Addicted

Overcast days make me depressed and it has been so since I was a wee little tyke. I remember sitting in my room in Germany looking out the window feeling like the world is ending with every white cloud that I could see shifting in the sky. Needless to say, not the best feeling for a 10 year old. Now, 15 years later I have the same half headache producing pressure that causes me to hide my smile under a sea of melancholy. I have wondered why of all things overcastedness (a word I assure you) puts me in such a foul mood. With no explanation readily available, I turned to look at other times when the melancholic blanket smothers me with its warmth and pallid luster. And this my friends is where addiction comes in. A few years ago i was watching this movie on quantum theory and addiction, how these two were linked I do not remember; however, one thing that stayed with me was the idea of emotional addiction.

How many of us have triggers that set off emotions that we are all to comfortable experiencing? How many of us can feel the onset of that aforementioned blanket before the stimulus even stimulates us? We get so used to feeling a certain way that we run back to it whenever there is a chance; addiction, emotional addiction, physical addiction are all interlinked. A great example of this is body image and for those who diet and exercise. This especially rings true to me and the lifestyle I am living (gradual lost of 20 pounds in two years). How many of us have dieted and exercised for about a month and then stopped. Then had the nagging urge to keep going, but still do nothing. What stops us, what gives us the ability to withstand our goals and progress slipping away? The nagging feeling of defeat  that we have preconditioned ourselves with. We feel as if it is a futile effort that is being wasted away and that even if we keep going we are never going to reach the goal. Now how many other situations can you apply this same reasoning too? How many goals have you let slip away because of this futility? We are addicted to this line of thinking. Our safeplace is half stepped failure, we tried hard so we kind of succeeded, but we didn't reach it so we kinda failed. This halfway house of success is failure and if we stay being comfortable in it, we will feed the addiction. Which a lot of us have for the last 20 or so years.

The question should be; how do we break this addiction, or even can we break this addiction. The answer to this question is I don't know. The only way to stop an addiction is to stop doing the things that you are addicted to. Your safehouse of emotions is a wooden, one door shack sitting on a beach 10 minutes from a tsunami. To make progress, you have to go inland and explore the woods, with woods being your inner psyche and the inland being the world (just in case i was being to metaphorical). Only then when we let our safe-houses be destroyed will we grow. Don't let your fear get in the way of how you want your life to be. To some of us, it already has, but it's up to us to move forward.