I'm addicted to love.
Today marks my 67th day of sobriety. That’s 67 days that I haven’t smoked weed. Yes, weed. I first smoked weed when I was fourteen and I fell in love with it immediately. When I was sixteen, I bought what I thought was weed and ended up in hospital. I was convinced that my body was a gameshow: I could visualise every individual part of myself as a separate part, lit up with blaring lights, bells and whistles. Slowly, each part would turn off - the lights would dim and the noise would quieten. I was lying in bed and I was convinced that, once each part had shut off, I would die. I begged my mum to take me to hospital but she scolded me for having smoked weed in the first place and it took 40 minutes of sheer existential panic before she relented and called an ambulance. It turned out that my heart rate was so high that I nearly had a heart attack. It turned out that what I smoked wasn’t weed, it was K2. Spice.
For hours that night, a line from the David Bowie song Cygnet Committee rang through my mind: “I see a child laid slain on the ground.” I was convinced that on the walk home from my sisters, as I was smoking the joint, I was struck by a car and was laid dying on the road. All my experiences after that point - the game show, the ambulance journey in which my mum callously told the paramedic, “this coming from a boy who said he’d never even touch a cigarette” - were all just figments of my dying brain’s imagination as the blood seeped onto the pavement.
I stopped for about a year but soon started again. I was intermittent at this point, returning to it every now and then, but always deeply apprehensive in case I accidentally re-triggered what I had considered at the time to just be a really bad whitey (it wasn’t until years later that I understood that it was spice and not normal weed). I was convinced it was haze, so whenever I’d smoke with friends, I’d need serious reassurance that it wasn’t haze. They’d tell me it wasn’t, but sometimes it would be, and they’d simply lie, and I’d be fine.
Then I went through a horrendous breakup at 24 and started smoking regularly. It became insanely regular. As soon as I woke up, I’d light my first joint. Then as soon as I got into bed at night, I’d smoke my last joint. This lasted for a long, long time. I wouldn’t do anything without being high for it. I reasoned that things were just better high. Food was better, films were better, sex was better, so why not always be high?
I was in a long-term relationship that I spent the majority of high. I’d be excited when she’d visit home for the weekend because it meant I’d have an unabashed time of solitude, films and a shitload of weed. Throw in some greasy takeaways I desperately couldn’t afford and I had the full house of Ryan glory. When I’d get into bed at night, I couldn’t wait to sleep so that I could skip forward to the morning’s first joint. I’d have an important meeting and I’d hazard how close to the meeting I could still smoke a joint: sure, half an hour before is fine, as long as I spray a lot and chew a bunch of toothpaste.
All this is to say that I was a person who would always say, “I don’t get addicted to things.” I was genuinely convinced that that was the case. I really thought that, because I didn’t get addicted to the baccy, that I was above the pathetic concept of addiction. I am in control of my faculties, not external substances. I scoffed at coffee drinkers who’d joke about not being able to operate without their morning coffee: “I only drink water in the morning, I’d never let myself get addicted to an external substance in order to stay awake.” I’d say this with a fucking joint hanging out my mouth. I thought I was so self-aware, and yet I was deceiving myself daily.
In the last few years, I really started to accept my addiction to weed. In fact, I knew about it for a long time. I’d profess to my partner at the time that I wasn’t going to smoke again, and I’d make a grand gesture to prove it: I’d empty my grinder into the bin, throw out my skins, drop my roaches and the rest of my weed tin (an old tin from a special edition Bluray box set of Blade Runner, because I’m cool like that). Four hours later, I’d be digging through the disgusting remnants to roll one final joint. Shameless, gross, and all just to get a bit fucking high? So fucking stupid.
I quit for seven months in 2023. I did so fucking well. I started to convince myself that I could smoke again, because I was so past it. So I bought some. I smoked four joints, then gave the rest to a friend. I was surprised by my level of self control, and incorrectly surmised that this meant I was able to buy even more. Ryan, meet lack-of-self-awareness-masquerading-as-deep-awareness. It wasn’t long before I was back on the hype, and I was smoking more than ever. This continued until 67 days ago.
I learnt a lot about myself in this journey with weed. I learnt how much I would try to outrun my deepest fears by espousing them in a hazy cloud of highness. I learnt that I was operating behind a smoke-screen for most of my adult life, never quite able to see clearly, like looking through dirty glasses. Doesn’t help that I also wear glasses that seem to get dirty incredibly fucking easily. I learnt that I can get fucking addicted to things.
And today, in a moment, I realised something even more important and crucial. You see, weed was my way of not confronting my problems. Of course, it’s obvious that substance abuse is mostly down to people shying away from confronting themselves. I thought I was above that notion because I considered myself self-aware. I have done a lot of therapy, I’m an avid writer, I spend so much of my daily life looking inward at the fleshy abyss of my soul and quantifying it through my creative endeavours. I gestate my observations for days, weeks, months, years, and let them accumulate into epiphanies and neatly-wrapped presents that I present to my future self, like a token of, “you’ve done the work, now enjoy your life.” So how can the person who does this also not have any self-awareness at all? I saw cognisance and actualisation as binary concepts: you either have them, or you don’t. Of course, I knew they were a muscle to be worked, but I thought I was working that muscle every day, so didn’t even bother looking for the blind spots.
The blind spots are where the real nuggets of truths lie. The blind spots are where the bullshit thrives and multiplies.
I’ve been so afraid of zero these past few months. I came out of a long-term relationship last year and quickly entered a new one. I only recently came out of that, and have confronted the notion that killed this new relationship head-on: I need to be alone for a while, to sort my shit out, to work on myself, and to build the life I need for myself instead of orbiting around someone else. Zero, to me, is the idea that you have no romantic interests to pursue whatsoever. When you get into bed at night, you have no one you love, or are interested in, who you can message to say goodnight. You have no one whose messages you’ll wake up to. No one who will be the default person you think of when you want to go to a gig, or an event, or the cinema, or a walk, or any other bullshit we all do to fill our days. No one to cuddle. No one to kiss. No one to fuck. Just you. Just yourself. Zero.
The last two months have seen me referring to the term of being “at zero” more and more with friends. I’ve feverishly pursued the idea of filling in that gap, trying to turn the zero into a one. I think, in the exact moment I write this, I realise that I am the one. I am never at zero because I have myself. But it doesn’t feel like that. Life feels empty without someone to direct my sensitive, insane and dedicated love to.
I’ve flirted with the idea of being addicted to love for a while. I first watched the Judd Apatow show Love in 2017, and fell in love with it. I related deeply with Gillian Jacobs’ character Mickey. In the show, Mickey is a high-strung and neurotic woman who realises she’s addicted to love and sex, so joins a love and sex addicts anonymous group. At the time, I was in a strange dynamic with an ex - we were broken up, but lived together. We were still sleeping together, but at her suggestion, we removed intimacy from the sex, which literally meant we didn’t kiss or cuddle or really have any foreplay. Quite often, she’d cum and then just climb off and return to her room. I felt like a human dildo, it was very fucking weird, and I didn’t like it, and felt used, but I loved her, and reasoned that if this is the most I can get from her, then I will accept the horrid torture it was imbuing upon my soul.
But outside of my feverish need to love, and my obsessiveness around those I fall for, I never really considered what a potential addiction to love looked like. Tonight, I realised exactly what it is. When I was smoking weed, I had so many demons that I tried to outrun by just getting high instead. Cloaking them in smoke, obfuscating their detail. I knew for a long time I needed to stop smoking weed, but I’d buy another one anyway, because I like how it made me feel. “I’m not addicted, I just genuinely love being high and it sparks my creativity.” The level of internal justifications are fucking olympic. Today, I am facing the reality that’s sinking deeper and deeper within me that I truly need to be alone for a while, and I don’t want to be. I want to immediately find someone new, someone to fall in love with, to spend my days with, to share things with, to cook for, to create with, to fuck passionately. I am chasing a feeling. I am chasing the same feeling as weed. This isn’t about the other person. This is me wanting to distract myself from the supposedly-stark reality that being on my own presents: the emptiness of the late night, the hollowness of the sun when you’re walking under it alone.
It’s like it only just occurred to me moments ago as I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My behaviours around weed are exactly the same as my behaviours around love. I’d try not to smoke, but I’d be staring at my phone, knowing that I could pick it up, text my dealer and be smoking within 45 minutes. I’d try to quit, and ceremoniously discard of the rest, only to pathetically scramble for crumbs from the bin the next day. And once I had it, and was smoking it, I’d just need to keep smoking it, and keep buying more, because the idea of being sober and out of the cloud again would be far too daunting and truly insurmountable for me, like a fucked version of the point of no return.
Do you see the parallels too?
I’d obsessively swipe the apps, hoping each time that the perfect idealised person I’ve built in my head appears as the next profile. I’d scramble through my catalogue of past lovers to see if I can dip myself emotionally back into any of them, just for a hit of some sort of validation or interaction. I’d go on dates with people even if I wasn’t interested in them just so that I can feel like they at least want me, and then I can be chosen. I’d end up in relationships, strings of relationships one after the other, where I knew it wasn’t really right for me and I knew there wasn’t longevity. I’d do all of this to avoid being sober. Sober from love. My addiction to weed and my addiction to love operate under the same circuitry, and that actually kinda terrifies me.
How am I supposed to recover from this kind of addiction? I feel like I have built my entire life around the idea of love being the ultimate reason for existence. It’s a transcendental experience that tethers us to the cosmos in ways that are unexplainable. To find your ‘soulmate,’ to fall deeply for each-other, to share the gooey fractions of your primordial selves. Am I disordered in my approach to love? Am I meant to starve myself, go cold turkey? What happens when I return to it? Am I deserving of love if I feel so afraid of not having it? Do I truly need to not have it for a while to grow? Is it possible to grow whilst loving someone else? I know that when I love someone, and when I truly invest in another person, I prioritise them always over myself. That isn’t healthy. I let everything about my own life fall to the wayside and that is fucking abysmal, to be honest. Yet I can’t help myself. I can be nourished from a fucking breadcrumb of tenderness from a girl. Just like an addict can be nourished by a single hit. Until you need the next hit. And when it doesn’t come, you spiral.
I need to take back the power and control of my own happiness. I can’t give the steering wheel to someone else anymore. It is not a healthy way to love someone and it is not a healthy way to love myself either. It is scary because I haven’t really been in this place for 13 years. I entered my first relationship at 19, and before that, I was obsessed with the idea of falling in love. I always, always had a girl to fixate on, ever since I “came of age” at around 13 years old. At 19, my first fixation was realised into a relationship, and I haven’t off-boarded since. It’s time to cool it down now, whatever that means.
Lately, it has occurred to me that the very nature of cliches that circulate around the canon of pop culture are all there for a reason, but you have to experience the genesis of those cliches in order to understand them. I won’t bore you with a string of empty idioms because they’ll be meaningless to you unless you’ve derived them from your own experience, but the most important one of all is perhaps the one that will make half of you cringe and half of you nod in silent agreement: you have to love yourself before you can love others. I know I still have a lot of work to do in that department. I guess, in a way, that’s why I’m writing these posts. I’m finally decluttering my brain of all the rigidities that lead me astray from self-love. I’m verbalising them. I’m putting them out into the ether. I love love too much not to make this work. Soon, I will love myself. It’s the one love I’m not fucking addicted to.