One of the main reasons I decided to get sober was to figure out the real source of my difficulties. What a funny thing to say, really. As I write it, I realise that how I’ve expressed how I feel is by translating a common French casual way to express, vaguely, that something is wrong in your life. It’s the way you would say that things have been hard lately, without going into any detail, to someone who you don’t know very well, to which they would respond with a generic recognition of what’s been said without asking for any further explanation. This type of interaction is quintessentially French. It’s at once expressive and impersonal, formal and revealing. There is a social recognised boundary which is not crossed by either party in the exchange. Et voilà.

To say ‘my difficulties’ feels like the ultimate euphemism. What I am trying to discover, to realise, is how the very core of my being functions, to understand the mechanics of my unique operating system. Please don’t mistake this for delusions of grandeur, I’m not saying that I’m exceptional, no, this is not about ego. I am at a point of recognising and accepting that my experience with and in the world may not be like most other people. Yes, there are many similarities, human emotions, concerns, troubles and the like that I share with everyone else. What I am interested in understanding is how the brain I was born with is similar or different to most others, and how my upbringing effected my personal, social, and intellectual development. How the way that I think, learn, process, and experience things began and has changed throughout my life. How did experiences and substances effect me, both positively and negatively?

I thought about reincarnation when I was about 4 years old. I remember figuring out what happens after we die is that our spirits continue on. To me this made perfect sense. I was present in a body, when I closed my eyes I was still there, in the blackness, so when I would die, I would still be there too, in the blackness, until I could open my eyes again, somewhere else, in some other body.

Also, when I would fall asleep at night, at the same age, I would close my eyes and press against my eye lids to make colors in the blackness. I would focus on these colors until they would start to move and it would feel like I was flying through the blackness along trails of dots and lines of colors.

Even now, as I sit to work, I am drawn to distraction by everything that is not what I need to focus on. So, what is this urge? Is it my brain, or is it my self – my inability to focus or my total avoidance of tasks at hand? It is so difficult to separate the two, especially at my age, seeing as my behavioral patterns are so very well worn in. This makes it hard to differentiate, as whatever mechanisms that do exist are not only the result of my innate chemistry but are deep neuro pathways, the result of years of repetition, experiences, traumas large and small, a variety of interpersonal relationships, and both a complicated self-view and world-view.

Also, I have my coping mechanisms. Now it seems I am left with coffee and food. I just had coffee and left-over lemon buttercream cake for breakfast. Not at all healthy, but a sensory reward of a warm, rich, liquid bitterness paired with a tangy, sweet confection of no less than three different textures. Seems that sensory seeking is something I’ve always done, in one way or another. Where is the line between normal and abnormal? I don’t know, but I’m sure that I’ve made a habit of crossing it, over and over again with any sense that I could stimulate.

I have so many coping strategies, and have only started to realise the scope of them and how I’ve gotten away with them for so long. You see, many and most of them are positive for myself and those around me. Take cleaning and arranging for example. This is a complicated one for me, as it is deeply tied to my childhood experiences. I grew up with two parents that didn’t really know how to clean and organise. Or maybe they did, and they never had the time or focus to do so. Whatever the reason, our house was always messy. Not an everyday type of messy, resulting from the tornado of busy children who love getting into things, but the kind of messy that is never resolved. Boxes that never quite get unpacked, projects that are put aside for later, in a house that was built from nothing but never finished. We would eat on just half of the table as the rest is full of unsorted piles of papers and mail, and the kitchen bar is the same. Piles and piles of laundry on an unfinished bathroom floor and the toilet mounted on plywood where tile was meant to be. Why anyone would choose to install a textured linoleum kitchen floor, with tiny little crevices to capture countryside dirt was beyond me, but I would scrub it nonetheless to have it clean, occasionally. I was baffled by my parents’ disregard for the state of our home, and embarrassed, ashamed that that was how we lived.

So I cleaned as much as I could since as long as I can remember and I decorated in my head. I finished things that were left indefinitely unfinished, imagined how much nicer the wooden plank floors would be if they were just given the attention they needed, to be sanded and stained. I would imagine this over and over again. I would trim the bare windows, finish the stairs so they closed at the back, so I’d not have to imagine a monster underneath grabbing my ankles as I bounded down the stairs. I still remember the one step that was loose and would pinch my foot if I landed wrong, sometimes now I dream of it and the pain is amplified. I would have definitely finished that step, just tightened the two boards so that they wouldn’t pinch tender feet. I didn’t much keep a diary when I was small but I remember once writing about how I had decorated the living space downstairs, all in wicker furniture from Pier One Imports. To me, it was the perfect compliment to the nature outside, our house was tucked back in the woods on an idyllic piece of land that had been cleared before we moved there. My father designed and built the house with only a little bit of help but at some point, he seemed to just give up, and it was left as is. My mother never mastered how to organise and hated to clean, so the house was just a terrible mess, most of the time, and I was left to imagine just how beautiful it could have been had anyone with the power to do so would have paid attention to it. What a horrible metaphor for how I felt, too.

I could write so much more but now I must work, as I feel like if I continue I will have to go on forever until it is all out. So for now I will leave this too, unfinished.