(This is something I posted elsewhere, updated slightly, make of it what you will.)
My experience with addiction & thoughts on the matter.
tl;dr version is everyone who ever picked up a drink or wrap etc thought they could handle it;
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for a long time the addiction maintains that illusion through feeling so damned good that the costs seem to outweigh the losses, and your tolerance and therefore frequncy of use can remain low-level for a long time;
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and you only know you’re in too deep when you’ve gone well past the point where it’s going to be incredibly painful and hard to get out, plus a lot of your life by then will become about (and/or have been damaged by) your substance/s of choice and the people it brings into your life.
This was my timeline:
1. Start of the golden glow – drinking just a small amount feels wonderful, sparks new insights and inspirations, even the hangovers were kinda fun, permission to have a day of thinking and taking it easy, very enthused about it all.
Totally believe that while no animal model has ever shown that alcohol is non-addictive when it’s drunk regularly, loser human alcoholics are still somehow a breed apart from brainiacs like myself.
At this stage I’d overcome a long episode of bulimic behaviours using my willpower and wits, and by studying the topic, so I had good cause to think I had steely will and the kind of smarts you’d need for this, since eating disordered behaviour can be very like an addiction in some ways (stress-relieving, and takes up enough mental run-time that your other problems seem to diminish).
2. Interim term – still feels wonderful and like the costs (money, hangovers feeling not so great, vague nagging awareness lots of intelligent people die of this shit) are far less serious than the benefits, and having a fantastic social life revolving around it.
Few funny stories of things said or done when pissed as a fart, imagine alcohol to be this cool safe thing that just turns up the volume a little with me and life in general.
3. Start of the badlands – a few things done and said under the influence that were destructive and couldn’t be taken back, increased frequency of use, feeling not quite right if I was sober for too long.
At this point I ascribed ALL negative consequences to bad planning, such as talking to my boss one night when I was drunk and ran into him in a bar – I knew he went there so I shouldn’t have, or things like drinking stronger drinks, the “I should have stuck to beer” theory, drinking on an emtpy stomach, or when tired, etc.
Individually these do make sense, but in the bigger picture, they’re ignoring the fact that my tolerance had risen so high that I’d go from “almost enough drunk” to skullfucked reckless asshole without knowing it.
4. Deeper in de Nile dan a crocodile… at this point I was drinking 1 – 2½ bottles of wine daily, considered I “needed it” due to mental health issues I’d had all my life (clinical depression, which I later got rid of using magick and dietary changes).
My main concern by this point was trying to protect my body from the effects, by eating the right foods (lots of B-complex vitamins and electrolytes), good hydration, etc. Hours spent online trying to find new ways to drink heavily and stay healthy. It was as though my health was something to be spent slowly over time, but as parsimoniously as possible.
I was able to work pissed off my tits on about ¾ litre bottle of rum on several occasions, and because I was working with 2 other functional alcoholics (one of whom was also a heavy cocaine user) I did get lucky to some extent.
Some of my family (not all, they’re a mixed bunch and some are straighter than a straight thing) had died from or been made ill by drink and drugs, and an interesting thing I experienced as a pay-off at this stage was I suddenly understood why they’d been unable to stop: it would be fair to say that if getting high was a church, you could suddenly count me in among its believers.
It was at this point it dawned on me that I was not uniquely smarter or better than any other addict who’d been killed by their stuff of choice, and so my focus became on preserving my life as a continuing heavy-drinker. I’d out-clever them, prove my superiority, and beat the statistics that way, instead.
But it did help me reconcile a bit to why they’d not just put their responsibilities and loved ones first, since it was becoming obvious to me that just walking away at the first sign of it being a problem didn’t feel like an option.
5. Badlands – by this stage I figured alcohol was the only thing keeping me sane (addictions cause you to lie to yourself a LOT) and the only way to unwind, I was doing a lot of work from home and because I’m a perfectionist I do find it hard to switch off when possible responsibilities are in my inbox, and cracking open that first bottle was a good way to draw a line under it.
A lot of perfectionists become alcoholics, partly for the off-switch and partly because we want the highest high possible, so our tolerance increases fast.
I lost one good friend over this, a memory that’s too painful to try and even summarise, suffice to say I acted like an asshole under the influence one time too many. And the financial cost was horrendous.
6. Recovery – I set a date and packed it in using a combination of Rational Recovery and anything else I could find, for example making sure to keep my blood sugar stable (I was a vegetarian back then) and researching nutritional supplements. The process of recovery alone took my full mental attention for about 3 months and I had to cut ties and change my social life to accommodate it.
My overall point is that I didn’t realise something that felt so fucking incredibly good and which did bring me good things for a very long time would tilt, slowly, and attempt to wreck my life.
And this is the issue – you don’t know addiction’s got you until you’re at a point where it’s going to be incredibly fucking painful to get away, and require immense amounts of will and also the right support for you, because a lot of what gets offered as treatment for addiction is utter bullshit.
If you think having a strong will alone will protect you, you’re dead wrong – and also kidding yourself that every other single person who ever died of drink, drugs, or even cigarettes was somehow weaker than you.
Every single one of them?! Get a fucking grip on your ego and face the facts.
Also, like I’ve said before, magicians especially want states and experiences “the common man” doesn’t have, we have a high tolerance for risky endeavours, we want power and the feeling of power, and we tend to see ourselves as being a little “different” to the average joe out there and assume we can always buck statistics, since the art of magick is about disrupting probablistic outcomes through an act of will.
Perfectionism as well, and a love of extreme states is pretty common with magicians, and those are also things that suck us in deep and fast – we aren’t “moderate” people content to half-assedly do things we love, to stop sipping at the 2nd glass of wine or pass up a chance to get high when we’ve got time to do it, we want the brightest fucking fluorescent life possible, and to push reality and ourselves to the limits.
If you were to ask anyone who knows about addiction what personality-type is most likely to get addicted, it would pretty much be that – it doesn’t mean we’re wrong or need to change, or submit ourselves to relentless 12-step style attacks on our own ego and judgement skills, but it does mean recognising that every aspect of life has a downside, and this is probably ours.
You’ll only know if you the one who can’t just stop using when you’ve become hooked and find you can’t stop, so you have to ask is that a risk worth taking.
Nobody ever who got hooked on drink, drugs, or cigarettes, and got their life wrecked by those delights ever thought it would happen to them, period.
And then for a long time when you are hooked, the fact the human brain can’t remember pain very well, the fact your social life will revolve round being with other users, and the general fact of it feeling wonderful will keep you in the dark about the horrendous reality that you’re not some kind of Übermensch – you’re just another person with a biological body and brain that got hooked like everyone else.
I am well aware that this isn’t generally a popular stance to take amongst magicians, and I have every possible understanding of why people want to stay at the management/health-spending stages, I’m just sharing this to tell you what a simple, pleasant glide it is, for a long time, until suddently one day it’s hell on earth.