Day 358
The role that thinking about death plays to an addict — or at least to this addict — is as powerful to contemplate as it is melodramatic to verbalize. In the musical Hamilton, the title character is facing a bullet when he talk-sings the line,
“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”
I cried like a baby the first time I heard that, just a few months after I began acting out.
Even during my seemingly willful misbehaving, I reconsidered another theatrical line that I thought was just stupid the first time I heard Rose Castorini conclude in Moonstruck that men cheat because they fear death. I came to realize I was dancing on a fine line between fearing death and welcoming an easy way out of the conflict between life and fatigue.
It was an equally juxtaposed reality that sex was both the cause of my pain, and the snake oil I kept drinking trying to ease that same pain.
Overall, I don’t think I’m a stupid person, but it gives me some odd relief to look back and see the connection that my addict had to those stupid things that are now so clearly in contradiction to my sanity. It's also nice to see some of these sentiments, once part of the insanely unique lies they played in my own delusions, characterized in cinema; someone else must have experienced the same and found ways to express it.
That is also a recognition of the role recovery plays in shining shameless light on those idiocies, the reasons for them, and the better path available.
–JR
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