that which I’ve been running away from

heh, it’s funny to me, how easy it is to forget what I’ve been running from. Easy isn’t the right word, it took me nine years to get to the point of rolling back that which helped me forget, namely really powerful medications. Power is the thing, the obsession, the part of myself that has terrified me. It was brought back to me by an author I thought was dead, writing a story about giving into a desire to be used, to be drawn to an irresistable force. My whole life, that’s been the holy grail.

Of course part of it is fantasizing about becoming such a force, and I’ve invested more in that because there’s real money in that. Though, my fear of it is still a thing. When I’ve been given a lot of power, I found out things about myself I didn’t like knowing. So I tried to run, tried to fade into the background, and stop my romance with the idea of puppetmastering weaker wills, or finding someone talented enough to puppetmaster mine. Authors went out of print, and soon I forgot I was ever afraid of the monster I could be…..

sobering up. that’s what I’ve been doing. I spent a lot of time studying addicts, long enough to know that it’s just my willful resistance keeping me from becoming one, or rather the obstacles I’ve put between myself and what would be my drug of choice. I don’t remember which addict said it to me, about the drugs being poison; “But you see, poison kills, and there’s something inside me I want to kill.”

That’s the whole ball of wax. I knew physical death was out of reach…. so I tried to kill the metaphysical idea of who I wanted to be. I failed. This is my largest failure in life, failing to quiet the voices such that I can get on with the tedious matter of earning money, aging, and dying. Not literal voices…. ah that would be simpler….. just that self I was running away from, the self that won’t die.

Thankfully at present I’ve rendered my professional life if not dead then on severe life support. That’s the prime gateway; though money and connections I could rise to the kind of power that has always attracted me. Lacking that….. I’m far less afraid of being a washed up has been than of what would happen if it actually worked out.

This stuff….. I haven’t ever managed to talk about it in therapy, the opening to see it only comes a few hours every few years…. but it’s all behind the curtain, setting up my motivations which make no sense to anyone apart from me.

I can’t run anymore. I’ve come to the end of what legal chemicals can do. illegal chemicals aren’t that much better, they’d only give me at best a few more years.

I must find a way to reconcile with what I am, what I wanted to be, what I don’t know how to be and am desperately afraid of….. I must, it’s an existential fight, else? I’d find a way to destroy myself, I came so close a year ago. I’ve learned to despise the forgetful shell I had become….. but the alternative? what alternative? the world never had a place for me before, I don’t expect it to start doing so now.

and even as I sober up off the hard stuff, I’m sucking down nicotine and caffeine as my meager comforts as I approach true madness.

One of the songs that plays in my head, when I’m thinking about this, Addicted to Love, a particular line;

“You like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah! Closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough!”

alternatively, to take the Lovecraft approach; “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and in untold aons even death may die”