Tag: addict

Can we just start?

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Last night, in the middle of the night, I got up. I’d been awake all night. When it comes time to sleep, my body goes, “We’re not! We’re not!” Four hours of just tossing and turnin’ and dealing with an amorphous blob of stuff. Fear. Shame. Pain. The whole gamut of human emotions. I’m nearly 50. I’m a dad, dad of four, with a loving wife. It’s astounding what’s happened in my life. But, it feels as though the past has me in a headlock. Something else to give.

I am trying to sort out the wreckage of the past. And I’m picking a rather particular way to exorcise these demons right now. I’m a hermit. If I’m not on stage, I’m in bed… Can we just start?

— Robbie Williams, from opening scene of “Robbie Williams“, a Netflix documentary filmed behind the scenes for over three decades. (S1:E1: “Let’s Get Wrecked”)

Reviews:

  • The Irish News: Robbie Williams Netflix review: An addict who can’t seem to walk away from fame
  • Stuff.co.nzL Robbie Williams is a Netflix series about mental-health, not music
  • Daily Mail: Robbie Williams found watching his own Netflix documentary series ‘deeply unpleasant’ as it documents his ‘descent into mental illness’

Lightly Child. Lightly.

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Yet we’re still programmed to think and act as if we don’t have enough. As if we’re still in those ancient times of scarcity. That three-pound bundle of nerves in our skull is always scanning the background, picking up and prioritizing scarcity cues and pushing us to consume more… Aren’t addiction, obesity, anxiety, chronic diseases, debt, environmental destruction, political dispute, war, and more all driven by our craving for…more?

— Michael Easter, from “Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive” (Rodale Books, Sept 23, 2023)

Notes:

  • Highly rated by Amazon readers and Goodreads. Amazon’s Pick for Book of the Month in October, 2023. An engaging book explaining the what and the why, but if you are seeking solutions to break addictions, cravings, etc, you won’t find them here. (I was left wanting! Where’s the chocolate ice cream!?!)
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

T.G.I.F.: I want what I want because I want it.

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There is no end of advice these days on how to be a good person, how to make good decisions, how to be mindful and compassionate, how to have boundaries, how to be open, how to be assertive, how not to be self-effacing, how to be politically invested, how to live in the now, how to live in a world that demands immediacy, how to think about the future, how not to think too much about the future, how not to think. For a certain kind of person — the person who, usually, strives to be a responsible parent, a sensitive friend, an upright citizen, a person who tries to care about their community — it can be impossible not to succumb to the incessant urge to mimic someone else’s supposed balance and feeling of wellness in life. What do we even know about them really? […]

Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance. This infinite pedagogical universe was recently, and aptly, named the shame-industrial complex; poured out from every angle of life on social media, pushed by algorithms. In this vertigo we’ve forgotten that no one knows, or has ever known, what it really means to be an adult. Also that pleasure is hard-won, small, ephemeral; singular to each person. Wishes are historically overdetermined — meaning it really is your pleasure, and your pleasure only…

What I found, after much work in analysis, is that there is no justification possible, no matter how hard I tried to find it. I want what I want because I want it. You have to live with your choices which are more-or-less inexplicable to others…

We are contradictory creatures, wondrously and terrifyingly so.

— Jamieson Webster, from “I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You.” (The New York Times · August 25, 2023). Jamieson Webster (@jamiesonwebster) is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and a professor at the New School. She is the author, most recently, of “Disorganization and Sex.”

Portrait via Peter Rollins

Watch it!

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Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly

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I wish, for the me I was then, that I could add one more flash, much further forward. I wish that the me nodding out in a cold cinderblock cell could see ahead five years, or even ten… I wish she could see who she will become, and the parts of herself she will leave behind. The darkness that she will learn to live with, and the light she will learn to let in.

— Keri Blakinger, random excerpts from Corrections in Ink: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, June 7, 2022)

Notes:

  • See prior post on Blakinger’s new book, here.
  • Book Review by David Sheff in NY Times: A Harrowing Journey From Cornell to Addiction to Prison
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”