When I was younger I smoked, but I’m healthy again and for many years I have been able to confidently claim superiority to all addicts. Until I realised that I was just lying to myself, or I was simply unaware of my addiction (If I am not mistaken I think that is the avow of most addicts).
Recently I pointed out the poisons of someone else’s addiction in an attempt to guide them to a better place (Change them). Ignorantly standing on the pedestal of abstinence I said that addicts have no self control or awareness, you couldn’t be addicted if you did. As sure as what goes up comes down, and as my mother always said about pointing, in saying that I was shown how little self control I had of my own.
Addiction is anything you cannot choose not to do. (Those obsessive compulsive neuroses not included here). I thought I just loved chocolate, until I realised I had no control over it, I had to have it, I was addicted, however this awareness I had before three-fingers-pointing-back at me. How I gave up chocolate was the same way that I gave up smoking. I call it the For Now method. I would simply make a choice in the moment of craving not to, for now, knowing full well that I could equally and just as easily choose to, but for now was making the choice not to. I can smoke, I can eat buckets of sugar, but right now I will pass.
Simple as that. For now I will be in control and take the road leading me away from addiction. One for now at a time I became smoke and addiction free (coffee not included yet). For now was also taking back control, when I saw that I had no control, that was a problem for me, I like to be in control where I can be. Being controlled by an addiction wasn’t an option when I saw that all I had to do was claim back control, for now.
That was until I was challenged to stop thinking. Turns out I cannot stop my thoughts, and therefore I cannot even control my thoughts and am so far beyond addicted to my thoughts I have to painfully admit that I am hopelessly heedlessly shamefully addicted to thinking. (I think we all are). I also think, and I say this having never attended any such meetings, that admission is the first step. I can at least now see and admit that I am blindly inconsiderately stubbornly ruled by a jabbering of thoughts in my head that completely rule my life. I therefore have to admit that I have no self control or awareness.
I do not smoke, I do not take prescribed or non prescribed drugs, I do not take straws or plastic packets, but my menial jabbering mind keeps me in a perpetual imaginary state between yesterday and tomorrow that even my glimpses of present tense are so brief I might as well be hooked on crack and work in a mine.
….My heading offered a solution didn’t it? Come to think of it I have come clean, I admit it, (There). I do see it, I hear it, I want to stop it but I can’t. I was planning on finding a solution to offer, but this is easier, to come clean by admitting that my mind is loud and I have no control of it. It’s somebody else’s toddler in the temptation aisle. Only this toddler isn’t asking why it’s asking what about now, and now, and now…and now, now, now, now (There is no power in this prattle). If you think that I am over exaggerating and believe you can control your thoughts or that it is easy (then congrats you’re a guru) but I don’t mean shush it for a few seconds. Or distract it with a mantra or technique, which is like holding your breath in the bath. My mind is like my 15-year-old self, it thinks it knows everything. Seeing the addiction in search of the solution, at least I have come clean. Maybe I will attend one of those meetings to find the next eleven steps, I wonder if they can show me how to silence the twitter.
otherwise 