An Open Letter to the Disease of Addiction

Dear, Disease, 

I hate you.  I know that hate is a strong word, and that hate is an emotion to be avoided in most situations because the things we hate tend to then be bound to us all the more tightly, but hate is the only appropriate word for how I feel about you.You have, once again, stolen a bright and wonderful soul from family and friends who love her, and you seek to steal more. You are a detestable scourge upon humanity and if you were a person I swear I would kick the shit out of you where you stand.  

You're a liar.  You promise peace but only bring anguish. You try to entice us with illusions of camaraderie, pictures of friends laughing at bar stools and sunny afternoons driving four wheelers across the  mountains with golden retrievers by our side. Those Sunday afternoon Budweiser commercials look so "American", so much like a harmless, lazy summer day.  What you really bring us, if we're addicts, is isolation.  After awhile, we can barely stand to be with ourselves, let alone with anyone else.  Even the mirror is too much to bear. 

You're a thief. You steal our friends, our fathers, our mothers, our brothers and sisters, our looks, our youth, our jobs, and, when you're at your very worst, our lives. You whisper in our ear that we can quit after just one more drink, one more hit, one more pull, one more score.  We can't.  That last time might truly be the last time, and, even if we survive the night, you will be right back at our ear whispering again the next day. You're a seductive bitch.    

You never give us enough. Ever ever ever.  You lure us in with promises of how lovely we will feel, how the troubles of our day will simply melt into oblivion as we slowly melt into a state of drooling stupidity, but those problems are there with glaring honesty the next morning, accompanied by regret, self loathing, and possibly just a touch of confusion at how we allowed you to completely take the wheel in our lives yet again.  Because one of anything you entice us with is never enough to push us over that edge. Neither is two, or three, or four.  Enough is when we can't lift a bottle/glass/syringe/mirror/whatever again.  Enough is when we're flat out, or possibly flat lined.  And that's not enough either, because when and if we come to, we'll be reaching out for you again, hoping that the next time we seek solace in your wicked arms one will be enough to get us to our "happy place".  

I hate you. I will hate you forever.  I hate you for my Dad, my cousin, Lisa, Sky, Drew, and so many others who I will refrain from mentioning because some of them are working at keeping you out of their lives and might not want to be put on record.  You suck. I hope in the new year you will stay far the hell away from the people I care about.  Fuck you.    



     

Post Yule/Christmas/Hanukkah and Onward to New Year's Eve

I've heard this time of year called a "between time" and I think that's true. Right, now, I'm breathing a sigh of small relief that the holidays are behind us (though I and my family enjoyed them immensely) and feeling on the brink of expectation.  I enjoyed gift giving a lot this year, in trying to more outwardly express my love for the people around me. I think that I sometimes get caught up in the Irish way of being too subdued while at the same time feeling very emotional.  My own family has always teetered a bit between outward affection and a sense of being reserved, and I tend to forget that if we don't show folks what they mean to us they won't necessarily know.   This year, I plan to work on that more and see where it takes me.  

Our Yule tree is still standing proudly in the living room, happily twinkling brightly colored lights each night, but it's drinking up less water than before and I know that soon it will be time to let it go. That's kind of how winter is, isn't it? It's  a time of letting go of the things that no longer serve our best interests, of being more introspective, searching out what we'd like to birth when the spring rolls around again.  In a week or so, we'll being packing away the ornaments and taking down the trimmings, tucking them safely away for another year, even as we cast glances toward what might lie ahead in 2016.  If we make lists, maybe we'll jot down a few things we'd like to accomplish in the new year; I did this last year and found it helpful. I didn't call it a resolution list, but rather a list of goals. I find that putting pen to paper and then referencing the things I wrote from time to time can be helpful; it's easier to remember what I want my focus to be, which is important to a person like me whose thoughts tend to run in rabbit circles if I don't specifically direct them.  

Our back yard is in a between stage as well.  We had a load of dirt trucked in over the weekend, a gift from someone who no longer needed it and that we needed desperately to help add to our eroding back yard.  We live on a lake, and the water is trying to reclaim what she feels is hers. We've been planting small trees to help hold the soil, but we needed some good heavy dirt to place back there, and now we've regained quite a bit.  In the interest of doing what is good for the long term, our yard has been torn up by the backhoe which transported all of that fabulous earth. Our resident goose voiced his displeasure to me quite heartily on Saturday and has been camping out in the neighbor's yard ever since. I think that the commotion created by dismantling the back fence, the guys working with my husband in the yard trying  to clean out a year's worth of junk, and the truck being here plowing (literally) through our back yard threw his goose mind for a loop. Added to that is the extra effort it takes for his water equipped body to waddle over small dunes of soil; my thought is that he'll be much happier when the grass is growing back there again.  I concur.  I struggled to be okay with the mess the backhoe driver was making of our yard (seemingly with great relish!), telling myself that oftentimes a mess must be created in order for something good to happen. I think that might be true of our entrance into 2016 as well. We're going to need to shake life up a bit in order to create new avenues of opportunity.  

Happy 2016!!!