick primer: you visit so many porn sites, even your laptop has an STD; you game till your eyes bleed; Montecasino now owns your house; or / and you eat enough to create your own gravity well, then… you probably have a process addiction.
Different from chemical addiction in that it’s not external chemicals (except maaaybe with food) that are altering your brain chemistry, but a complex biochemical reaction in your brain ‘rewarding’ you for the activity you just did. And you want mooore…
Simple example: you’re playing Candy Crush. Every time the screen flashes with “SUPER SUGAR HIGH!” in pretty letters (because a random placement of sweets allowed you to clear a bunch of boilers), dopamine gets released in your brain. You want more. Just one more level. Meanwhile, your kid is still waiting to be picked up at school. And it’s midnight. On Saturday night.
But whatevs. They will never take Game of Thrones from me. I will binge if I want to. How would that go down in rehab?
“I’m in for crack.”
“Oh,” I’d reply. “I’m here for mainlining Lannisters.”
I actually started getting into it while I was in Houghton House’s secondary facility The Gap. If you know the show, you know the Starks love their little Wintery motto. Finally, after dicking around for six seasons since its promised arrival, Winter came to the show.
Winter in Westeros lasts years. Funnily enough, the same applied to me. 10 long years of Winter. And it snowed. Eventually, I was so frozen by my addiction, I started contemplating joining the white walkers’ army of the dead. I was so desperate for an end to my misery. I felt like the world was slipping away from beneath my feet and I was left to tumble weightlessly through the void.
Many addicts get to that point. Where it feels like there’s actually no point anymore. Why carry on? Still, a single, lone voice called out from somewhere, in the depths of despair, a voice I finally listened to.
“Ask for help.”
For help brings hope, and hope Springs eternal.
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