addiction and circles
I’ve been lighting a lot of cigarettes under umbrellas this week. Or ‘brollies’ as the most anal friend of mine insists I must call the smaller umbrellas that wrap up neatly into a case. I am sick. I slept twenty hours yesterday. I feel permanently hungover. I have thought so little in the past week outside of whatever I am needed to do at any given moment. It is a bizarre state to exist in for prolonged periods of time. I often attempt to fill as much of my time as possible for fear of boredom, loss of love, or lack of experience. But when I oversubscribe myself, as I often do, I burn out, waking up one day far too late and realising my vision is blurry, my mind is foggy, and my lungs are heavy and black. ‘Please enjoy it.’ My mum told me the other day before doing something for the first time. For she knows I’ll forget it. I did enjoy it, but alas I could not stop fucking thinking. Or not thinking. Honestly, I am lost as to what is thinking and what is not. In one of my more unbearable moments from the past week I shouted in the club ‘I have no grasp on time or reality right now, please do not ask me questions.’ I think I should get some slack given intoxication, sleep deprivation and sickness were my main drivers at this point (2am on a Wednesday morning) but it’s becoming so easy to lose the grasp on these things. Even now.
And so, as you forget that awful paragraph I have just put you through I’ll move on. I’m pretty down on ambition at the moment. Not for myself. What do I have if not my fucking dreams? But conceptually, I wouldn’t advise ambitions as a goal. Because goals are not really reachable, right? It won’t be the goal you cherish but the menial, dull days that got you to the goal. The days where you wake up twenty minutes late, do some writing, watch telly with your friends, laugh at a pretty decent joke.
Okay, back to the grim haze of my non-stop fortnight. Because my eyes can’t focus on anything and no one in this beautiful coffee shop knows that I’m going to be famous one day.
Okay, now addiction memoirs because how I feel right now is as close to high as you can get without illegal stimulants. And then I promise I’ll shut up. Okay, so addiction memoirs can start in various places. Rehab. Rock Bottom. Ropey poo. Mum’s arms. Mum’s arms all veiny and infected and holey and oh wait no they’re yours and mum’s arms have been underground for years. And then the memoir will likely end in a similar place, either with the addict (person) coming to a notably profound realisation, or a lack thereof. And in between these two imperceptibly close points of beginning and end they will go round in circles (just like this blog post). It sounds like I’m shitting on addiction memoirs. I’m not. They are my favourite books. I’m sure there’s another blog post in that, which you can’t wait for. Rightly or wrongly, there is no one I have more respect for than an addict who is no longer addicted. Because every day they are reliving the worst chapter of their memoir. Going round and round and round and round in their heads resisting the urge to unblock their dealer, skip lunch, invest in a new set of knives, go home with a stranger, open up a black and orange website, have a drink, another drink, just one more drink. Round and round and round and round and round and round and round, dizzier than a dyspraxic on the dance floor. How do we live like that? I dunno, but we do and I’m proud of you.
Onto tomorrow.
