Misery lite

That was the daily goal "misery lite".  My best case scenario.  In active addiction, in a bad relationship or a shitty job... the best I could hope for was, misery lite...  Brought to by the makers of misery, misery lite has all the great taste of original soul crushing misery but missing one or two components that make it slightly less than unbearable.

Basically if things were just a little bit worse I would quit or leave.  Or more telling, after I've left a truly awful situation I realize if it had been just been a little bit less horrible I would have stayed... misery lite.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" -Henry David Thoreau.  The truth is I would take quiet desperation all day.

But Q.D. is an upgrade.  The reality is way more hopeless.  Thomas Hobbs, British philosopher and clergymen, theorized that there was no choice but to live in society.   Because life outside society would be, in his immortal pessimistic words, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. In a word Misery... 

Joining society is hard when you're depressed and anxious and miserable.  Making things seem a little bit less miserable can be very attractive.

Enter the quick fix of mood and mind altering substances.

  Going from misery to misery lite instantly. Alcohol being the granddaddy of all misery  modifiers. 

Valium the misery lite of the 60's.

And as a man child of the 80's, for me? Cocaine. 

Addiction is decidedly outside society and therefore, as we recall from the reading, misery. Once addiction has taken hold, just being less miserable is the only goal.  

Trading short-term pleasure for long-term pain has always been the basic tennant of addiction. Hitting the snooze alarm on a bad situation rather than correcting problems at their source.  The easiest way to avoid the pit of misery. 

Silly Silly


Even given all of this knowledge and understanding I fought against the idea of making positive change.  I willingly set up shop in the pit of misery lite.  Because misery lite beats full on misery all day long....and the transformation is often instantaneous... positive  change takes a while but with drugs and alcohol you can feel less miserable right fucking now.  

But with this "solution" the misery gets worse and the need to mitigate becomes more urgent.  Becoming a perpetual motion machine run on despair... my misery kept me sick and my sickness kept me miserable.  

For change to happen the cycle had to be broken. Giving the sufferer a chance to experience some non chemical misery reduction. That's how treatment is supposed to work.   A break from the pit of despair.  An opportunity
to upgrade from misery lite to full flavored Hope.  

That's why I'm where I am.  To get all the way out of misery.  To begin to believe that there exists something better.  

I stopped chugging the misery lite and tried a sip of hope... and to be honest ... this hope shit's not half bad.