June 10, 2002

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  I was still in my teens the first time I heard a shrink say I had an “addictive personality”. So, I’ve had forty years to think about that concept and to study addiction. If the shrinks can expand their definition of “personality” to include neuroelectrochemical idiosyncracies, I’ll wear that label, maybe.

  
  

  If this were a personality disorder, I would tend to think I might easily have become an alcoholic or opioid addict after repeated exposure.  But I loathe the way alcohol makes me feel, and every opioid I’ve ever been given has caused some sort of allergic reaction.

  
  

  After two exposures to cocaine, I decided that the sensation of my heart stopping and then racing to catch up was uncomfortable enough to outweigh the euphoria. No problem saying no to that one from then on. My emotional responses to the way prescribed barbiturates deleteriously changed me and my life were enough to impel me, against medical advice, to break that addiction. I’m so sensitive to common liver- and kidney-toxic painkillers that I chose to train myself to use a mind-over-matter pain control technique rather than take the pills. Maybe all this is consistent with “addictive personality disorder.” I’m not qualified to say. Diagnoses must be made by licensed professionals.

  
  

  I find it interesting that I’ve avoided and escaped addiction to so many common highly addictive drugs while being so wretchedly strung out on simple food substances that don’t cause any problems at all for many people. The only drug that ever tempted me to full-blown addictive excess was methamphetamine, and after a three-month run on that I quit and never put another needle in my veins. But since childhood I have been uncontrolledly addicted to casein, gluten, starch, sugar, and probably [although I've yet to find any scientific work even hinting that it is addictive] albumen.

  
  

  Some patterns in my behavior are obsessive. I study obsessively, and sometimes I work at a project with rapt intensity until it is all wrapped up. I become fascinated with a question or a mystery, and I can spend sixteen or eighteen hours a day chasing the answers. When I first met the old fart, he seemed to discount these obsessions, calling them “positive addictions.”

  
  

  After living for over a decade with dinner conversation telling him more than he ever wanted to know about serial killers, or about cannibalism in Chaco Canyon, often fixing his own dinner and slipping a sandwich under my nose so I don’t get famished and faint at my worktable, he is less likely now to take these obsessions lightly. For the last few weeks, he has been forced to keep his own counsel even more than is his custom, because I keep hunching over this keyboard and only glancing up, when he manages to get my attention, long enough to ask him, “Can’t you cut to the chase and let me get back to my writing before this idea evaporates?”

  
  

  If there is any hope at all for me to transcend these persistent food addictions and regain a bit of physical health so that this quirky-but-fun mind can enjoy more geographic mobility and useful longevity, then it surely has to come through the power of Will. And where is that Will? Well, I think it is coming, growing inside me. I’ll just have to turn those concentration skills and obsessive tendencies to the pursuit of health.

  
  

  My first Xanga blog was all about the idea of the “extinction burst”. Right at this moment, my mind is open to the thought of bringing it to a halt. My body is rebelling against the abuse I’ve been handing it. It wants to clean up, straighten out, and dance again. Body/mind still feels the pull of the cinnamon rolls and triple chocolate ice cream, the coffee, and all that crap. I’m still going around and around, but the carousel seems to be slowing down.

  • 1:04 pm
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