You and I Are Too Old To Get Sucked Into a Brand New Addiction

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Shubham Sharan on Unsplash

Finally I have an inkling of what it’s like to be a frustrated parent

Stay with me here, I’ll explain.

The view from my perch is unsettling, particularly because I know that any advice I might offer is likely to be ignored, like that of most parents. That’s a heart breaker, just as it was to my parents. Every parent, friend, mentor, advisor, counselor, for that matter.

In the space of one day, I found three articles which hurt my heart.

Let me start with the parenting part, for I see so very many articles online which attempt to parent or correct others who frankly, my dear, don’t give a damn.

Let’s talk.

I eschewed children, for good reason. I’d have been a terrible parent, not just because I didn’t have the best role models, but because I was racked with eating disorders, and the kinds of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCDs) which disordered my entire life. That’s hardly all, but enough.

As someone who would by now typically be a grandparent, I didn’t have kids onto whom I might have heaped such behavior by example, if not outright teach them.

I would likely have, as my mother did me, taught my girl-child to utterly hate her body no matter how perfectly-formed she was (and we are all perfectly-formed, just saying), a life sentence of self-revulsion and permanent self-revision to find a state of perfection which doesn’t exist.

It’s larger than that, though. OCDs leap from one to the other like Bubonic Plague-infested fleas, infecting our lifeblood over and over. I’ve done it. Over and over and over.

I’ve OCD’d myself through overeating, sex, eating disorders, exercise, designer duds, designer bags, designer scarves… my god if there was something to overdo, I did, happily shy of drugs and alcohol.

One of my devoted and admittedly slightly deranged-in-all-the-best-ways long-term readers

NancyL

sent me this article yesterday about a young woman who went from one addiction to another with terrible consequences.

The writer, Margo Steines, had morphed from drug addiction and eating disorders to exercise. This she took on with precisely the same horrific, body-damaging compulsion as she had her seemingly less-healthy choices.

Here’s a quote:

Within a few months, I was clocking 10 to 15 mile runs across all the bridges to Brooklyn, up and down the West Side Highway esplanade, around and around Central Park or Prospect Park. I could run, and far, and I became obsessed with testing how far I could go. My body grew harder and more taut, as I’d always desired, and my feet peeled apart in bloody layers.

I didn’t realize the running was not about fitness, sport or even physicality. I was not out there just to be an athlete. I was out there to see how hard I could push myself, and to carve out a space to disappear into. (author bolded)

She finally realized that over-training not only ages us, but damages us, and can even kill us off. An OCD is an OCD is an OCD, and for most of them, the end result is still self-destruction.

I’m not sure she understands that the next OCD is always lurking in the shadows, for if we don’t face what sent us off the precipice in the first place, we simply launch ourselves over the next with the same reckless abandon.

I could have told her. Coulda shoulda woulda. But folks don’t listen, because such advice isn’t solicited. Not desired. What the hell do we know?

Kinda, a lot, actually.

I’ve written about this a lot because I’ve lived it. People don’t listen because they don’t give a shit what I think; my comments can be perceived as parental, and therefore, suspect.

I don’t blame them one bit either. Nobody could tell me anything before I turned fifty. Even after that it took several whacks on the forehead with a ball peen hammer to get my attention. Still does.

Nobody really cares what you’ve been through, not really. They only care that in that moment of huge dopamine high, whatever it is that’s providing that hit, they are, of course:

ON TOP OF THE WORLD AND FUCK YOU, YOU KNOW NOTHING, I’VE GOT THIS

Like our kids, right?

If on the other hand someone has been down this path already and been scarred by it, then finally perhaps, like the kid who finally has kids of his own, they understand what I’ve been saying.

If you’ve been through this, you’re nodding. I see you.

That must be a little of what parenting feels like. You want so desperately to keep someone, hell anyone, from suffering the same scars, wounds and mistakes.

You can’t.

Maybe, ultimately, we shouldn’t. But that’s another article. For that I will first consult my Khalil Gibran.

That said,

You and I are WAY Too Old not to see that unanswered anxiety leaps to another damaging OCD over and over again for the rest of our lives.

Addictions are addictions. It doesn’t make a damned difference if you think that your new shiny thing (what you can’t stop doing) is healthier. It’s still an addiction if it skews your life sideways.

Want an embarrassing admission? Even writing. EVEN THIS. Why? Because as I joked with

Kristi Keller

recently during a weekend when my productivity soared, it did so because I was using my writing as a way to avoid something that absolutely positively needed doing and I was avoiding it.

My writing can become an OCD. I could hardly stop. I finally realized what I was doing and reined in that runaway horse. Not all of us has that skill, to notice that what we think is so admirable is just compulsive behavior, and had become an OCD, which derails life.

Well ouch. The “parent” needs parenting, right?

Two more stories allow me to illustrate that point, and how media lionizes people who are living out their OCD addictions in ways which seem heroic but ultimately are not. But first, this:

What about healthy eating?

Oh, that can get crazy extreme. This article explores how otherwise healthy eaters descend into self-righteous insanity. And death. At the other end are the mukbangers who gorge for their audiences. They can die from that, too.

A long-term friend of mine used to do construction work for a very wealthy homeowner on Maui. Bruce told me that the man got caught up in the ultra- vegetarian lifestyle. One day as he was meditating in his gorgeous, tropical back yard, surrounded by all that wealth and all that foliage, he dropped dead. His body was starved for key nutrients.

You get it. Now the other two:

This Runner’s World article discusses another one-time addict who is now in the 2024 Olympic Trials. In most cases I’d be chuffed for the guy. I am, to a point. AND I see what many don’t: that likely, this is morphing into another addiction. Here’s a quote which underscores my point:

It felt good to have healthy obsessions. It might not be prudent for a typical new runner to go to bed at 7:45 and order only white rice with egg whites at restaurants and start doing two-a-day workouts and contemplate 100-mile weeks and otherwise obsess about running, but perhaps the rules are different for people who are running away from a heroin addiction.

“Healthy obsessions” is as bullshit a phrase as I have ever seen. I thought I had a healthy obsession with exercise until I was spending more time recovering from overuse injuries than I was in training. What was described above is a recipe for disaster.

So, bullshit.

The rules are NOT different for people who are running away from a heroin addiction. That is pure, hyperbolic bullshit, but it sells.

Here’s another: the natural father of my cousin’s kid was a cocaine addict who used to hang in some of the worst of Miami’s gang neighborhoods. A Jehovah’s Witness got him to convert.

He has since dragged his tiny kids through that same incredibly dangerous neighborhood, risking a shotgun blast to the face as the peddles his brand-new holy addiction. No concern about the kids’ safety.

All that matters is that now he is as addicted to Jesus as he ever was to coke, and he’s taking his kids with him.

Which, kindly, is worse?

You see my point.

Annie Lembke’s important book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence speaks to how our culture has been able to “dopify” damned near anything. We seek relief in the highs offered by the external when the true work is internal. Always has been.

Here is one quote from Lembke’s book that nails it:

“Because we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.” (author bolded)
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

This underscores part of why it’s so damned hard to decouple from what distracts us and drives us past our endurance in every aspect of our lives. There’s money to be made from it. Worse, we thrive on stories about others whose addiction far outstrips our own.

Where the culture celebrates extremes, and this is where it touches my world of adventure travel, it kills. To that, this is the other story that caught my attention.

The Guardian’s long piece about the extraordinary world of extreme skiing (so RAD) is right to the point. Someone who takes a chance inspires someone else to push the limit even further, and up the spiral goes, with inevitable consequences.

Part of me feels some admiration. The part of me which knows better from my own experience with extreme sports (skydiving, for one) just cringes.

I know what’s coming for their families, for I very nearly killed myself multiple times during the most extreme of my adventure sports. I had a very hard time dialing that back. The applause I got was highly addictive.

Photo by Inés Álvarez Fdez on Unsplash

This from the The Guardian’s article on the skiing:

Like big-wave surfing, extreme skiing has always carried an existential charge: its dangers are not incidental or extraneous, and death is not a rare accident that only occurs when things go terribly wrong. Doug Coombs, an American whose style was once compared to “a droplet of water trickling down a rough plaster wall”, plunged to his death in the French resort of La Grave in 2006. Shane McConkey, a Canadian who was pivotal to the development of wider skis in the 1990s, lost his life in 2009 in an attempt to combine skiing with Base jumping in Italy. Swedish pro skier Matilda Rapaport died in Chile in 2016 while filming for an extreme sports video game, the title of which was, simply, Steep.

Outside Magazine and Outside Online, once my bibles for the sports I love, all too often feature the kind of breathless coverage that sends a great many ridiculously foolish noobs out to try something that perhaps only one or two people in the world can do.

A mean-spirited part of me will point to the Darwin Awards, and hope that their line ends with them.

The other mourns talent lost, a life ended too soon, and a grieving spouse and children.

Both feelings are true and deeply felt. My frustration at how we lionize extremes for the sake of eyeballs, Red Bull sponsorships and all that comes with it is real.

It’s the same way I feel about the boys made to feel like pencil necks by the steroid-fueled muscled heroes whose bodies are bought with illicit drugs and whose lives are also often cut short by them.

But nobody cares what I think. I’m old, right?

Like a parent or grandparent, the fact that I have already survived a good many of those very addictions, done many of those stupid things, paid all the stupid prices and happen to still be standing, healthy and hearty is meaningless.

As meaningless as any parental figure intoning unsolicited advice about taking drugs, drinking, unprotected sex, too much social media.

Truth is I CAN relate. Truth is I DO know what it feels like to be in the grip of a dopamine dervish.

I also absolutely, positively DO know how to break the cycle.

Hell, don’t listen to me. Here’s what Lembke writes:

“I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to. The rewards of finding and maintaining balance are neither immediate nor permanent. They require patience and maintenance. We must be willing to move forward despite being uncertain of what lies ahead. We must have faith that actions today that seem to have no impact in the present moment are in fact accumulating in a positive direction, which will be revealed to us only at some unknown time in the future. Healthy practices happen day by day. My patient Maria said to me, “Recovery is like that scene in Harry Potter when Dumbledore walks down a darkened alley lighting lampposts along the way. Only when he gets to the end of the alley and stops to look back does he see the whole alley illuminated, the light of his progress.” (author bolded)
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Photo by Iva Rajović on Unsplash

That is indeed what I have done. Still do. Must do, for the urge to merge with something that utterly consumes me lives in me still, and likely will to the end of my days.

Am I a master at it?

Hell no.

Am I better than I used to be?

Hell yes.

Am I scared that I might get sucked into a compulsion again?

Because I can parent myself well enough to see the symptoms and do an intervention.

That’s paid for with time, loss, failure, pain, withdrawal, patience, and a willingness to stand in front of what frightens me. Terrifies me, in fact.

Many writers have spent time with the book No Bad Parts. This is a fine time to consider which of your parts urges you to push beyond your limits to the point of pain.

Here is where I wrap this discussion, because in our shame-motivated, pain-loving society, this is the worst of all.

Lembke warns us to be careful of getting addicted to pain.

I did get addicted to pain. It’s impossible to describe the agony I have gone through unless you can imagine 28 root canals. I did have 28 root canals. That’s barely a fraction of what my eating disorders cost me. You get my meaning.

One final quote from Lembke:

The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, leads to pain.

There is no freedom if we cannot stop what we are doing.

There is no freedom if we cannot stop running from ourselves.

There is no freedom without embracing all our complex parts, and asking why they are running so hard.

This isn’t advice. Just an invitation. You gotta do you, live you, and pay “the price that life exacts for granting peace,” quoting Amelia Earhart.

I will never say I told you so.

I do most earnestly hope you don’t take as long as I did to realize that there was nothing in my life that needed escaping. Just facing.

For it was always myself that I could not face, an inner child who deserved a deeply loving parent.

I get to do that now.

Let’s play.

Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash

Thank you for spending your precious time with me today. I hope you got value from this challenging piece and were moved to consider your life and those lives around you, and how we are spending them. If you enjoyed this or were moved by it, please consider

If you know someone who is struggling with an OCD who might be open to reading someone else’s experiences - in that we are validated for not being alone in this way, please also consider

Either way, I wish you peace, freedom from what frightens you most, safe journey, and much joy.