A/N: This is the piece I came up with during a writing workshop that I host for FREE every Monday, from 11:30 am to 1 pm – you can join through zoom so why the hell won’t you take advantage of it? Come join us! We are a lovely group and we swear we don’t bite. You can register for sessions HERE.
It’s depression season again but I really don’t have the time for it this year. I’ve got so many things I want to do because I’m in a perpetual race to do all the things I wanted to do in my 20s, now having to do in my 30s, having lost a decade of my life to addiction.
There is a realm in Buddhism that can certainly be viewed as a kind of hell, where hungry ghosts roam in eternity. They consume in perpetuity, a never-ending feast of abundance and glory, and all the power one can imagine and manifest, but the starvation never resides, not for one minute. They do not rest. They wander around this world forever seeking, always longing, without an end in sight. Gabor Mate said this is what addiction is – an eternity of longing.
I find it hard to find the balance between the kind of passion that lifts, and the kind that devours. It has always been all or nothing for me, I’m not the type to go in-between. But healing and sobriety has taught me to celebrate mundanity, to seek the ordinary, normalcy is the aim yet one must never be complacent in their sobriety, be normal but be active in your normalcy, choose normalcy everyday, abandon longing, seek not and you shall find peace.
In this, I find, I am somehow incomplete. Like desire is a thirst I have to set aside, like craving is an enemy I must somehow defeat. Everything is passion for me, and asking me to fight without volition seems ineffective. I want to submit without boundary, learn to be ravenous without a mouth, and hope with no bounds but then I find myself trapped in this vicious cycle of want and need, where my passion and longing remain unmet and so out of me sprouts a fountain of delicious words and artistry to fill that void, creating endlessly to fill that gap, to mount a bridge to overcome this abyss, and somehow form a journey – with a cohesive start and a voila! of a finish – out of the null, and find completion in nothingness.
for #NanoPoblano2025
NanoPoblano is the world’s least official November blog challenge. Participants and supporters are called Cheer Peppers. The BIG goal is 30 posts in 30 days. You can share your goal and your progress and your posts on the Facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1336744293025187/
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