The wolf moves

An excerpt from work-in-progress

The stars

  I keep looking for the right metaphor. Something about misalignment and miscalculation. Going too fast? Going too fast for the world that’s too slow or going in the wrong direction. Most cicadas spend 13 or 17 years underground as nymphs, feeding on sap, waiting for a precise internal and environmental signal to rise, shed their shells, and sing. But sometimes environmental disruption confuses their internal clocks. They surface too early, years before the rest of their brood, and they find themselves alone, exposed, and doomed. They have all the instinct to ascend, to become winged and transcendent – but the world isn’t ready for them. So they emerge too soon and die quickly.

  Who is an addict? What is addiction? I’ll never stop wondering – or trying to describe it. It’s nurture. It’s nature. It’s both. Neuroscientists say it’s a chronic rewiring of the brain’s reward circuitry – the dopamine loop that keeps us chasing the next high, the next relief. Anthropologists might call it a universal myth of longing: every culture has its sanctioned intoxications and its rituals of escape. It’s spiritual and supernatural. It’s a mystery. It’s part of the human condition – that endless struggle to be alive, to feel, to want, to destroy, to begin again. But it’s a human condition that operates at a monstrous need and monstrosity of demand.

  I have come a few full circles with my addiction. I tried to overcome it. I almost succumbed to it. More than once. Know how many times? At least twenty times. And at least twenty times I pulled myself out of it.

Finally, I tried to lean into it – meaning I tried not to beat myself up about an occasional “slip” – and now, where I am, I’m treating it as something dangerous but also precious that it’s just mine, the way my dark shadow is. I can’t get rid of it, I will never be rid of it. It belongs to me, this thing with claws and fangs. Yes, it is a thing with claws and fangs that also shimmers and undulates, that used to make me think I could reach for the stars — it makes every single addict think they can reach for the stars. Because that’s how it starts with all of us – with reaching for the stars.

A metaphor for an addict, better than cicadas, is the migrating birds who lose their way when city lights blot out the night sky. The birds follow a compass that no longer points north, circling until exhaustion drops them from their heights. This is what an addict is: Someone with a big desire, someone completely unprepared.

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I’m on the CBC IDEAS podcast tomorrow:

MAKING SENSE OF ADDICTION

Self-destructive drug use is no theoretical matter. But thinker Hanna Pickard — scientifically-informed and clinically experienced — has developed a philosophy of addiction. She argues against the view of all addiction as a neurobiological disease in her book What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? This episode also features the experiences of memoirists Jowita Bydlowska and Michael Kaufmann.

Wednesday, March 4