the revelation

I’ve been addicted to many things.

By this I mean, in some way, shape or form, acting compulsively to do something which may not have been aligned with what I really wanted do. Maybe it’s that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

Smoking tobacco. Smoking weed. Poker machines. Video games. Compulsive eating. Viewing pornography. For nearly 20 years, I’ve fought the tide of compulsive behaviour in one or all of these forms consistently. Most of these battles were silent. I was gainfully employed. I socialized. To family and close friends there was an understanding that I smoked too much weed and this was a problem, but to everyone else, I was a normal, quiet guy.

The revelation is that it took me over fifteen years to learn that everything I though I knew about addiction was wrong. The concept that you’re prone to do something because somehow you can’t control your own behaviour is a myth. A catastrophic ideal that lead me to believe that somehow I wasn’t in control of my own actions. It’s ok, I’m addicted. I hated this idea. But I was prone, I was consistent, I’d proved to myself over and over again that my behaviour was inherent, it was destined, it was repetitive. No matter how many times I tried to resist smoking more weed, I would end up doing so anyway.

The change in this understanding was actually conceptualizing the action of smoking and how all the talk about it is how difficult it could be to stop. How it’s ok. Everyone finds it hard. Most people can’t stop. But if you really break it down, what that says is you can’t stop doing something which you don’t want to do.

Really?

Well fuck that.

The change was about empowering myself. It was returning from the paradigm where I was governed by all my previous actions to be destined to act again in the same way to – I am in control of my life. Every time I choose to make a decision, I have no fate burdened upon me by the decisions I’ve made in the past.

The past no longer exists, and every time I need to make a decision I’m free to make it regardless of what I’ve chosen in the past.

Ultimately, this blog is about learning about personal power, and how if you change the way you think, you can control everything in your life.