Trades

What’s an acceptable level of addiction?

 I guess it’s pretty subjective. What are you willing to take in order to solve the problem you’re faced with? Full blown addiction is when the perceived cure becomes the new disease and you become subject to the conditions demanded by what was once your medicine. The line is nearly imperceptible in my experience; it’s impossible to know when you’ve crossed it. If you’re looking, if you’re paying attention, something will feel unnatural and you’ll be able to see the line if you look back, and you’ll see where you surrendered something important in order to feel.....more, or less.

Addiction is surrender. Adictio, in Latin; a giving over, surrender, to something that is inevitably unacceptable. But who sets the bar for you as to whether something is acceptable or not? Ultimately, and ideally it’s you, for you and by you; you are setting the bar for yourself, but that’s tough. Freedom of choice is a heavy burden, and we are all subject to the constraints and allowances of our conditioning, our culture, to the extent that we can easily make choices and act in a way that is not in our best interests without apparent fault, blame, or consequences.

Take for example workaholism, an addiction to work. It’s a funny word, because it’s obviously built from the compilation of work and alcohol and -ismed into a model of an unhealthy doctrine. But work is good, work is really important. Everybody needs to work. Work builds a person from the ground up by forcing them to develop skills and competence. I’m not positive, but I think that there are no bad jobs, just jobs done badly. Anyway, where’s the line between working hard and being a workoholic? It got crossed somewhere, that intangible line. Somewhere a few steps back it became not about work at all, and now it’s not acceptable, somehow, to someone; maybe it’s your family, maybe it’s your body. Maybe you’re just avoiding something that you should be addressing.

Like me.

Work was never my poison, not really. I love work. I love being competent and productive and learning how to do things well. The results of my work are vast and far reaching, in a way. I’ve personally built, I don’t know, at least 15 houses, and that’s a big deal. I’m really happy about that; people really like houses. I’ve done lots of other stuff too, for love or money, but I crossed a line somewhere, and I wasn’t able to accept that fact until I became, after ten very painful years, completely incapable of work due to, at long last, unacceptable physical suffering.

It happens all the time. In the trades you see a lot of beat up individuals; it’s hard on a body, these noble pursuits that make everything possible, the trades that see us paid in money, in satisfaction and self worth, in approval. I worked too hard sometimes. I think I also have an injury from my dirt-biking days that was agitated by all the hard labour, and this put me in a lot of pain towards the end of my career which made me kind of grumpy, which initiated a fast rewind that went like this. Loss of approval, loss of self worth, loss of satisfaction, loss of money, loss of trade, loss of noble pursuit. Just a beat up individual who believed that work was the issue, but it wasn’t.

Approval was my poison. I needed it so badly that it cost me almost everything, even my life. Approval isn’t a bad thing, we all need it, it’s really important, but it’s unhealthy to make unreasonable sacrifices for it. That’s unacceptable in the long run.

I think I crossed that line a very long time ago. It doesn’t matter when, and it no longer matters why. I’m an adult, and capable of making decisions and taking action on my behalf. What matters is that I willingly sacrificed my agency in order to please others or bury pain instead of addressing it. That’s addiction. That’s why I started smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. I did it because it seemed acceptable. I’m not stupid, I’ve never been stupid, but it felt better, somehow, for a time, to be a slave.

I don’t want to be a slave, though, but I am smoking again, and I can’t be a smoker and call myself free. I don’t like smoking. I don’t like being addicted to anything, that’s why I quit all those times before. It’s my last vice. It’s not about what you think; I’m not a slave to your approval anymore, and even if I was, cigarettes are hardly the way achieve that. It’s just really important that I have my own, and in this case, I don’t. It’s impossible to acquire a healthy sense of self worth when you’re disgusted with your behavior. Smoking makes me feel gross when I don’t have to feel gross. I’m choosing to feel gross, and not only that, I feel ashamed about it, and that makes me want to be dishonest, and I can’t do that. Dishonesty and fear are the maelstrom of addiction, if you don’t course correct at the lip and fight like hell, you’ll get dragged in, and it’s really hard to get back out again. It’s really fucking hard.

Something about healthy approval is that it comes from good resources, and is contingent upon upon value. It’s an exchange. Unlike compassion, which is mandatory for health, approval can be abused, but.......I need it.

Is an acceptable level of addiction actually addiction? I suppose it depends on the context. I went to rehab many years ago. I loved it there. I loved it because it was a place where I could safely sacrifice fear and shame in order to be heard and understood. It was a place where I could learn how to be honest, and truly understand compassion. I think everyone should go; I’d go again. It was my first holiday.

Well.....I don’t find things as scary as I used to, I’m not given to the extremes that I once was except possibly in regards to being a bit dramatic, but I’m willing to pit one addiction against another here. I’m quitting smoking. It sucks and I hate it to the degree that I can’t continue healing while I’m doing it, never mind the disastrous health implications. I don’t think anyone really approves of smoking, but it’s not even about smoking, either, it’s about having a good life. I want to be honest and clean, and not rotting.

You’re good people, like me. I want to see you well almost as I want that for myself, so I’ll take your approval as given already, and I thank you for it.

This post sees the light of day on Wednesday, November 22, 2023. That’s my quit date, if not before. That’ll be today for some of you.

Anyway, I might be a little grumpy and stressed.

Tell me to suck it up, or something.

Thanks for reading.