Octopus Advice

I’ve meditated every morning for the past 209 days. By the time you’re reading this, it’ll be longer than that. I can genuinely say it has helped. But I still cry in the car and escape to the bathroom when I feel the first chest crushing blows of a panic attack.

I don’t have the usual anxieties of a 37-year-old single mother. Any morning I write down finances on my ‘what’s bothering me section’ of my journal I breathe a sigh of relief. And though I feel kinship with those who choose to drown their unnerving maladies with booze and pills, I’m destined for my own neuroses.
Trapped in a web of the multitude of lives unlived, I drown myself; a  near waterboarding, with endless words.

As I sit and write this I’m resting against a large print copy of “Happy-Go-Lucky” by David Sedaris
My tote bag, covered in mystery stains and buttons identifying my place as one of those “leftist types” has an inter-library loan about pain as told through a feminist autoethnographical lens. And a book about Martha Graham I took off the free cart. It all sounds like an absurd caricature of a pretentious feminist type. And maybe that’s what I am. All I know for sure is the endless streams of black squiggles on pages, the constant hum of words out of my headphones, they prop me up.

My Library card is the equivalent of the $20 you might steal to score just enough to get you to your next fix.
I don’t hazard to assume I understand the life of an addict in the deepest throes of uncontrollable need for a drug that could kill them if they take it, or even if they don’t. For reasons, outside my capabilities to understand ingesting substances have never provided me the real or imagined solace, from my reality some people experience.

I’ve wondered what my life would be like if I could become an addict. And then sit in group therapy, sharing the laundry list of horrors that led to my path down a seedy road of drugs. People acknowledging my pain warranted an exit strategy.

I know my opinion about addicts falls outside the standard beliefs. They are doing their best to get by. Horror happened. And pain embraced them. They sought comfort in the physical ritual of altering their brains, and yet, ultimately, it all got away from them. Whatever control they believed to have had was most likely usurped by an unregulated substance. One possibly on the streets due to the actions of a government who believes they are men with the power to control nature.

My hubris of control was slashed and burned years ago. My daily meditations, Yoga, journaling, reading, even becoming a professional artist. They are acceptable to society. People think I have full control. I’ve been told I’m inspiring. I have something called fortitude apparently. But whatever it is you see of me or think about my alleged choices, they are almost entirely actions of happenstance. Of luck and privilege.

Somehow, in the grand scheme of the genetic lottery, I didn’t get the addicting gene even though it flows through my family, like a maelstrom of muddy waters.
For that, I don’t know who to thank. The same universe who has time and again dragged me to the deepest reaches of the sea?!

Like a Styrofoam cup in the marianas trench. I’ve been squeezed of all my air. Shrunk to a miniaturized version of myself, still recognizable to others. And yet, I’m missing an essential component of sustaining life.
There is no space for air down here.

I was cursed with the adaptability of an octopus, as well as the penchant for escape. I’m nothing, if not malleable, but somehow I can sit up straight.