First post

Goals: 

• Tell my story
• Express why I do this for other addicts to relate to
• Try to understand how this shit works
• Offer/get "Experience strength and hope"

 

I am in the throes of active addiction.

 

Like other high-functioning addicts, I have been able to hold down a job…But I am often using on the job. I have gone into such an enormous debt I can barely stand to look at my credit card statements. I am living a secret life, and it is not a connecting life in a bar or alleyway with other addicts, carousing. It is using psychic chat services on my phone and on my computer. 

I have been wanting to write this book for a long time to connect with other people who have this problem. I don’t think there are a lot of resources for us. Moreover, it is a poorly understood problem; I have faced it for years and I certainly don’t understand it. In some ways it might be just like any other addiction, so I could always read resources on other addictions and try to make it make sense. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that every second or minute that I am writing this is one that I am not “using”… using the psychic chat websites. 

It is also not unrelated to the idea of love addiction. Addicted to romantic fantasy and obsession. Spending the whole day just thinking of the love object and objectifying him in that way---hoping he loves you, and using that love to cope with all of the hard things that life throws at you.

Some songs make me feel this way. One came on while I was writing this just now. Some songs I associate with months and years of that same longing, that gets shuffled onto the next love object if I fall badly enough. The feeling made me pause. Whatever he was singing about in the song, “You Swan Go On,” that sense of connection and tenderness, I had a feeling of wanting that, wondering if I had it with Jared, realizing I didn’t, that things didn’t fully unfold for me to be in that closeness with him, then wondering about the singer, wondering about the moment he talked to me at the signature table, wondering if he was enchanted with me as I was with him, if he recognized something in me, or if it was all in my head. Years like that, with me hungry deep down for someone to be close to me in the way that I long for and enter extended reveries about.

This book is so self indulgent. But it is not really just for me. I need to write it for the other people who struggle with this.