By ESTHER RAMOS
If I choose to drink a bottle of encouragement in the morning when I get up, it’s my own business. If my poison of choice is a line of blow, or crushed hydrocodone up my nose, or a main line hit of crank, whose affair is it but my own? Right? Right! So, by the process of elimination, if those activities, along with over-eating, smoking, porn, etc., are my own business alone, then I, alone, am in charge of my own addictions. Just using first person singular as my vantage point.
How often do we hear ‘I’m an addict and can NOT help myself!’ Sometimes tears are added for effect. Spare me the drama! Anyone who falls for this is doing just that. Falling backwards into it. I know for sure, because every addict is some version of me.
Yes. I am an addict. It’s a personality quirk, as are other obsessions and compulsions, that are in one’s DNA. It seems that I tend to over-do everything that I do at all. When I drank, it was every day and it was often to a blackout with no memory of half of the previous evening. I came to in many strange places with people I didn’t know and no clear idea of what we’d been doing. It’s a good thing AIDS hadn’t been invented yet.
I did not have a job, but didn’t seem to need one. At one point, most of my daytime hours were taken up going to diet pill doctors, and I learned how to be a local drug dealer to feed my own addictions and to pay my rent. This was back when doctors gave out diet pills that contained actual ether-based class A narcotics. Sever. I had a $350 a day habit before it became just too much of a job to make that kind of money daily. Daily. I had no idea that quitting a chemical dependence of that magnitude could actually kill a normal person. It’s a good thing I’m abnormal. I have remaining tracks on my wrist and up my arm from years of I.V. drug use.
During these years I also smoked. A lot. Got up to 2 and a half packs a day. Not hard to do when a person is up all day and night and day, speeding, chewing gum, walking, playing pool, drinking coffee and tea, and going to doctors, stopping only on Tuesday to eat, and to sleep a 24 hours to Wednesday at midnight I’d go back out. I had to do up before I could stand up and then I couldn’t stop for a week.
You see, one doesn’t develop an actual habit by being a weekend user.
I’m telling you all of that to tell you this: Any substance or any behavior that you NEED to stop or change, you WILL stop it or change it. You have to feel an internal need to revise yourself. When you do, no person, no event, no thing can ever persuade you to go back. Ever. Never. Under no circumstances. I know this because I am this.
The ever-expanding ‘rehab’ industry is such a con and a racket. If a person has no driving need to change, the person will not change. Period. If the person has food, clothing, shelter, love, comfort, transportation, etc., etc., provided, wherein would lie the need to change? It will never have an effect on the ‘addict’ if there is no feeling within of a need to change. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of dollars are thrown at this, nothing will change. The needs of parents, spouses, children, doctors, religious leaders, will have no bearing. Rehabs will come and programs will go and a comfortable person will not change.
No, one cannot alter ones DNA, but choice is still an absolute given.
