Getting real about addiction
By Hattie Butterworth
18 March 2023
You can’t seem to leave me alone
Your tight mark stands far off releasing me
The emotion still sounds an almost alarming noise
Why did I have to leave you?
Maybe emotion is all I have of you now
All I ever really had.
Was it real or were
You just there - present to the clatter of minds
How much longer will I mourn you?
I spent a good 30 minutes trying to remember who I wrote this poem about in my diary on 18 March. But I couldn’t remember mourning any relationships back then - who could have possibly taken up that much of my brain?
The give away was ‘your tight mark’. I was struggling with addiction in March. Even though I was almost a year clean, the words show how smothered I still felt by it. It took up a lot of my thoughts and was what my mind went to during times of intense emotion.
I was sure who I had written about was a person - maybe that was my intention back in March. To personify the illness of addiction is to give it life and express how active it can feel, even in sobriety. Love is similar, because we can’t turn it off without time.
‘Why did I have to leave you?’
Addiction destroyed my life, but it took a long time to choose sobriety with any real commitment. Addiction is like the blanket of warmth some feel in relationships. It was the immediate place of ‘safety’ I found in emotional danger.
We can easily forget in early recovery that addiction didn’t make things better. I think that’s what I meant when I wrote ‘was it real?’. Was the relief and safety in my addiction really as real as it feels like it was? The temptations to slip back into addiction are because you believe it solved so much pain.
I don’t experience these temptations or urges like I used to. It’s impossible to believe that your mind will slowly release the grip of addiction, just as it will with past love.