Do you remember?
Do you remember the fear. That moment. They were wanting to take something away. But you could not let go. Would not. You needed it. That is addiction. To lose it was falling into the deep, dark and hollow, like grief.
In 2024 there is a cure. It’s still not widely known. There are survivors out there. We hear stories.
I’m down the track. Moving forward. Sticking to the plan. But not out of reach. Now, a quick glance back, it’s hard to fathom. But it’s still hunting me. Maybe more haunting than hunting these days, that horror movie I broke out of. The eerie theme playing at the edge of distance. Avoiding it, avoiding going back into it, is natural, instinctive these days. This feeling and the one before are both labelled as pathological. We live in a state of disease. Especially if the act is non-conformist. Once in the zombie apocalypse, you are not allowed to leave. The manufacturers say there is no cure.
Zombie films are not fantastical horror. They are contemporary documentary. You can only appreciate that once you are free.
The thing about the memory of the ‘addiction’, I know it as a feeling, the hunger, is the lingering intensity. The memory of the feeling is grabby and resistant, wanting to gain hold and drag me by the hair or ankle to its toxic snapping jaws and foul broken teeth. Back into the sticky, stinky, sensory depriving quagmire, back to sleep. Promising comfort but delivering nightmares. Some of the intense fear lingers like tickling fingers just above my skin, when I stumble.
I can remember there was no way I was going to give up chocolate, pasta, pizza, potatoes and bread. It was an affront to my cultural heritage (it actually wasn’t). Something I had never thought about until I needed it as a justification. There was no way I could even start. I was walking through the fog. Stumbling backwards in pain and exhausted, to a starting line squinting at all the things being left behind. Looking at the wreckage. But it was my familiar wreckage. Should have been looking forward, maybe focussed on each step, or at least at my reflection. But that takes a superhuman sustained effort. I wasn’t even human back then.
Now, I understand the memory of the fear still has power to trap and hold a being in their tracks. Then drag them down, devouring their brain with uncontrolled hungry thoughts. Disallowing, disempowering the self to try to move along a path to a cure, to better health. You are your own gatekeeper. Your own rolled- back, white-eyed body guard.
Stand up to yourself. Bump the monster out of the way. Give them a shove. Put them off their precarious balance. You just need that small distance to make a break. A moment of self will. Break free. Push off and go! Keep going. Use knowledge to release the hold of addiction. Quash the hunger. Make the break. Get out in front of the fear. Out of grabbing harm’s reach. Shake off the death grip. Escape the hunger and the echoing cries, the siren song of addiction.
Be aware it will chase you with its grasping grey hands and broken fingernails. The apocalypse is all pervasive. Leaping out at you from brightly lit convenience stores aisles. It is the prevalent swampy ecosystem to navigate. But once you break free of it, at the start, use the new found power and energy to run. Run. Find firm footing and run. First focus on escape. Don’t look back.
Then, with distance, time, and changes, maybe along the way you’ve picked up a sturdy bat, built a reliable armoury. That dawn may find you on a level open field, on a clear sky day, calmly breathing, trained and skilled, strong and pain free, ready to turn and face your silently screaming, seemingly unshakable, zombie past.
Let me know the reaction, please.