When An Addict Says "No More"
When An Addict Says "No More"
Best believe they are dead serious.
Some of us had to crawl on our hands and knees for years just to say those blessed words out loud. You arrive at them carried mysteriously by a heart that won’t give up though it’s been strangled by fear and slashed again and again by sheer exhaustion. Or at least, that was me. I almost couldn’t believe I was finally saying “enough is enough.” And meaning it.
What you begin to see when you get sober and clean is that you must take up the task you couldn’t handle before. First you close the door on your precious substance of choice, the one you swore was your friend and lover and comfort and savior and confidence and escape - then you begin to see the other doors you must go around closing in your life. Doors to all the energies screaming of lack, of ignorance, and of self-sabotage.
You begin to see that it is time to shut off access to you more broadly. All the circumstances, relationships, activities, jobs, titles, and people you said “yes” to when what you really meant was “hell fucking no.” And the difference isn’t those other things, they have been what they have been all along. On their own agendas and trajectories, born of their own intentions and mythologies. The difference now is you. Your awareness of how you operate when you are not slogged down by the distortion of addiction. You begin to see that you must let go of it even as it refuses, over and over and over, to not let go of you.
We don’t want to see our addiction. In some ways, that’s what defines it as an addiction. There’s an obsession coupled with a blindness when you are using. But maybe what we have been even more afraid of is what it would mean if we put a stop to it. Who we would be if we stopped lying to ourselves. How our lives would look if we allowed to unravel all that needs to unravel to finally get to the truth.