Normal

Normal.

A setting on the dryer.

A setting everyone expects me to turn on in my life

Addict.

Are you clean?

How many days?

As if that is the only barometer anyone will use to judge how worthy I am of existence.

As if anything but the number they have decided is acceptable is an abomination

I am some gross detestable beast.

Uncontrollable. A monster.

My humanity is dictated by one ever present number.

How many times must it be repeated for my recovery to be considered worth-while?

What in your eyes will make me a person?

Why is my existence looked at as though it is some form of atomic bomb?

As if my story is some kind of blasphemous agenda created by the devil himself?

Who even am I without my addiction defining who I am to you?

Who will I be on the other side?

Do I get to finally define myself, or do you also get to choose my life sober?

You certainly had your opinions about what made me human before.

I was the weirdo.

The stranger

The homo

“He looks like trouble, avoid him”

“He cuts himself, what a freak.”

“He’s depressed, he’s got issues”

I have never been able to define myself. I have been crushed beneath the weight of your ever- present good intentions. Belittled into a non-entity by everything you have ever hoped I would achieve and then failed to.

I am not a human unless I am a human to you. I’m a faggot. A sissy. I’m depressed. I’m a mess. I have had more labels placed on me than there are on the cans at the Grocery Store yet you still sit there and dismantle every last piece of who I am.

What is left?

If I act in this particular way.

If I perform like this particular circus monkey.

Why must everything be decided by you?

At what point does my life become mine again?

Is that ever anything that I will accomplish?

Is my greatest achievement in life going to be finally discovering how to think for myself?

Will it be that I am finally able to access myself, for the first time in forever?

Why is everything a question?

There are so many unknowns, that it sickens me. So much confusion, I am not sure I will ever be able to be understood.

I am surviving and thriving. Yet nothing I ever say or do is enough to assure you that I am fine. That I am no longer a monster. That I am no longer whatever label you have chosen for me today. For so many of us our lives have become based on what everyone else will stand to call us. We cannot and will not find a voice of our own out of fear, and pain. We struggle daily hoping that someone will notice, and that someone will help. Hardly ever do any of these things come to pass. How do we begin creating for ourselves that which everyone else has from the beginning? How are we to be reborn within ourselves? When do you come back from the dark?

If my life is to be an endless unknown, then how will I know if I have even died? I honestly don’t ever recall being truly alive. I can’t remember having a mind, yet alone how I lost it. Diagnosis after diagnosis. Doctor after psychiatrist.

“How does that make you feel?”

I feel however you have decided I do on that little notepad in a folder on a shelf that I sit on in your office. There is no name for me outside of whatever disorder you have chosen for me. What disease will I shovel down with my cheerios this morning, Brenda?

There I will sit until our next session. Where you will ask me all kinds of questions, and I will guess at the answers.

“What do you truly believe is the root cause of your addiction?”

Oh I don’t know I was born with more heroin and alcohol in my body than anyone could dare believe. I don’t think any of this was by choice. The universe had it in for me from day 1.

This is my story. The one you have created for me. This is my addiction.