I'm quitting drugs, but not really

laying down the burden of personal development

There’s an app on my phone called Smoke Free and I’ve been lying to it. 

Every day at 6pm it prompts me to please complete my diary entry for the day. The first question is “Have you smoked since your last diary entry?” The options are a disappointing yes-or-no binary, leaving no space for creative interpretation. 

“Sort of” not being an option, I go ahead and click “no” even though I had a drag of my friend’s cigarette that day while we shared a can of Niagara Cider on her deck across the road from my house. 

Did I buy a pack of cigarettes? No. 

Did I hold an unlit cigarette to my mouth, light it and smoke the entire thing? No. 

Where is the option for “had three drags of an organic-tobacco-and-herbal-blend hand rolled by my friend who is an actual doctor”? I see no such option. 

I tapped “no” instinctively and without forethought because I am an expert in making up stories. I’ve literally made a career of it. Like this story I tried out on my bestie three days later. 

“I’ve been smoke-free for thirty-six days!” I hold up my phone and shout triumphantly, sliding out of the passenger seat of her car and making my way up the steps to my front door. 

“Oh yeah?” She says calmly. “What was that you were saying the other day about being more honest with yourself?” She says this without pretense, coming down gently with her very annoying iron rod of truth. 

It’s true. I am working on being honest with myself. There are a lot of days when I wish there was a “sort of” box because honesty can be so goddamn uncomfortable. 

“You’re hiring that coach because you think you can’t do it yourself but you can.”

“That person you hurt may never forgive you. Work on forgiving yourself instead.”

“It will be harder than you think it will be.”

“You should probably do less MDMA.”

A truth that my fingers are loath to type, let alone publish on the internet, is that it would probably be a good idea for me to do fewer drugs. 

Not because I’m trying to be a better person, the opposite actually. I’m trying to stop trying to be a better person. Even though I left the church of personal development, it didn’t quite leave me. Somewhere in me lives a belief in the moral imperative to grow, to become better, to find in myself today a better version of the woman I was yesterday. 

This belief clings to me like a tapeworm.

I’ve heard myself say to my lover a hundred times this last year, “you’re really growing,” without realizing there’s an entire worldview tucked away in the sentence, and I’m not sure the observation isn’t just a little bit condescending. 

Who gets to decide what is growth and what is not? And what if I (or he) would just like to stay the same for one goddamn second? Is that so bad?

Therefore I have decided to take a break from growing. And that means taking a vacation from drugs. Because something non-drug-doing people don’t know is that drugs are a lot of work. Despite my best attempts at recreational drug use, these drugs are relentlessly working me. They are like the world’s most annoying and demanding personal trainer.

I have had far more difficult trips than easy ones. I have had my heart ripped from my chest dozens of times and somehow found the courage to say, “Yes, okay. And what else?”

People who do drugs are so much braver than you can possibly imagine. People like us are willing to peer around dark corners, tear open suspicious packages and descend the invisible staircases into the very basements of our hearts. We are not fearless but rather willing to be afraid. I am proud to be one of those people.

…but I am also very tired.

I have just worked a 14-month shift and I am going to rest for a while. I plan to eat Cheetos, listen to Ariana Grande and have a sip of tobacco now and then, if I feel like it. 

When I get the urge to better myself, I am going to say to Tarzan:

You were in pieces yesterday, you are in pieces today, and you will be in pieces tomorrow. Your parts are a kaleidoscope of colour and light and you will be twisting the end cap every day for the rest of your life.

There are endless variations of you, each one as complex, beautiful and unknowable as the last. There is no moral imperative to grow, and you cannot have expansion without contraction.

Growth was your full-time job, and you are now on sabbatical.