If you are part of the group of individuals who do not have a demon addiction to battle everyday, than you can definitely afford to let it all hang out and go crazy and try life to the extreme because you know that you can dial it back to moderation without risk.
I can’t do that, I need to live in moderation with everything I do, to be able to live. I can’t “diet” in moderation, so I don’t diet, I have figured out a routine that works really well for me and I stick to it. The eating in moderation is the hardest battle that I deal with because we have to eat everyday and food enlists all the senses, it also has emotional ties, it fills certain holes in your life. So when I’m depressed, I go to reading and/or writing or some other activity other than eating because it is easy to want to lose yourself in something that triggers that happy center in your brain, if only for that small moment in time. For we all know the regret afterwards, when you are laying down surrounded by empty carcasses of ice cream cartons or cake tins, it isn’t pretty. Thank god that hasn’t happened in quite a while, I have to say that writing everyday has kept me from descending into my periodic depressions.
Addiction is really hard to explain to someone who doesn’t know it. I’ve talked about my relationship with beer and cigarettes before. In 2007 we all had a falling out, it put me in the hospital. I won, people might ask “at what cost?” I would answer, no cost to me. I am living happily without beer and cigarettes and I think that the biggest reason for that is that I am honest with myself, I know that I could never have alcohol in moderation, the same with cigarettes. Once I start, I can’t stop. It might be my imagination, but I remember how that drag from my cigarette would illuminate those pathways in my brain and get me to that happy place. The same feeling would happen with Budweiser, those little pathways would brighten and all you wanted was to keep it that way. What makes me such a lucky person is that by never activating those pathways agin, means that I don’t miss them. I don’t have that itch therefore I don’t need to scratch.
The only pathways that get illuminated in my brain these days is chocolate, anything. I try to stay away from chocolate, chocolate is very nice, there is something so lovely that happens when you are eating chocolate ice cream or chocolate fudge stripe cookies made by the Keeblers elves. If I have one, I can’t stop, I hate it, not the chocolate or the cookie or the ice cream but my failure to stop. Knowing that I have a half-gallon of ice cream opened in the house of my favorite ice cream, Edy’s Fun Flavor Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, will torment me until I go downstairs and get the half-gallon and finish it and put myself out of my misery. What is so weird is that I am okay with any other ice cream in the house as long as I don’t have any,or even the cookie dough ice cream, as long as it is unopened, I’m okay, it’s only that first spoonful, and it is game over. Crazy, crazy I am working on it, honestly however, if this is the worst than I have nothing to complain about. I am aware of my limitations and I am dealing with them. That is what is important.