On distractions

What would feel healthy vs what would feel good :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCtober 17th 2022

Sometimes I have felt like my life has been one endless string of distraction.

If you read my book, the premise of my issues are clear. I let you see them by page 20. I am accepted sometimes, I am not accepted other times. It is hella confusing. I scan people for their availability of my authenticity. I construct a mask to survive. By the second chapter, I assume that I don’t deserve love because I am somehow faulty - not like the others, and I can tell this by the way I am treated. I am too skittish and anxious and I get punished for it. So this sets up my life like this: I take crumbs, because that’s all people like me get.

The unloveable wound, yes yes.

How does one deal with this? Well for me, as the child of a long linage of beautiful and mad addicts, it was distractions. I don’t feel good enough? Let me just distract myself from THAT feeling.

My first distraction was reading. This was probably a healthier distraction. I would get lost in novels and books and live inside fantasy worlds when I thought myself to be too unlovable and different in my real one. As a child, this was thankfully a nice resource. Maybe I’d befriend animals too and go outside and build homes for caterpillars.

Then my distraction of choice became vodka. This is when things started getting dicey. I put myself at risk - for disease, for accidents, for assault. I loved vodka. I drank it well too. I could down a few shots and I would keep track of them by drawing small lines on my forearm, eventually figuring out a perfect way to get so sloshed that I simultaneously wouldn’t feel my body but could still remember most of the night. I only blacked out a few times and I can only remember 2 times I actually threw up during years of this distraction. I drank everywhere - school, home, on the bus, at all hours. I loved being at least a little buzzed at all times - I was for all intents and purposes, a teenage alcoholic. I was what my friend called, A Happy Drunk too. I never caused issues when drunk. I just stopped feeling unlovable. In my bubble, that possibility was muted. Except that one time I spilled out to Arnold, my first boyfriend, that I had seen his text messages with Jessica. And I knew about the hot tub. The next day, I apologized via BBM using Buckcherry lyrics. He did not notice they were Buckcherry lyrics. Score for me. We continued to date, despite Jessica. And I mean, I had my own Jessica too? Right? Arnold, his Jessica, my Jessica, they were distractions too.

Until Arnold, one year my senior, left my high school for another bigger one and told me he had to break up with me because we were going to be long distance. What? I replied. We literally live 10 minutes apart.

I know babe, he said, but we won’t see each other all day anymore. We cried as if we knew what we were losing, and we hugged and I am pretty sure we had sex and then we got dressed and cried again at the foot of the staircase at my dad’s house when no one else was home and then he left. I will always remember crying at the foot of those stairs for something I was losing that I didn’t even understand I needed or wanted - a break from feeling like I was unlovable.

Years later, he called me and told me I was the love of his life. I said, I think you’re just lonely right now. He assured me he wasn’t. We did not get back together. Sometimes he still does this. And I still say, no you’re just lonely right now.

But when he left, there were more distractions. There was my Jessica and our impossible love, and there was also Karly and Thomas, and Tristan and Benjamin and each time, people would leave or it wouldn’t work out, there was always Ativan too - that gave me that thing I cried for at the end of that staircase - a break from feeling so broken. A better version of me.

I mended broken heart with eventually another broken heart. A rejection with a make out session. An empty pill bottle with a screen obsession.

I have an addictive personality. This could be because of my autism - it is more likely that people who have the skill of hyper fixation will be addicts. Many autistic people cope with life throwing them into sympathetic dominance constantly by being an addict. Since I come from a family of addicts, I know what it is like to not be able to withstand your own pain. I know what it feels like to impact, and I also know what it feels like to be impacted. I know that moment where you could choose something else, what would be healthy, but you choose what would feel good instead.

I know how quickly it all happens. As if you have no real choice in the matter anyway. I know how good your intentions are to choose better, and I know the rush of anger toward yourself that takes over when you do the thing you promised, literally swore, to yourself you would never do again, but how it’s already in motion and you’re doing it now. And it’s too late to stop it because it’s happening.

Feeling good feels so good. Fuck the risks right?

I just want to feel good again, I get it. And then once I notice that the high didn’t last and that no one saved me from my own pain, I feel so ashamed and mad at myself. When will I ever learn? Now I’ve got more stress because I engaged with my addictions.

In A.A, they say when you are in pain do not seek pleasure. Over the years, I am 5 years 5 months sober now, I have learnt to try to live by this. I don’t always succeed. I very openly displace my addictions. So yeah, I haven’t taken a benzo in almost 5 years and a half, but I have engaged with other distractions for sure - social media, fantasizing, big big high and low lows romantic relationships to feel distracted from feeling unloveable. It’s not that these things I distract with- they always make me feel lovable; often they don’t. It’s that I don’t have to feel my own feelings when I am engaging with them; there’s more to focus on than myself, than my pain.

Do not seek pleasure they say.

It is so counter intuitive to what you want to do right?

And it is also in opposition to a lot of the self-help or even pleasure activism world - where we are very much encouraged to seek out pleasure. And listen, I am all for glimmers. Create safety and consistency and stability for yourself - but as an addict, I have to be very careful how I am seeking pleasure.

My mom often says, “What would make you feel good?” and recently, I told her to please stop asking me that question because for me what makes me feel good is typically unhealthy.

Instead I asked for that question to be altered to me, “What would make me feel healthy?”

I try so hard to pick what will make me feel healthy. I usually succeed. But then those moments come by where I just want to feel good and now we visit the times in which I do not succeed. When I don’t pick what feels healthy and I pick what feels good, something has triggered me and I just want to forget that I am unlovable.

I find that if you are an addict, it is helpful to know your pain body VERY well. It helps to name exactly what you are trying to escape from feeling, what you want to quit, what you want relief from, what you’re seeking a break from weighing you down.

You don’t have to write it on a public newsletter where everyone you have ever known could see it. But you can if you want.

It takes away the shame of it.

I don’t like feeling like I am unlovable, and I do a lot of things, and have done a lot of things, to distract myself from the fact that this might be true.

And the only way out of distracting yourself is naming what you don’t want to see and staying. And I mean, really staying. No matter what, no matter how - you stay. And coming back each time you leave; a lot or a bit. Staying so much, and so long, that you change the story. That there is at least one person who finds you loveable and treats you as such - you. We count as people too.

And…

Once you name it, the thing you’re trying to escape by distracting, you’ve made it to the end of the maze. You got out.