Here is the foundation of addiction –
that it has no foundation,
that it is rupture,
co-rupture,
corruption.
You get into an addiction, a habit, because it balances something.
There is a kind of existence that feels ‘centred’, and something about you, or your existence, an affliction, is pulling you off that centre, and the addiction is what you use to rebalance the affliction.
So you set up a system:
on the one side the ingrained behaviour, the affliction, which pulls you off centre;
and on the other the addiction, the outgrained behaviour, which makes you feel better.
And it more or less works.
The problem is that the existence that you called ‘centred’ becomes the fault line of two warring continents:
‘The Affliction’ –
your genetic predisposition, your karma, the deep embed of your psyche, your grief, your pain;
vs
‘The Addiction’ –
that which has the power, temporarily, to redress the balance,
relieve the stress of the ‘Affliction’, to make you feel a little better for a while.
Nothing is gravitating to the centre.
The extremes are pushing their weights farther and farther out to keep the balance;
a tightrope walkers pole, weighted on either end, growing longer and longer.
Simultaneously the two extremes come to need one another more and more –
take away either extreme and there is a terrible fall.
The situation is,
inevitably,
increasingly tenuous.