Over Thanksgiving break, I indulged in playing video games again. I played Diablo III with my brother as we tried to get through challenging parts of the game. My brother left before I did to go to school. I was supposed to leave early to go back home from New York to Baltimore and prepare for work, but the next day, I played Diablo by myself for almost the entire day.
I didn't leave until 9 p.m., playing the game and being sucked into it. I made excuses for not leaving to my grandparents and mother, telling them that I was tired and didn't want to make a long drive without a nap.
But the experience brought me back to the days of when I was addicted to video games and didn't stop. I wrote previously about how once, I was brought into the counselor's office with another kid, when I gave another kid the password to my MapleStory account. I lashed out at Chris in the counselor's office, begging everyone in the room for my friend to give me back the password.
I was not in control of my life then. Video games were. It's different for me now, but the fact remains: an addiction is when you don't have control over your life, and something else does. An addiction is when something has so strong of a power and pull over you that you don't have power over yourself.
I once heard someone say "why give anything power over you? Why not have power over yourself and your own destiny?"
These were compelling words. But obviously, it's easier said than done. I've learned, the hard way, from the experiences of myself and my friends, that there's always something behind an addiction. And to work on an addiction you have to strike at that "why," strike at the core, or you're just putting a band-aid over something that needs surgery.
My brother and I have always resorted to video games as some sort of escape, some way of relieving the tension caused by growing up under a deeply troubled and dysfunctional family.
"Drug use is often voluntary in the first instance," writes Adam Felman of Medical News Today "The development of a full addiction occurs through a variety of circumstances."
For me, I have always displaced my addictions with other addictions. I have been addicted to running and my athletic success when my family was at its worst. I have thrown myself into work when I didn't want to think about the stressors within my family.
And I will re-tell anecdotal experiences from my time listening to friends and people in crisis about their own addictions. The friend with a drinking problem had a close friend die horrifically over the summer. The friend who smoked weed every day had his brother die over the summer. The workaholic friends often had similar dysfunctional home lives like myself.
What I have found for myself is that I don't find myself any less of an addict than I was 10-years-old. I have sat in on Narcotics Anonymous meetings with a friend, and although I haven't been brave enough to share, I'm driven to tears emotionally by some of the stories told by people at the meetings.
I wish I can, too, one day start off a personal testimony saying "my name is Ryan, and I'm an addict."
Personally, I have just displaced my previous addictions with different ones. My brother has done the same. We both have been driven obsessively to be perfectionists at work. When we aren't, it grinds out gears. Although we both exhibit extremely strong workaholic tendencies, we both have at times indulged in other addictions as band-aid solutions to pressures at home.
I have been obsessively addicted over athletic achievement, over my ability to run fast times on the track. I have been obsessively addicted over grades. On a given day that I'm not working, I get anxious and obsessively look for ways to hustle and things to do. Sometimes, I drink too much. I rely on my faith, religion, and church in and some would argue that my adherence to my faith is also an addiction.
I don't think any of my addictions are any less or more than someone who is addicted to heroin or cocaine. My addictions are just more socially acceptable, but they're all the more consuming over my life. American capitalist society rewards people who buy into bourgeois hustle culture, and I just happen to be one of those people.
And I see it in my students as well, working at an inner-city school. The worst misbehaviors have been catalyzed by troubles at home, whether it's the student with the dad that recently passed away or with the student with the parent struggling with heroin.
We resort to addictions because they're a solution, even if they're imperfect ones. They're distractions from a deeply-rooted, traumatic issue, until they become so out of control that they're the problem.
But what if a band-aid is the best we have? What if we don't have any better options? In a way, succumbing to addiction is liberating because we can be distracted from the cores of our addictions that haunt us so painfully.
I'm not going to offer any solutions because if there were an easy solution, our collective struggle with addiction would have been solved a long time ago.
What has helped me my entire life is the knowledge and internalized awareness that I am not alone. As I have written before, we need to rely on community and relationships to create a new normal.
Life itself is too hard to go through alone, but addiction is way too hard to power through all by ourselves. As a first-year teacher, I have accepted that the work is too challenging to go through alone, and that I need support and mentors. Without other people around, without support, I will get into my own head and think in circles, and eventually, I'll get around to thinking about family, about a mother fighting through cancer or the multitude of other undisclosed problems plaguing our past.
And we can't fight addictions alone. We have to realize that we are not alone, or else there's no one to make us feel less isolated, and no one to keep us accountable.
There's always something behind an addiction. For me, it's family. It's always, always been family. And until we make our peace with the cores of our addictions, we will always be addicts.
I know that some wounds are so deep they cannot be fixed. That's why I'll always be an addict. But we can make progress, even if it's minimal, and the simple awareness that our addictions aren't just addictions goes a long way in that.