I’m sitting here right now thinking about how awesome it would be to have a bottle of Vicodin and nobody to get on my back. To feel that glorious sensation of cares and pain washing away in a tide of peace and tranquility.
To have the racing thoughts and emotional demons that bark and scream for attention fall silent again for a few blissful minutes, and feel the wave of ease flood over me again like God’s own mercy. God in heaven, what I wouldn’t give to have that feeling again – knowing down to my core that everything is fine, and at peace, and I can simply slip away from the world.
But I can’t, because I know where that road goes. It ends in darkness and tears, with the people I love in tortured heartache all around me.
This isn’t about Trump. It’s not about politics. It’s about our society, and our collective failure to understand that addiction like this is an illness as surely as cancer.
We’re learning what leads to cancer. What we haven’t done is understand what leads to addiction. The hurting father who lost his job, or was injured, and now finds a few minutes of glorious peace in his soul when a brother in law gives him a leftover oxy to help him out. The single mother, who is busting her ass to make ends meet and gets a prescription for her back injury – and suddenly feels the inner peace she’s been looking for in a pill.
I can’t speak for other forms of addiction, but I can say that opioid abuse by and large comes from pain – the most basic impulse of living beings. From flatworms to humans, our instinct is to avoid pain. When you can find a pill that not only takes away physical, but also emotional and spiritual pain? God in heaven, there’s nothing that can keep you away from it. When we can’t find that, we try other things. Heroin, alcohol, OTC cold pills. Hell, even massive doses of acetaminophen, looking for anything to take away the pain in our bodies, our minds, and our souls.
Presidents can’t change this, Governors can’t change this. Only each of us, acting on our own, can change it. Love one another, support one another. If someone in your life is struggling – in anything – reach out to them. Sometimes the difference between addiction or relapse is one phone call, one email, one human touch that lets us know that there are other routes to peace, and we need not go down the road that leads to destruction to stop the pain we so desperately want to escape.
