unflattering

(a personal entry)

part one: cigarettes

"there is a diamond in my wound and i can't see it." -alice notley, in the pines

truthfully, i love cigarettes. they have been my greatest addiction, and my greatest addiction overcome.

after ten years of smoking tobacco (in latter years, around a pack a day), i quit cold. i refused tobacco in any form, but never failed to enjoy it when people indulged around me, smoke drifting into my face.

my time with cigarettes is marked by decades. from ages 16 to 26, i was consumed. from 26 to 36, i abstained. this february marked my ten year quitting anniversary; ten years was always my goal. i hoped i could change my relationship to tobacco, enjoying a hookah or a cigarette every once in a while. but fear of my extreme addiction kept me distant.

in recent years, i wished to be stronger than that fear, and assumed a time would come when i would test myself. that time arrived last month. smoking again (with an intention of limiting myself) was part prayer, part coping mechanism. life and loss had turned me upside down.

with a generous gift of a large bag of friend-grown, uncured tobacco (thanks noah!), i began to smoke full, hand-rolled cigarettes. in a week, i was smoking compulsively.

one month later, as i write, i am chain-smoking, enjoying immensely this return to a familiar compulsion. eager to defend myself to anyone expressing critique of this decision, i have legitimized it as a temporary controlled experiment. in actuality, it has been a salve for fresh wounds, helping me channel my intense emotions.

i don't feel guilty, at least about cigarettes.

since starting again, i've had a kind of plan, a bargain with myself. if i allow this now, guiltlessly, i also need a firm quit date and extensive quitting plan in mind. as the date creeps closer, i continue to smoke relentlessly, mapping out the patterns of my familiar addiction. what does smoking do for me? what will i do with my hands? how will i treat my lungs? where will my emotions go?

in the past few months, my body has been shrinking. this is partially due to a different quitting plan (my 2016 "no beer this year" goal, which has resulted in only drinking alcohol - wine - once since january first). i have lost roughly 30 lbs in under five months; half of that has been in the past month alone, with tobacco as an obvious reason.

my body certainly feels different. yes, my clothes fit me more comfortably now. and my body is enormously tired. wrecked actually. i walked about six miles today & felt fine, but smoking + asthma has felt quite dangerous. waking up in the morning is mildly horrible. it seems i need one or two extra hours of sleep every night. yet it is all coupled with the amazing feeling that first cigarette of the day brings me. joy. a temporary rush of it. god, it feels like something divine.

when i quit in february 2006, i wrote a zine (essentially journal entries) of the first few days of withdrawal. it served multiple purposes: gave me a place to channel the withdrawal symptoms, documented my process, and offered a touchstone to help me maintain commitment to my goal. i approached the quitting time with the same compulsion that i approached smoking. this taught me immensely, so much so that i have often remarked that quitting my cigarette addiction was one of the most challenging battles of my life.

this quitting process gave me two very specific gifts. one, i felt amazingly strong and proud of myself for seeing it through. i began to inhabit a new, smoke-free body. the zine was my way of publicly holding myself accountable, and it worked. two, i felt a deeper understanding of the complex struggle that addiction can be. this was not only true in increasing my empathy (and boundaries) for and with others struggling with addiction. it also allowed me to see the many substances and habits i had addictive relationships with, including the abandon, compulsion, guilt, and extremity of my own behaviors in the world, things unrelated to cigarettes.

part two: other substances

"this is a better system: one looks into the blazing defect, all at once. not really such a hard card to play. but i never want to turn a card over again." -alice notley, in the pines

in studying substance addiction, i have been shown how both total abstinence and harm reductive approaches can be useful for me.

in college, i was definitely addicted to weed, although so many heavy weed-smokers refuse to admit that the substance is addictive. in my 20s and 30s i've used weed occasionally; there were years where i didn't smoke at all. i don't really enjoy the effects all that much, but every once in a while i forget that & do it anyway. my approach to weed has been a harm reductive one, but the substance itself no longer compels me much.

alcohol is different. much of my 20s was spent enjoying it on occasion. i was likely not drinking all that often due to the cost of alcohol, and its lack of focus in many of my social/community gatherings and relationships. there were short windows where i drank more regularly - for example, the floridian winter i spent drinking nightly bottles of wine in the backyard with two good friends (naming ourselves "the bad influences"). in my 30s, alcohol use has been more prevalent, specifically in more recent years. prior to this january, i'd say that my most habitual drinking has been in the last two years.

i noticed my growing dependency because of that telltale question: are you hiding it? i was. mostly i drank by myself, but also with my previous partner and certain friends. i also regularly consumed a larger amount, anywhere between 3-5 beers almost every night. so much money was spent on alcohol, particularly fancy beer, and there was usually a bottle of gin in my closet. it became more obvious to me when i realized how infrequently all of my housemates would drink alcohol, and how patterned around alcohol consumption my romantic relationship seemed to be. i tried taking short breaks, mostly to prove to myself that it wasn't an issue. these breaks would last a month or so, and during them, i found it consistently hardest to maintain my sobriety when with my partner.

there are other substances too. sugar is a top one. the gratification of baking is something that poses a challenge. as a creative hobby and stress reliever, baking functions in a kind of "healthy" capacity. but my sugar addiction, coupled with my body's dislike of gluten and dairy, turns baking into a kind of itch i need to scratch. gluten and dairy have their own difficulties. i've learned certain ways to tolerate them in small doses, and also ways i can avoid gluten (by using newly-accessible but expensive substitutes). i wrestle with these foods on a daily basis, while also trying to prevent them from taking up too much space in my mind.

then there is caffeine addiction, which, i've learned, is potentially larger than my tobacco addiction. i don't want to quit. in reading about this addiction, i found something about how caffeine can restructure one's brain, which can mean that longtime/heavy caffeine users, even in quitting for a long while, will have a nagging sense that something isn't right. a kind of ongoing chemical imbalance.

it had been years since i tried to take a short break from caffeine, so i tried again this spring. i took ten days off and felt, well, mostly terrible. i started up again then took another ten days off the following month. i noticed i was less anxious overall, but still eager to return to yerba mate.

i don't feel able to write much more about this. it's a definite addiction, widely acceptable, and i have little motivation to quit.

part three: the less obvious

"the intention of the organism is to know. i say i don't have enough stamina to clean all the rooms. i say i may not have enough stamina for all this. the others will insist i have." - alice notley, in the pines

in focusing on my substance addictions, i began to see how i would make plans to quit one thing by replacing it with another. when i quit cigarettes, i replaced them more immediately with eating sugar and drinking lots of tea. physical, oral immediacies. in the longer term, i became very interested in breath, yoga, and meditation, which is worth another entire entry.

when i made a plan to stop drinking alcohol, i replaced it with copious consumption of sparkling water. the pattern of drinking cans or bottles of something carbonated was not interrupted. as a physical replacement, it has worked well. i also began a new habit of practicing spanish every night, mostly using a website. the gamification/ goal-orientation of the website's structure triggered a sort of compulsion, which helped me stay committed to the learning.

the act of substitution began to stand out to me. i recognized the ritualistic and habitual nature in which i was/am acting much of the time. of course, habits and rituals are common parts of everyday life, like brushing one's teeth. however, it occurred to me (and not for the first time) that some of my behaviors resemble obsessive-compulsive disorder. i have used "OCD" to describe myself before; while being serious and mindful about not using it pejoratively, i thought it somewhat milder in me, wondering if it was "ok" that i claimed it as my own.

in reading more about OCD and seeing a therapist/ receiving medication for anxiety issues, i started to realize how well this explain certain things about me, particularly things i try to hide from others. years ago, my therapist pointed out that i struggle with rumination. i understood this as a kind of analyzing taken to an extreme. it can also describe a "worst-case-scenario" thinking that runs uncontrollably and frequently through my mind.

my obsessive repetitious thought processes are exacerbated by the immediacy of computers and smart phones. but these mannerisms can also be traced to less obvious (at least to me) habits that play out particularly in my work and in my relationships. they also frequently arise as debilitating fears about the loss of my family members and close friends, or about my own death.

earlier this year, i began to scrutinize my workaholism, an addictive set of behaviors that seems relatively common among many of my friends - in particular, those who do political/community organizing. there is a gut-wrenching drive that many of us seem to share. we want a different kind of world and existence, so it feels wrong to stop fully engaging with this work at any point. i tell myself, i take breaks. i go camping or small trips, take baths, watch tv or movies, etc. but my work, even the paid, non-community-organizing stuff, is filled with constant juggling of tasks & timelines, extreme self-initiative, frequent meetings & strategizing, and ongoing exhaustive work. it is also rewarding in many, many ways. amazing friendships are born or strengthened, resources are connected or shifted, support systems are built, and my own validation (from "having done a good job") is a huge payoff.

but this workaholism belies an incessant, capitalistic obsession with productivity (which many others have written critically about, so i won't really add to that). this kind of obsession takes over my life in two main ways.

the first: the things i do that are not explicitly "work" become a kind of intensive labor. this is most evident in my romantic relationships. this also becomes clear in pastimes like reading. instead of simply making it a point to read more frequently, last year i set myself a goal of reading 100 books. i ended the year with a list of 350 books i consumed, and not in a "good" way. many of the books i hardly remember, as i was simply driven to finish them. (many of them i do remember & did enjoy, but still.) this was a pinnacle of compulsion for me. and it's so rewarded! people would view having read so many books as a kind of achievement (or conversely, as a kind of luxury... who has the time?). i moreso felt a kind of shame about it; it draws attention to my obsessive nature.

the second: my obsessions can create a kind of dichotomy between "work" and "rest" (or play) that feeds into and exacerbates other issues. one easy example is when relaxation consistently takes the form of drinking alcohol. another way this plays out is using "rest" as a kind of general escapism, something i only allow if i have pushed myself to the limit with work. in relationships, i may only allow myself to "rest" with people if i can also "work" with them, which can sometimes take the form of pushing them to limits or watching them push themselves.

here is my most difficult and tentative insight: relating with others, especially certain others, can bring out strong OCD or addictive tendencies in me.

part four: relationships

"i never wanted to do you wrong. / you are the one i wanted least to / do that to. this must be a universe of / care, that hoot-owl moaning; please / don't mischaracterize me, i would not / want to wrong you. i never wanted / to sing this song. but now it's mine." - alice notley, in the pines

i can offer two relatively different examples of how these tendencies play out with my relating to other people. the first is with my family, particularly my sister's family. the second is within my romantic relationships, particularly within my two most recent, longer term partnerships.

with my family, i try to have relationships that are "exempt" from work - in the sense that i end up trying to meet them much more where they're at. i don't necessarily try to continuously improve my relationships with them or attach intensive political-driven desires. but that's only some of the time. when i am with my niece and nephew, it can be exhausting but there is a lot of play, a kind of break from everything else. this sometimes feels like an enormous respite for me. yet i also try to teach them things about the world as i see it. i talk with them about gender, police brutality, the black lives matter movement, consent, racist sports logos, dumpster diving, nationalism, etc etc. i encourage them to question what they are taught, even the things i communicate. they recently moved to an even-more-white suburb of madison, into a fancy house and neighborhood, and it's important to me to be a regular presence in their life that is outside of all that.

there is an element of control in this, and i see that. i can also justify it by acknowledging that they are knowing me, which means knowing about the ways i feel, think, and perceive. i can only hope to engage them.

there is an OCD element in my family relationships. i feel a kind of repetitive terror about the loss of my family members, in a way that truly can keep me up at night. my time with my niece and nephew is also filled with my over-bearing protectiveness. it can be difficult to relax. i know that this is not helpful, that being anxious and fear-driven can create a tension that isn't supportive of their freedom to play and explore. but i cannot curb my thoughts, which get set on high volume. what if they choke? run into the street? fall down stairs? have an asthma attack? etc etc etc

recently i was with my niece & nephew while my sister was in the ER dealing with her own constant health struggles. my nephew had a fever of 102.6 and became incredibly hot and very lethargic. i came seriously close to a panic attack when i was unable to reach my mom (who is a nurse) via phone. as i was carrying him to the car, preparing to drive to the ER, my sister called from there and calmly instructed me on what to do - which included giving him medicine and waiting for her to get home. while this situation describes a kind of anxiety that i'm guessing many parents and caretakers face at some time(s) or another, it has stayed with me for days, worrying and obsessing about the safety of my family.

this week, i also recently (separately) ended up in a full-blown panic attack, one which i could not locate the source of. i had taken a shower & was about to get ready for work, and suddenly i was incapacitated. i stood up to close my window and very nearly blacked out. as i laid in bed, mentally repeating "everything is going to be ok" while waiting for my anxiety meds to kick in, i couldn't figure out what was happening, or why.

this was not my first panic attack, but it is rare for me to have them unprecipitated by something i know is a trigger. for example, if there is a tornado watch, it is possible. if there is a tornado warning, it is practically a given. sometimes i have panic attacks after smoking weed. one thing is clear: i have difficult and sometimes debilitating struggles with my own mental health.

whether it comes from others who - consciously or unconsciously - delegitimize or invalidate this, or whether it comes from within (in the sense that i am often posed to see my own struggles as "not as bad" as others), it becomes a new kind of struggle to allow myself the acknowledgement of my own demons. these include depression, delusional thinking, sensory imbalances, OCD, dissociation, past experiences of trauma, and general anxiety. it is not flattering. my own mental health struggles have caused me to lose jobs and relationships. if my coping abilities lead others to believe that i "have my shit together", then great. but this isn't the full truth, and it's also a kind of misrecognition. i am regularly engaged in internal battles, ones that feel highly uncomfortable to bring to light.

the second major area that my mental health struggles and addictive tendencies play out is in my romantic relationships. the intimacy of these relationships seem to create catch 22 situations. i want to be both independent and interdependent. i want to be challenged but also experience connection. i want to be in relationships that feel safe & secure while also not depending on them to validate my self-worth. my most recent longer term partnerships have shown me my strengths, confidence, intelligence, and compassion as well as my shame, insecurities, and obsessions.

in the first, i was with my partner, d, for six years. we created a life together that i would later call "codependent". we were very different, in terms of ways we engaged in the world, and it often felt like a "mismatch". this was negated in ways by a powerful emotional connection and shared dreams of daily living and a future together. we lived together for years and moved to three different states. we farmed together, something which served my workaholic and organizing-obsessive tendencies. to coax seeds into plants, plants into rows, and rows into truckloads of food was quite a labor of control.

d and i also started our own farm business, which was filled with planning (and debate). we accomplished physical farm labor together with an ease, both comfortable with eachother's strengths and weaknesses in this realm. both of us had a lot of stamina and dedication for this exhausting work. however, we lacked shared intellectual and creative pursuits, which i know now that i need in any close relationship. i used to say, "i want to be challenged in ways that make me grow", and felt our disagreements were repetitious and lacked mutual insight, particularly in regards to motivations and intentions. this caused the most harm in our frequent, high-emotion arguments and in experiences with non-monogamy.

when that relationship ended, i recognized that i had spent most of the relationship blaming d for not measuring up to what i wanted - a high emotional intelligence. i felt forced into a position of being the one who did the majority of emotional labor. while there is truth in that ("i did the majority of emotional labor"), i needed to know what my own accountability was in our tumult. i needed to understand the harm. it took me awhile to locate it.

[an aside: while blame can feel like an outlet for the anger and loss of a person who i loved dearly, blame also felt old and tiring. i had obsessed about our dynamics for far too long, and i wanted to learn something more - about myself and for myself - not just chalk it up to "choose a more emotionally intelligent partner next time". blaming also enforced a convenient narrative, one that held me in a victim mentality and displaced my own responsibility towards myself and towards my partner.]

what i came to see was that i had clung to the relationship in so many instances, believing that it was more important than my own needs. i had become dependent on d to fill a place in my life, perhaps even to protect me, and had a difficult time imagining what my life could look like without that relating. because i could not control d or the relationship (and i tried), i ruminated constantly about it. i analyzed, challenged, and picked apart things, believing that doing this would somehow keep me safe. i feared abandonment more than anything. but i wasn't content. how could i be? i didn't turn my analysis back on myself and ask, why are you choosing this? because i didn't feel like i was. i was addicted to the relationship and i believe d was too.

my constant mode was one of suspicion, which led me at times to violate d's privacy. i justified this as a protective measure; only later was i able to fully understand how awful these behaviors were. there were other hallmarks of co-dependency on display in this relationship. years later, the more interesting questions for me at this point in time are: what was my substitute for this addiction? also, what comes after co-dependency?

for a long time after, i obsessed about this relationship. my drive to understand every unexamined piece was fueled by d's absence, as well as a desire to never put myself in a similar situation again. i did not want to be hurt in the way i was aching and i did not want to ever again act in such hurtful ways. it was important for me to clarify and own my participation in our dynamics. only then could i really feel able to forgive d and myself.

in time, i have been able to do both; d and i have been able to become supportive friends to one another. the point about being driven by absence is a sticking one - particularly in terms of substitution- and has come up again in the ending of my more recent longer term partnership.

i entered into a sort of on-off relationship with s maybe four(?) years ago, which was not very long after my previous one had ended. s and i ended up being more consistently together for about two and a half recent years.

this relationship was grounded in distance, both spatially (living in separate towns) and emotionally. it felt very different than the previous one, which was exactly what i wanted. our primary connection was intellectual. at one point early on, s wrote something like "a relationship with you is going to be a lot of work, but isn't there something romantic in that?" for this and many other reasons, i felt we were "a match". it seemed i was partnered with someone who could keep up with me, in particular, my incessant analyzing.

the distance served me well. i had become extremely skeptical of romance myths and was very aware of my previous co-dependency. the distance gave me space to be with close friends and build tighter community, relationships that also challenged and supported me. it gave me a lot of time alone, which allowed me to work more and also helped me stay mindful of how i was relating in partnership. i felt much more aware of my choices and intentions, and often looked outside of my partnership to meet certain key needs.

there was an odd, enigmatic security in not have security in this partnership. i was very determined to not behave in controlling ways, which at times skewed the other direction. i wanted to be very careful about insisting on having certain needs met, either because i thought this insistence could be potentially controlling or demanding, or because i had recognized that s was not capable of meeting them.

intimacy became a stranger and stranger concept. in providing for myself often outside of the partnership, i was slowly building a kind of invulnerability within it. my obsessive behaviors played themselves out in a regular pattern of analyzing. i wanted to understand so much about how we were different, and i also wanted to locate places where we were similar. places of connection.

s and i had both entered into our relationship after losses of previous, important partnerships. we both had very extensive systems of protection and shared in common a high valuation of our individual mind's own abilities to keep this protection in place.

i defaulted predominantly (though not always) into a mode of non-suspicion, believing that i should be most focused on myself, my responses to situations, my own intentions. i knew how horrible it felt to operate out of a place of constant suspicion, and how harmful to everyone such a mode can be. while i regularly checked in with myself about my assumptions of "good intent" (what i assumed from my partner), i also see now how my endless curiosity and questions could have been perceived as suspicion. i didn't want to control s. i wanted to control myself. i learned how to make a lot of space in me, particularly to understand different motivations and ways of viewing and being in the world. i believed this to be a liberating basis for a relationship.

while i would say that this kind of relating felt "healthier", a couple of my friends recently told me they disagree. their assessments were something like this: in my drive to "do things differently", to prevent myself from co-dependent relating, i furthered a kind of destructive individualism that dismissed the importance of intimate interdependence and basic emotional care. i maintained a cautious eye on - and ownership of- my impact on my partner (self-accountability) but believed it to be my full responsibility to do double the work, maintaining the same cautious eye and ownership regarding my partner's impact on me. the heightened intellectual basis of our partnership made this difficult for me to see. one friend described my partner's regular communication style to be, 'i want to create whatever rhetorical structure is useful to me, and i don't care if it's at your expense.'

as that relationship has ended and many difficult things have occurred in recent months, i am forced to ask myself where i go with all this.

first, absence. without this person and partnership in my life, i have seen much more clearly my tendencies towards obsessive analysis. i have a need to comb through all of my memories and feelings to try to make sense of what happened. this feels like a kind of addiction, or a kind of addictive withdrawal. this, again, is unflattering. while i don't believe this partnership was "co-dependent", i still feel a kind of addictive absence. i miss the ongoing challenge of trying to relate to another highly intellectual person, someone who had seemed to share a huge capacity for analysis and a similar drive of curiosity. someone with an independent and protective mind.

but the absence is also, in its own way, a replacement of an addiction, a swapping. to trace all the previously unseen threads and pick them apart, to let my mind run on and on. . .

i know i could just as easily turn to a substance (like cigarettes, which i have done) or another romantic relationship (which i've attempted, but then backed away from). instead, sitting in my sorrow, anger, and analysis has its own strange allure. or compulsion.

more than anything, i want to grow and learn from my experiences. and if i've caused harm to myself or others, i want to understand how and why i did. if harm has been done to me, i want to root it out and understand it. this is an obsessive drive for me. it feels as though i am on a kind of roller coaster, and cannot allow myself to exit until i have come to terms with every curve and dip, every corkscrew and climb. or until the rollercoaster runs out of power and comes to a stop on its own.

in thinking through questions regarding suspicion and assumptions of intent, other mental pathways about identities and power and internalized oppression open up. these things have their own language and frameworks, and i continuously write them out. cigarettes in particular are connected to habits of endless writing. i've filled two journals already.

the last question i am turning around, especially lately, has been about my own mental health.

whether it's addiction or OCD, constant questioning, analyzing, and ruminating is something i don't feel in control of. conversely, maybe it's all i have control of, or it's a tool that i use to help me feel safe in a hostile world. yet it doesn't always do this. it can heighten my intense fears and anxieties, leading to panic attacks and the like. such analysis can also provide rewards. i am a better friend-therapist, community organizer and political strategist, and can use my analysis to hold myself accountable.

but it can also push people away when it places them under the microscope, and can lock me into a tower of my own self-protection. it reinforces the lies i tell myself about my vulnerability or invulnerability. it puts me on roller coasters i'd rather not be on. it can turn play into work and drain me of my breath.

and still i cannot stop.

my mind needs a maze to run around, needs to come up against limits, needs to exhaust itself over and over again.

sometimes i wonder what i would be like without this. my imagination fails me.