A Call With My Hommie.

I spoke to a former roommate of mine earlier this evening. We don’t speak often, and it’s been a while. He’s busy, I’m busy, yada yada yada. Our affinity for one another remains.

We begin our exchange over Facebook chat. Interestingly he asks me if I am still sober. “Yeah,” I tell him. I find this question strange. Not drinking is an afterthought to me; a given. Other people seem more interested in my old drinking habits than I’ll ever be. This is besides the point.

I tell him I’m building a case that I suffer with a personality disorder, and it underpins other undesirable behaviors, cognition, and feelings I have. Addictions, failed relationships, money problems, etc. growing like weeds over core issues. My conception of a personality disorder is it being a pervasive set of behavior patterns designed as a coping strategy for dealing with perceived threats which have grown out of control. Kind of like Agent Smith: designed to protect the system, but now taken on a life of its own.

I initially got the idea after reading about personality disorders last summer, and taking a couple of quick internet quizzes. What I read and how I scored gave me enough to do further exploration, so I’m looking into it more seriously now. And just the other day I read an article about sex addiction which stated many addicts have underlying personality disorders. In my intuitive thinking style, this all rings true.  I’ll explore this in greater depth in a subsequent blog post.

On The Phone.

He asks me to call him. I dial his number. The phone rings five or six times. I begin to question if he’ll pick up. Perhaps I misunderstood him. He typed “Call me fool,” which I suppose could have been intended as “Call me a fool” in reference to his preceding thought. He answers: “Hommie…”

“Yeah man, its good to hear your voice again,” I say with a smile.

We jump right in, discussing alcoholism, sex addiction, marijuana use. He has his battles with his vices, I have mine. We talk about our shared belief that recovering from addiction involves coming to terms with and overcoming underlying issues driving addictive behavior. We agree addiction is not just about the poison itself, or one’s choice of vice; it’s also about those insidious underlying issues dug in like ticks siphoning the stuff of life from one’s being.

Furthermore we discuss how it’s not unheard of for people to squash an addiction to one poison just to unwittingly replace it with another. Case and point: I gave up drinking back up in the day when I concluded that, were I to continue using alcohol, I’d end up incarcerated, dead, or both. Two and a half years later I realized my sexual behavior filled the hole alcohol once pooled into. There I was thinking I’d solved a major problem in my life (and in some regards I did), while all along my underlying issues continued working against me. I’d cut a head from the hydra only to have grow another one in its place. (BTW – if you think it’s a coincidence the Greeks developed that story about Hercules, I invite you to guess again. I believe they dealt with emotional/mental/spiritual problems as we do today. The more the game changes the more it stays the same.)

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