outlook

My life is suddenly full-to-overflowing with stuff. Do this, do that, dot i, cross t, eat, sleep, breathe. My last post was sort of a reflection on my second step, which I worked through with my sponsor this past Saturday, and I think for me, for now, my definition of insanity is “choosing to suffer.” I don’t think I ever woke up in the morning and said “how many ways can I make myself suffer today,” but the result many, maybe most days was the same as if I had.

I guess for a lot of people the traditional recovery definition of insanity (“doing the same thing over and expecting different results”) makes sense, but for me it really doesn’t. For me, it flies in the face of “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again,” and “practice makes perfect,” and etc.

Also, I don’t believe that quote is from Einstein. It flies in the face of science, and reason. What if Copernicus stopped looking at the stars because hey, we see the same thing every night? Or if pharmaceutical companies only tested drugs on ten people before putting them on the market, because hey, those ten people didn’t get sick or die, it must be safe. There are always variables, and we can never do the same thing over again, because we are changed by our previous experience of doing it, and everything around us has changed as well.

I’m not saying I learned anything new, or gained any value from my experiences using or drinking, but I was changed by them. The progressive nature of the disease of addiction sort of speaks to that. I got progressively sicker, and my addiction got progressively worse. Each time I used was not the same as the time before, it was worse. I was worse.

If the results of my using had been the same every time I used, I never would have stopped. My first time using was euphoric and amazing, and there were no immediate external consequences. I’m not romanticizing it, that’s just the way it was for me. I realize the euphoria was false, in so much as it was chemically induced, but that doesn’t change my perception of it, then or now. That euphoria is as real to me as the paranoia I lived with for years trying to recreate that feeling. I don’t know when I crossed that imaginary line, but my last few years of active addiction were nothing like that first time. The book of Narcotics Anonymous talks about how we addicts seek to recreate the feeling of our first high… It is all just one big mess, really.

Ultimately, though, I do not believe I was doing the same thing over and over again. I was increasing my suffering each and every day. It was building in me like mercury in my veins. Like mercury I was injecting into my veins, hoping it would cure me, when I knew that it would kill me. That, for me, is insanity.

And today, I’m getting better. I’m still changing, like we all are, like we all do every day. Today, I want to be aware of the change, not to understand just the possible outcomes of my choices, but why I am making them. I want to grow into the world, not away from it. I look at the stars and just see possibility.