what it means to be something on:
It seems that treacherous term “alcoholic” has taken a new front-seat to the people around me. I myself never understood it too much, that disregard for personal responsibility, and even more so, control to a substance or substances that take it away from you personally.
I do smoke pot, but on occasion, to lift some of that pain that I feel physically. I realize I never get as messed up as my friends namely because it removes some of the hard edges that I am assaulted with internally. The surgeries that I have had have left my insides ripped, cut and sewn back together haphazardly. As a result, there is a pain there that permeates, reverberates constantly. I do not feel normal as most people understand normal, mostly because I am not. It is a similar sensation to that “I don’t remember what it feels like to feel good” that we all know about as we sit or lie next to toilets, having puked or eliminated said virus from our body. I feel that strangeness daily, aware of new ticks, tocks, pulsing pain and the fibers that fly across my vision as my heart throws clots from my valve. I don’t remember what it feels not to feel, more precisely.
My friend’s alcoholic girlfriend apparently went on some rampage upstate, having gotten drunk with her mother, then disappearing to a bar whose bartender told her mother she was old enough to make her own decisions. Interesting how a person can be messed up on anti-depressants and alcohol and the bartender is somehow more competent to make decisions for this girl than her mother. My friend was left with the residue of conversations had about having seen her make out with some guy, and knowing that she took her mother’s boyfriend’s phone, only to have to answered by said seedy man who would not let her talk to anyone for many hours thereafter.
The point is that people lose it, and I have no idea what substance could ever be worth losing the main force of decision making, control. I myself have never been too in love with the idea of being so messed up that my personal choices and powers were veiled in some insane gassed out idea of intoxication. I have some people close to me who have problems, yes, but their kind of intoxication and messed-up-ness is a conscious choice made that has no negative effects on anyone in their company. Like B, who smokes so much that I have no idea how his body hasn’t fallen down ashen. He is with someone who tolerates this, and even in his super-fucked-up state of mind, has never committed any violence, emotional or physical or even implied to anyone in his vicinity.
Emotional terrorism. Uh huh. People like utilizing it as a tool for control and power when they oftentimes are lacking the confidence and assertiveness to do it on their own, sans alcohol.
