“Addiction can show us what is deeply suspect about nostalgia. The drive to return to the past isn’t an innocent one. It’s about stopping your passage to the future, it’s a symptom of fear of death, and the love of predictable experience.
And the love of predictable experience, not the drug itself, is the major damage done to heroin users. Not getting on with your life is much more likely than going gto the emergency room, and much harder to discern from the inside.”
-Anne Marlow, How To Stop Time: Heroin A-Z
This started as an essay that brought together Food, Relationships and Drugs as issues in my life. After reading Anne Marlow’s How to Stop Time: Heroin A-Z, I decided that what brought these issues together was truly the issue of addiction, which in turn is question of nostalgia.
Comfort Food
Anyone who knows me, knows that food is my biggest trip. I love to cook. I love to eat. And I especially love to feed others. I love the recognition that I receive from filling people well. I love baking and filling up my kitchen with warmth and good smells and I love working with fresh foods and making a collage of greens, oranges, whites, reds, and purples on one well balanced plate.
Having a balance with food in my life is difficult and something that may always be a struggle for me. While food is necessary and nourishing, it is also comforting, addicting and easily excessive. As many people also do, I must question the relationship between food and comfort and between being nourished and seeking to fill a void of nuturance.
All You Need Is Love
My stimulation, my development, my coping used to come from my work now comes from my relationships. This is something that I decided to consciously focus on in a transition from a Marxist to an anarchist perpective. Building social relationships from the local has become my priority and since it has been my priority, I have found myself being constantly challenged in many ways.
My primary exmple for intimate relationships was that of my parents who were married unhappily for 35 years and really had no other friends. With the recently self-imposed near absence of TV, mass media, drugs, and a shift in focus from work, I have been able to begin unlearning roles and boundaries, ways of connecting, communicating and honesty and feelings.
I have learned to understand when and why I am angry, jealous or sad and instead of just having a reaction to it, I can now confront it and talk about it if necessary. As this focus of personal consciousness has become my priority and reflecting upon my own history has been crucial to understanding my patterns and my families history.
I have particularly enjoyed the role of “polyamory” or non-monogamy in my life. This has been a great way for me to be in really gratifying romantic and non-romantic relationships while not being too dependent on them. It has also pushed my relationships into a level in which communication, understanding, and compassion are emphasized.
One of my struggles is to figure out what the role of a “partner” in my life will be. There is definitely a perceived trade-off between making long-term decisions about my own life and wanting an unknown significant other to spend my days with for whom some of these plans/decisions might have to change. For many reasons, I am not happy with an identity as a single person.
This issue brings up addiction concerns for me, as well. It is easy for anyone to fall into a passive comfort-zone in a relationship because the way that relationships are had are so damned institutionalized. I disdain the thought of losing my independence, but I disdain the thought of living without a companion, too. So far, it has been pretty hard to have both.
Dorothy Day found a similar struggle between company and solitude. She had to choose between man and god. She felt social pressures to sacrifice her class identity in order to worship in the Catholic church. Others understood her desire for spiritual growth as a dissatisfaction of her physical pleasures. It is the same fear of aloneness that I and many other women face and acts as the fundamentally sexist dynamic in our intimate relationships. It can be hard to pursue my dreams independently; they have always revolved around having a partner there, on hold. But, it is when I am alone and okay with my aloneness that I can achieve honest intimacy with those that I love.
The tragedy of relationships for me is always that I can’t know someone in a different kind of world…
“Perhaps I was a little ahead of my time. Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has belief in the redemptive possiblilities of the future seemed so laughable. And nostalgia is not only all pervasive in our culture, it’s accepted as harmless. Until recent decades noone would have dreamed of reviving the clothes, furniture or objets d’art of earlier years: newer was always better.” (Marlowe)
It is easy to not have intimacy with others, partly because of our goal-oriented society. Reading and other forms of mass communication are only good for theory behind our day to day objective relationships. It is not uncommon for our subjective relationship to be misinterpreted as objective ones; particularly in the context of profit motivated and driven capitalist economies where in these realities that are perceived and experienced as mundane are things to be salvaged from a world of detached motivations. Psychologically, we become blocked from seeing our recurrent alienation from people because of our individual layers of ethics of self-direction, goal-orientation and a necessary competitive mentality (except by those who are crazy) those who have counter-culturally withdrawn from economic relations or those who have generations ago and the cogs of capitalism under their fingers (in which case other types of dysfunctions psyches take over.
Due to the difficulties of receiving true nurturing from our world, people are more and more driven to seek comfort in the past, attaining the known, that is easier and more tangible. There is no fear in seeking the already known.
