In those moments you’re absolutely baffled by how you ever get yourself to do anything that requires a modicum of willpower; how you were able in the past to even seek anything but comfort, to do things that merely approach the realm of delayed gratification. The next day you get up, you take an ice cold shower, you meditate, you groom a bit excessively, you go to work and consume only water and coffee and do a heavy workout and yoga in the sun and go out with your friends. Then you go home crashing and seek refuge like a soft missile, dive into the pillows of familiar solitude.

You can have an addiction, and have a thorough awareness of your condition, and still do it. You can have researched every single way this addiction will fuck up your life and still do it. You can reminisce all the times you previously engaged in it and all the pain it brought you and all the people it pushed away and chances you missed and still do it. You can ask yourself, ‘Do I really want to go there?’, answer no, then still do it. You can break down and cry after it happens and have an intense moment with yourself and swear to be good to yourself and do a symbolic action that represents a new chapter in life, then do it all over again the next week. You can open up to someone close to you and go see a doctor and attend support groups and write about the addiction in an attempt for catharsis, and fall back into it. You can not do it for a while and not even have thoughts about it and feel profound peace and maturity and gratitude for the fact that you’re finally moving on. Then for no particular reason, one day, you decide that you need to do it one last time. One last time becomes two days in a row and soon just a weekly habit and you’ve brought the cycle of hell back onto yourself and there’s no way to stop it now.

It’s like I split myself into two, one who’s good, knows the right way to go about things, and is looking behind his shoulder at this other me lagging behind, scared and lazy and screaming ‘no, wait, I’m still addicted to pleasure, we can’t move on to better things’. So, that superego waits patiently for the id to get on with his shit and get through it and meanwhile the ego is the one who suffers. But the Id is insatiable. When you think he’s done and gone he comes back with a vengeance. Every time hurts more than the previous time.

Addiction is ritual taken too far. It’s an attempt at engineering pleasure that becomes pathetic in its repetition. If you were just able to keep it under control, to not do it until pleasure becomes pain, to be moderate. To be mindful. All that goes out the window. The excess you’re looking for always ends in a sad mess.