A breakup is fundamentally a period of intense withdrawals, a topic I’m quite familiar with. See, there are two ways to handle withdrawals, you can either ween yourself off or go cold turkey. Depending on your personality (I’m speaking strictly of nicotine withdrawals here), either strategy can work. Personally, I’m a cold turkey guy- I find that any amount of weening doesn’t really limit me and I’ll just continue forever. Have to just rip the Band-aid off and be good and miserable for a couple weeks and with enough time, I’ll be free of want. I noticed a few things the last time I quit nicotine- one, I gained weight like crazy, like 20 pounds, which is pretty normal since nicotine is an appetite suppressant and you want something to fill the oral fixation. Two, I went heavy into ways to kill time, I played so much League, it was awful. Basically, I substituted the cravings with other things, traded one vice for another. I mean, it’s not a bad thing, an extra bit of weight and League of Legends won’t give you lung cancer, however, the general idea of simply shifting the object of your dependency doesn’t scream “healthy” to me.
This is where we come to the idea of breakups as withdrawals and the ways to cope with them. So, of course, there is the ween and the cold turkey, which would be contact vs. no contact. But that’s not really what I care about here. It’s more so about how I fill the gap, make up for the lack of the substance I was dependent on. Ideally, I can just attenuate my dependency on the external and become someone who is wholly independent on themselves for happiness and confidence. But like going cold turkey, the process there means that for a long while, I will be suffering from intense withdrawals with not much to remediate the swings that come with it. This is my goal, but just like when quitting nicotine, my brain is frantically searching for any kind of temporary distraction just so we can make it to the next day. For the past month and a half, that’s been things like running, talking with friends, going out to eat alone, gym, etc., which really helps with the immediate symptoms- the loneliness, the isolation, the negativity, and so on. It’s also helped a lot with letting me contextualize my own problems and made me a little more optimistic about my future. All great things. But these are all replacements that are mostly helping with the severe amount of time I now have on my hands. It’s a substitution for activity. The issue I’m having is that this only covers that one constituent part of the whole experience I’m withdrawing from and the other parts have so far been emotionally unmitigated. These are things like love, affection, sex, intimacy, inside jokes, comfortable silence, yada yada yada. You know, the big emotional stuff. I know this is normal for a breakup, to go from having everything with another person to having nothing, but the ways people cope with it differ. I’m stuck at a crossroads with mine.
There is, of course, the impulse to immediately throw yourself back into the pool and offload all of your target-less desires and urges and insecurities onto an unsuspecting rebound. I’m not sure exactly how common it is, but it’s common enough for there to be that adage “the best way to get over someone is to get under someone.” I can’t lie and say the appeal isn’t there, it certainly sounds like it could work. But I know myself and I’m acutely aware that doing so would be the same as just taking one hit off of a vape when I’m trying to quit, “just to take the edge off” and all that. It would be momentarily relief for delaying the whole healing thing, plus, in my opinion at least, it’s using a person strictly as an object for the purpose of diverting your affections and desires away from the one you actually hold them for. There’s the added benefit of getting the approval of someone enough to let you fuck them, which is also a pretty decent ego boost when you’re at an all time low. However, I don’t think I could do it in good conscience, not without crying afterwards anyways, which would then require me to kill myself posthaste.
There are other reasons this is stuck in my mind, though, and I think that’s related to me being a spiteful person, a biter. When I deeply reflect on this impulse to hop on the apps and hookup with whomever, the feeling, in part, comes from a place of wanting to stick it to the person who hurt you. Look what I can do, look what I’m doing, I don’t need you anyways, blah blah blah. Not that I have the requisite cruelty to ever flaunt it, but within myself, it would be a small, hateful, Pyrrhic victory. Someone hurt you and this is one of the ways you know you can hurt them back. I don’t like this impulse or the fact that it comes about within me, though I suppose as long as I don’t act on it, I can retain some consideration for myself as a decent person. I got bit, I want to bite-eye for an eye, pound of flesh. There are other reasons, one of which would be being super paranoid about the other party doing the same and so you want to get even A) to show that you can and B) so you at least can call yourself a hypocrite when you’re upset about it. This one is more minor, though, so I won’t entertain it much.
This takes us to the third act in my Saturday afternoon ruminations, which is self-harm. Specifically, the intricacies and definitions of such and the gravitational pull towards it during times like these. I will start by clarifying, I do not mean any physical violence towards myself, I don’t have the constitution for it. What I’m talking about here are things like tattoos, drinking, casual sex, etc. Most of the tattoos I have are from periods of very intense self-loathing, it made sense to get something permanent done to my body so at least I was marginally different from the person who was suffering. Depending on your outlook, this could be either transformational and healing or harmful and self-destructive. But I do feel that pull right now, every day, to go get a tattoo. Again, one part of that is because I want to make changes and that’s one of the easiest, superficial as it might be. The other is that I do have the urge to signify my suffering on my skin, to have all of my woes and grief and pity carved into my back. It’s self-flagellation in a way. These reasons are why I’m not going to do it, at least right now. I can’t in good faith get a tattoo when I know I’m just being melodramatic.
Next on the docket is drinking, which I have picked up recently. It’s fun and it’s nice and it does take the edge off, but I’m aware that I am doing it to distract myself from something greater and also to reduce myself to something more base. When I drink and walk around, I have a great time and that’s in part because I have the excuse of not being me at that point. I’m inebriated, I’m not responsible for what happens, my boundaries are shattered, my lips untethered, the world is my oyster because I’m a dumb fucking idiot under the influence. So, there are two sides of the coin here. No, I don’t think drinking is necessarily bad, that’s stupid. There are tons of good reasons to drink- I just don’t have any. But I’m doing it anyways, and much in the same way I get tattoos, it’s because I become someone else, though this time less permanently. When I do it, I’m very actively trying to diminish my sober self and his feelings and thoughts, trying to supplant them with happy talk and good vibes, pushing everything else to the margins of my consciousness. It’s not healthy and I am being very intentional to not make any habits out of it, but it still worries me some.
Last is casual sex, which I already touched on before so I won’t go into it much. But this is again, the most alluring tool in my self-harm toolbox. Be a bad person, be callous, use someone, get off, boost your ego, debase yourself as someone who had to fuck a person to stop feeling so sad, become meat, destroy your subject status, act strictly according to the base impulses of dick and heart, get back at someone, hate yourself for doing it. It’s a brutal little mental cycle that I’ve been dealing with for a while, this conversation between the natural/libidinal and the conscious and hurt. I can recognize all the ways in which it is not a good option, but the biter in me, and the mid-20s man in me, just disagree.
I will continue to do like I’ve been doing, which is to consciously suppress and muzzle myself whenever my brain starts to get spiteful and self-destructive. Writing this has helped me put some of it into perspective, so that’s nice. Being a biter is only a bad thing if you bite people, so I won’t. It’ll be miserable for a long while, withdrawals always are, but there is no refuge found in the distractions and substitutions, not for me, anyways.
jeez, louise 