One of the challenges of detoxing one’s system from chemical agents, which is what I am doing this week, (I have not had a drink of coffee or an alcoholic beverage in four days), is how to deal with the empty spaces that suddenly appear when one is no longer preparing for, or indulging oneself in, the consumption of these things. No more coffee refills several times a day and no more glasses of wine or cans of beer before going to bed. I just want to feel what life was like before these things became so important and seemingly necessary to me.
So far, so good. No headaches, no physiological disturbance that I’ve noticed. These addictions were only emotional, rather than chemical.
Of course, the emotional addiction that I struggle with the most- my incessant drive to have the attention and praise of others, is much more difficult to disengage from. How do I even measure progress in this? One can count the cups of coffee or the alcoholic beverages, but how do I count the mental and subliminal occurrences of this pernicious striving? Like a jealous deity, my emotional addiction to attention and praise requires more and more sacrifices of personal resources to feed its ghoulish hunger.
Honestly, why do I so often feel that I am the most interesting and the most important person in the room? I am reminded of my friend EH, who exhibits similar faults. Thank God for EH! He so beautifully reminds me that it’s easier to notice the unseemly hidden traits in myself by seeing them, (as if in a display case!) in the behavior of another child of Eve.
Maybe it was just me, but when EH was sharing from his autobiographic book recently, he sounded overly attached to his sense of giftedness and uniqueness. But then I had to tell myself to stop. I recalled that I also have recently written and published an autobiography. I began to wonder: Is my case any different from EH’s? Let me place myself in his world for a moment and see what I can learn. I can image that as EH was writing his story, he, like me, reveled in the attention it might (surely must!) give him. “Finally!” I can hear him saying to himself, “A chance to shakes the scales off of all those people who have for so long neglected me and misunderstood me. When I have finally delivered to them the necessary and authorized version of my personal story, won’t it be the most wonderful moment, singular and sweet?”
To be continued…
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