Addiction

So this week I again had trouble organizing my thoughts into a coherent stream that I could write about something. I missed last week so I feel like this week is doubly important. There's been so much on my mind in the last two weeks I don't really know where to begin.

I started this post thinking I was going to talk about priorities. At the beginning of last week, I had a conversation with a coworker that kind of set a few things into perspective for me about something that's been kind of a bother. I was going to do a post about priorities because no matter what age we're at, our priorities are constantly changing. In my family alone, priorities are so varied. For example: My personal priorities right now are to get my house in order. I'm 25 and I live with my parents. I don't want to so I'm getting my life together to facilitate moving past this stage of my life; My sister has never had much of a social life. At 23, she's just now beginning to have the kind of attention and social life that I had at 19. She's learning things about life I've known for many years; Remi, one of my brothers...actually, I don't really know what his priorities are. I know that he just got a job that pays really well and he's been talking about moving out. At 21, his priorities seem to be close to mine...but then he does things sometimes that contradict that. So we'll say his priorities are unknown for now; Rayo's priorities seem to be to save money and go on a two year mission for our church. I say seem to be, because sometimes he does what Remi does and contradicts that assumption of mine; Nick, the youngest, really doesn't have a choice in his priorities yet. He's a junior in high school and is focused on graduating. His choices of late are no different than most of ours were when we were his age. His priority, following school, is his friends. His family has taken a back seat...but like I said, we've all been there at one point or another. My parents...they're just trying to keep us all together and headed down the right path.

The point with priorities is that every person has their own. This doesn't make anyone more or less right for focusing on what's important to them. You can disagree with someone's priorities if you wish, but you can't condemn them. Just because it's not your current priority or you think it's something that someone should have learned already, it doesn't mean that it wasn't your priority at one time. We are all learning. None of us has an answer that will work for everyone. There is no such answer. I take it back...if I were to give you an answer to help you understand different peoples priorities it would be two words: Patience, and tolerance. If you want to get through this life in tact, become very good friends with those words and implement them in your life.

Ok, that's the first thing I was going to talk about. I could probably elaborate on that subject quite a bit, but I don't really feel like it's necessary right now.

Another subject I'd planned on blogging about was the situation with BYU basketball player Brandon Davies. I won't spend too long on this as most of the country was consumed by it for what I thought was an unneccessary amount of time.

I was impressed with not only Davies for coming forward and telling the truth, but also with much of the media who agreed with BYU for their disciplinary actions. I don't have official numbers or anything, but in one article I read online, the author said that most colleges have similar honor codes in place...but look the other direction when it's a star athlete. Most people do not agree with the BYU honor code. It's very strict and not at all what most people think 20 somethings should be doing with their lives. Much of the world does the opposite. College is for drinking and sleeping around and exploring the world in your own way. Whether you agree with the LDS standards in place at BYU or not, you can't fault a school for standing by it's principles and holding those who break that code accountable for their actions. We are still children learning from parents in college. Just because we are on our own and providing for ourselves does not mean we don't need guidance occasionally. By enforcing it's honor code, BYU is showing the world that there is no one, star athlete or not, who should not be held accountable for what they've done. Case and point, Ben Roethlisberger. In fact, most of the NFL...and NBA....and MLB....not so sure about the NHL, but you get the point. How is it that men who are known criminals and low lives get paid to do something they love knowing full well they can get away with almost anything? Call me crazy, but that is just madness. And that's all I'm gonna say about that. Good on ya, BYU.

Now, what I want to spend most of my time on is something that has claimed much of my life, my heart, and my soul. Addiction.

I'm not necessarily talking about addiction to drugs or alcohol. I am most definitely not addicted to either one, but I have an addictive personality. Were I to venture into that world and allow myself to partake in any of that, I know that I would have a serious problem.

Addiction affects everyone, I think. There are so many things we can be addicted to and most we don't even realize. For instance, I am addicted to Mountain Dew. That's kind of an easy one. Caffeine is addicting. Drink it enough and you get addicted. Mountain Dew=addicted Kati.

I'm also addicted to movies. You should see my movie collection. I love escaping into the world created by movies. It's how I unwind...but I have a hard time going a day without one. Movies=addicted Kati.

I'm also addicted to a few people who are not good for me. A lot of people have that one person in their life that does nothing for them. He/she does nothing to contribute to our lives in a good way. He/she is the leach on everything that is important to us. They draw on our emotional, physical, mental, and sometimes financial reserves. Certain people=addicted Kati.

Now, those are only some of the ways we can be addicted to things. In any form, addiction can be devastating. There's always the obvious damage caused by drugs and alcohol. Drugs have played a major role in my life and shaping me into who I am today. Many people are not as lucky as I was to come out relatively healthy and whole. Drugs and alcohol are the most destructive forms of addiction in my opinion. They damage our souls.

I've seen people and heard stories of substance abuse and what it's done to other families and friends. Movies are for me what drugs and alcohol are to drug addicts and alcoholics...a way to escape. The pull of the chemically altered brain is so intense that eventually, a person goes from being normal and healthy and happy to someone who can't bear living their life without those chemicals. They can sometimes see what that habit is doing to their lives, but more often than not, their own psychological need and desire trumps the needs of anyone or anything else. When you're higher than a kite, or so completely wasted that you can't stand, your cares and worries no longer exist...at least until you sober up.

I'm going to let you in on a secret. There is a key to all of this. Wanna know what it is?

Emotion.

Most of the stories I've heard involve people who are responding to things that have happened to them or in their lives. It's very rare for me to hear about someone becoming an addict just because they could. Even in my semi minor addictions, the key is emotion. I react to outside influences that provoke an emotional reaction. I feel the need to unwind in front of the tv for two hours. For major things like drug and alcohol abuse, the story usually has something to do with a big event in the persons life.

Our emotions are tricky little buggers. Our hearts and our souls are what make us unique. Different people react differently to different outside influences. For some people, the road to alcohol abuse may be triggered by something that seems relatively minor to other people. Then there are triggers like job loss, divorce, bankruptcy, and physical and sexual abuse. With all of these events, some form of emotion is experienced. The difference between regular people and addicts is how we chose to deal with those types of tragedies.

I have a few examples. I'm not going to name names, but if the people these stories are about read this, they'll know I'm referring to them and hopefully will understand my purpose. I have four stories.

First, the story of a male friend of mine. He was a Air Force MP and served in Iraq. He's told me stories of his deployment, but when he told them, he was so beyond wasted, that I don't really know if I should believe most of it. In all stories, there is a small margin of truth. Anyway. He served in the AF until the summer of 2008 when he was discharged. He had a mark on his record for an investigation into an incident where he was accused of "playing around" with his loaded weapon. The charges were eventually dropped, but the mark stayed. In 2008, the AF cut back on its personnel. My friend was a cut. He was devastated by it. He'd planned on serving his whole life in the military and didn't know what he was going to do. Well, he became a drunk who's best friends were the good Captain Morgan and Jack Daniels. I took care of him. He'd call me at 11 at night, knowing I had to be at work at 8 and I'd race up to his house to take care of him. I'd usually find him already drunk and he was not a good drunk. He ended up sending a drunk text to a few people, one of whom took it to mean that he wanted to committ suicide and he was in the hospital on suicide watch for two or three days. His hospital stay did nothing for him. I eventually moved home. I got a call from him about a month later. He was panicking and needed my advice. He told me that the night before, he'd blacked out but somehow managed to go to the place he worked, steal the alcohol, and dump it over the side of a cliff. I know, not very smart. He turned himself in, but even that wasn't enough to get him to change things. He finally changed when he ended up in prison for a parole violation. He was on parole because he ran into a parked car because he was driving while drunk. Yeah. It gets better and better, huh?

On to the next story:

I know of a girl who didn't get addicted to drugs or alcohol, but for a long time was addicted to the validation that came with being degraded. I'm not meaning the good kind of validation. She dated men who treated her horribly because it's how she felt about herself. This girl, woman now, is LDS and served a two year mission in Argentina I believe. After she came home, the unthinkable happened and she was raped. Not once, but twice. That's a pretty harrowing experience for anyone to go through. At first, she didn't deal with it real well. She spiralled downward for a long time. Anytime I saw her, I was amazed that no one else could see just how much she was struggling. It's like, this woman that I love was drowning and no one understood enough about what she was going through to lay flat on their stomachs on the side of the pool and stretch out their hands to help her up. Many tried, but when you have no knowledge of what those experiences are like, your hand has no solidity. I did what I could when I could, but it wasn't enough. She didn't think she was worth very much and dated slime who validated that feeling. Honestly, I don't think she consciously did that. I believe that much of what she chose to let in her life at the time was a result of subconscious decisions. She felt worthless and wasn't ready to deal with the idea that maybe she wasn't.

Next story:

This is about another man. When he was very young, his mother and father both worked a great deal of the time. One day, his mom left him with the babysitter. The babysitter did the unthinkable and traumatized this man at a very young age. I'm sorry, that's the best way for me to water that down. This man started using drugs at the tender age of eleven. When I met him, he was 24 and a hard core crystal meth addict. He could not handle the abuse he sustained as a child. With his parents occupied with three younger siblings and jobs to go too, he turned to the only thing he thought was available to him. Weed. In the beginning, that's all it was. It helped him calm down and focus enough to live...but it soon escalated into the much harder drugs. I remember one occasion at his house. His sister was at a church meeting and he'd been awake for two weeks straight. He literally was walking around the house carrying anything he could swing because cars were creeping by his house. I knew his sister was coming home and I didn't want him scaring the people bringing her...so I leaned against the door and refused to move. He got into my face and yelled, threatening to hit me if I didn't let him out to check on things outside. His house, that he thought people were creeping by, was on a corner with a stop sign. They were slowing down because it was the law. Later that same night, he told me he was seeing shadow people and trash people. His addiction was so strong that he could not clean himself up to take care of the girl he got pregnant or the child when it was born. He's been to rehab eight times that I know of, and each time he goes right back to the same situation, unable to affect the kind of change in his life that would facilitate a recovery.

Last story and then I'll close:

This one is about a girl who was raised by good parents. They traveled a lot because her dad's job required it. This girl has always been emotional. She has a big heart and doesn't like to see other people get hurt. When she was 20 years old, she became pregnant by a man who did not act as though he loved her very much. He did not help her with the pregnancy and brought nothing of either monetary or emotional value to the relationship. She moved away and put her child up for adoption. Being the emotional person that she is, the loss of her daughter was devastating. She spent the next two years in a downward spiral much like the woman from earlier. She moved away from her parents and her support system at home and into an environment that permitted her to seek out the kind of people who made her feel like her life wasn't a waste. For short periods of time, she felt wanted and needed. At the end of about two hours, she always felt worse and plotted ways to get that feeling back. She finally hit rock bottom when she realized that she was going to get into some of the same trouble that she had before and nothing had changed. She'd have to give up another child and that thought process stopped her cold.

All but one of these stories has resolved itself. The girls healed much quicker than the boys and the drug addict is still a drug addict. The moral of these stories I guess is that emotions are powerful things. If we can somehow learn to control our emotional reactions and temper them with logic and reason, we will be able to save ourselves and those around us from immeasurable heartache. Our hearts and souls are what make us unique. Why, then, would we allow ourselves and others to lose that uniqueness to an addiction that can't make us happy? Also, not every addiction is inconquerable. Sometimes, all it takes is that one person who's brave enough to lay flat on their stomach and stretch out their hand to pull us back. Are you brave enough?