The First Wrong Turn
It's the reason that I first turned to drugs, and it's the same reason I turned and walked away from drugs. My desire to feel. I just have this irrepressable, undeniable need and desire, this compulsion to feel things more severely, deeper and truer than other people seem to.
I'm like a papercut finger in a room full of envelopes and I'm jumping for joy about it! I'm screaming, "Cut me! Cut me! I dare you to try! Come on, I wanna feel it! Cut me open and let's see what's inside."
All my life, I've just been like, "Oh can I fall down off of that? Ok, good. Can I climb up, and stand atop that? Oh good, that'll make me feel something, alright."
I'm not some sort of Sado-Masochist, either. It's not that I want to be punished, persecuted, or rejected either. It's just driven by my own dull instint NOT TO FEEL. It's not even an instinct. It's the opposite of an instinct. What's the opposite of an instinct? It's not really a compulsion either, that's when you keep on doing something, even if it doesn't serve you a purpose any longer. It's the opposite of that too.
It's when you're supposed to be urged on, to take some action, some self-preserving motivation that you should just HAVE, without knowing WHY, just that you need to do something because it's good for you. Like eating, or sleeping. You just do them. Uncontrollably. You can't NOT do them, you just have to eventually. Well, you can control those too, you can take substances that'll stop you from doing even those.
And to FEEL, that's the same, you're just supposed to know how to do that, aren't ya? That's what I don't have. That's the instinct I'm missing.
But I wanted to feel. That's why I tried drugs.
Drugs aren't just trippy psychedelic eye-candy things that to make you see pink elephants and polka dotted alligators coming out of electical sockets. They make you feel things too, you have rainbows of emotions.
And that's all I ever wanted. To have emotions, and to feel them honestly, and to understand them, and to name them, and to be able to describe them to other people. And to be able to describe them ACCURATELY and DESCRIPTIVELY in a way that others could relate to, and understand, and recognize frrom their own experiences.
I wanted to connect with strangers, and admirable characters, to chat barroom chat with old men, and old women who had stories. Who WERE stories, just to look at them. They embodied the stories of their own lives, they were the sum of all the places they'd been and all the ditches they'd dug and all the houses they'd built from the ground up and all the children they'd born.
They had been carved, and molded by their experience. They never tried to be something they weren't. They were always just who they were. And that's maybe where I made my first wrong turn - was when I started to believe that I was never anybody in the first place.