6/2/2023 0 Comments The end of my addiction book![]() About mid-2009 the distinction between “using” and “killing myself” began to blur, and that blurring put things into stark relief. One realization was my inability to conceive of my behavior as anything other than suicide. Ultimately, two realizations pushed me towards “recovery”-a word about which I have some unease, given that it implies finality, and invokes a form of language that one might hear on a talk show I can’t shake the sense that I’m being ventriloquized. That book was also a let-down to me they appeared just like those old images that sometimes ran in the magazines that came with the weekend newspapers-”Magic Eye” pictures-which would have you struggle over what looked like a blotchy test pattern for hours in order eventually to see a teddy bear sitting among a quarrel of sparrows. Never feeling that I was able to get access to enough-and strong enough-acid, I remember coming across, in a New Age bookstore called Phoenix Rising, a book that advertised itself as containing “genuinely hallucinogenic images”-a promise, I thought, that I could quite literally get high just by staring at the pictures. I learned about this absolute un-substitutability very early on. I really wanted to believe in that, too I would have been overjoyed to have a surrogate addiction, and maybe the purchase of the books was a version of this, an addiction to self-help-book purchasing, but-for the addict, and I suspect also for many non-addicts-the experience of drugs and alcohol is so singular that it is not amenable to substitution, to any surrogates worthy of the name. It’s a cliché that people who stop using drugs often take up surrogate addictions. This pointed to a persistent sense of lostness, of not feeling, at base, that I knew how to live, like other people did, that I didn’t even know what do to when I got up in the morning-and then what to do after that. But it was hard to keep operating the opposite sides of my brain, which allowed for the beliefs that (a) the books-or a book-might have the answer, and (b) I wouldn’t open them precisely because they didn’t. I saw in books a kind of refuge that was not a drug or a drink: they offered vast pages of potential that retained that status-potential-as long as they weren’t opened. It was just that I found it hard to entrust someone with my life if I couldn’t trust them with an apostrophe.Īuthors like this didn’t seem to realize that making such claims meant that if the desperate reader got through their book without the seismic shift presaged in the introduction, it was equivalent to saying, “Oh well, in that case, your situation really is utterly hopeless.” I remember beginning to read a book with this kind of introductory framing, and my reaction was both to put the book down, never to open it again, and to order another title by the same author. Having said that, I don’t think it was merely a matter of judging myself superior to those authors-after all, I didn’t have the answer either. Many of the self-help books, eventually almost all of them, remained unread, in part because it was very easy for me to be put off a book by the most trivial conceptual or linguistic quirk: I was extraordinarily unforgiving when it came to what I saw as intellectual or rhetorical ineptitude, especially when combined with condescension an embarrassing degree of self-flattery on my part imposed very high standards on the authors I was reading. ![]() I was, evidently, temperamentally unlike Thomas Edison, who we’re told took every failed attempt (more than 1,500 of them) to find a filament for the light globe as a “success”-because every dead end represented knowledge of another thing that didn’t work. (Often the thought would be, “Well, if I could believe utter crap, this might actually work.”) I persisted with the self-help literature because I thought that eventually I’d come across a book which could effect the beloved “paradigm shift” I thought I needed.īut gradually, as the books piled up around me, I was struck by a certain self-understanding that seemed to follow ineluctably from their mere presence: I am terminally dysfunctional and there is absolutely no hope. ![]() I would embark on a new self-help book, only to be quickly put off by some claim I thought was wrong or unsubstantiated, or caused me to judge the author as somehow stupid or naïve or uninformed-or at least uninformed about me, given what I then took to be my incurable uniqueness. For a couple of years, my reading of philosophy and literature took a back seat to self-help. As with everything, I thought I could destroy addiction with books.
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