Maybe this is not a fair appellation.  What you dream is lush in strangeness, but what you see is mundane.  You don't walk through reality grafting your fantasies onto it like CGI onto a motion-capture suit (you hate that) - but your mundane and my mundane are not the same.  Visual, aural, oral, olfactory, tactile: you experience the full range of input with a sensitivity and appreciation of nuance that flexes well beyond my capacity. You report your experiences with the same attention to aesthetic that guides your sensory joy.  My words operate within a tight margin of error; yours invite unstructured play.

You are not the manic pixie dream girl frolicking about the periphery whose eyes never fully focus, not that sort of dreamer - but, not being you, I lack the proper word.  (Being me, I can't substitute an image and trust to its successful interpretation.  Hell, I just used the phrase "successful interpretation.")

You describe your experience of the temporal world to me, the joy you take in sensations I too often overlook; I think I must be fumbling to perceive your reality in exactly the same way we all begin to relate our dreams but falter because the very act of describing them has chased away the ephemera that gave them their true quality.  And so we use insufficient words: I call you a dreamer and know you are not.  You are far too present in this world, more so than I.

My best friend told his wife that I can see shades of gray where some see gray and most see only black and white.  I thought that great praise, until I met someone who experiences the whole color spectrum with synesthetic fullness.  You awe me.

I am far more realist than dreamer; I think I should understand you better than I do.  Even my spiritual beliefs stem from a practical assessment of what I can and cannot know (it is my act of faith to surrender the need to know and embrace the mystery).  But your pragmatism and my pragmatism are not the same.  My gift is for identifying emotions; yours is for regulating them.  Nearly overwhelmed by my feelings, I have a capacity for immediate vulnerability and expression; in the same state, you have a capacity for quiet deliberation.

We have yet to take the full measure of one another's intensity.  My pragmatism says, "It's not time for that yet."  Yours continues, "...so we're not going to do that yet."

All of the things I know have brought me to this diving board, where I stand both well enough trained to execute a seamless entry and fully aware that I'm about to cannonball.  You stand at the shallow end, where much of the same training took you.  Motioning to the steps, beckoning. 

I'm on my way down.  (If I look at the board wistfully every now and then, try not to hold it against me.)  You ground me.

Sometimes I am erudite - in most of my writing, I strive toward a dispassionate selection of words that paint pictures that reveal my perspective.  This is the me that my coworkers have at whiles referred to as professorial (I always find this apt, even if I don't always take it as a compliment).

Sometimes, I am emotional - I attack the keyboard, slamming the words in my heart onto the screen with a force that requires italicization and profanity to convey since none of you can hear the percussion in my typing or see the grimace on my face.  This is the me that many in my life have identified as "passionate".  A significant percentage of the time, they are being kindly euphemistic: "strident" is a word that fits this me at least as well, often better.

This is gonna be one of those latter posts, because right now I am angry.  I am angry at a thing that cares not for my anger - and as most of us know from personal experience, anger that is greeted with dispassion metastasizes.

My occasional and increasingly rare tendency toward self-loathing aside, I'm not a creature of much hatred.  I despise few things and no people.  But oh, the thing I do hate:

Fuck Addiction.  Seriously.

I have burned the filthy fuel of rage often in my life.  I know its too-viscous, system-corroding gunk with familial familiarity.  These last almost-ten years of mental health, I have made an ongoing mission of my refusal to burn that fuel again.  On this topic, I cannot restrain myself.

Addiction is, if you'll forgive me my bias, the most unfair of mental health disorders.  Consider the stigma: addicts are weak, addicts are selfish, addicts should know better, addicts seek to abrogate responsibility for their actions with the excuse of compulsion.  This is how society views sufferers of this disorder*.

Now consider how addiction begins: a teenager takes a drink of alcohol, a hit of weed, a pill that wasn't prescribed for her by a doctor but came recommended by a friend.  The objectives behind these behaviors are always the same: to increase comfort, reduce discomfort, and/or create additional psychological resources for the completion of some task.  The initial behavior is considered socially acceptable, low-risk, high-reward.  Anyone who cannot maintain the social acceptability of their alcohol/marijuana/gambling/sex-related behaviors has only themselves to blame.

As adolescents and young adults, we are routinely tempted into behaviors whose true risks we do not understand.  We are told that these behaviors are our right and rite as youth: we are entitled to take these risks and the taking of these risks is a gateway to adulthood through which we must pass.  If these behaviors result in negative consequences, we have failed the test.

This is bullshit (I warned you, Erudite Me is not the one sitting at the keyboard).  A bullshit double-bind.  A fatal bullshit double-bind.  A fatal bullshit double-bind that regularly claims bystanders as collateral damage.

Here's the true picture: a teenager, a child, takes an addictive drug.  Usually, the drug in this scenario is alcohol, which most people are incapable of perceiving as a drug.

It works.  It does whatever that child wanted it to do, whatever that child was told to expect.   Told by parents and peers. Told by every other Super Bowl commercial.  Told by Judd Apatow and John Hughes.  Since it works, the child takes the drug again.  It works again.  And again, and again, and again.

While it is still working, producing the intended effect, it begins producing unintended and undesirable effects.  Humiliation and hangovers.  Missed days of class, work, and family commitment.  The minutes spent in regret and self-loathing accumulate; the child either doesn't notice or considers these minutes an unavoidable and tolerable consequence of the intended effect.  With every "totally worth it" and "not that big a deal" and "not my fault," the intended and unintended effects collaborate to rewire that child's brain.  The rewiring is bent around a single objective: repeat the behavior.  Take the drug, tolerate the consequences.

Let's assume that this child makes is through college (I didn't).  Degree in hand, still taking the drug and tolerating the consequences, the child now considers himself a man.  Deems herself a woman.  The rite concluded, the test passed, the adulting begins in earnest.

Maybe this adult with the rewired brain lives some functional years.  Maybe there are years of happiness.  Maybe there is achievement, romance, family, financial stability, holiday cards.  The bills are paid, the taxes filed, but those negative consequences continue to accrue.

Ultimately, in the life of everyone who becomes an addict, there is a negative consequence that cannot be shrugged off so lightly as a hangover.  Cannot be laughed off as easily as being a bit too loud last night.  Cannot be amended as easily as apologizing to a loved one.

This is where the worm turns.  Society - the same set of perceived social norms and expectations and values and attitudes that has encouraged, supported, rewarded, and enabled the addict's drug use for years by this point - now blames the addict for this major negative consequence.  The addict, alone, is held accountable for this failure.

You should have known your limits.
If you knew you were the type of person to get addicted, you shouldn't have started in the first place.
You should have stopped when your friends/family/boss suggested it.

The heaping of blame that begins at this point finds a sympathetic echo in the rewired brain of the addict, who has been banking those minutes of regret and self-loathing and shame for so long that the external judgment is nothing more than diarrhea icing on a shit cake years in the baking.  Instead of promoting behavioral extinction - the end of the actual problem - this shame pas de deux demands more drug.

The addict medicates the shame with the source of the shame.  The rewired brain demands, as an act of survival, that the organism do that which is fatal to it.

This is the double-bind: if you're an American, you should take drugs.  Before you challenge me on that, consider the statement "I don't trust a man who doesn't drink."  Consider whether you've ever been at a party and been surprised by someone enjoying herself without any alcohol.  Yeah: if you're an American, you should take drugs.  But you should not get addicted.  Place yourself on the slippery slope and do not slide.

Everybody's doing it, the drug-taking (this is not true), and most of them are fine (this is also not true).  So if you take the drugs and are not fine, it's your fault (this is unmitigated horseshit).

How conveniently society forgets, in these particular cases, whose idea it was to take the drug in the first fucking place.  No addict has ever woken up with a virginal reward pathway and thought, "Hey, you know what nobody has ever said anything at all about to me?  Drugs; I wonder what that's about, lemme take some."

No.  Addiction is a function of human social behaviors.  It springs up where humans gather in groups.  Where people recommend quick fixes to each other.  Where people turn their backs on one another when those quick fixes fix nothing, time frame be damned.

Now I've described addiction.  Now you've read my anger and you're probably getting an idea of its source, but I have only begun to diatribe.

* This is one of those times people think something is a matter of opinion, or that there is room for debate as to the nature of reality, when neither is the case: whatever else it may be, addiction's nature as a neurological maladaptation is scientifically demonstrable.  Go debate the rest elsewhere.

What follows is a series of journalish things I wrote over several years, on the subject of a person.  The person's name has been redacted.  Not only because to do otherwise would be unforgivably rude; also because the end of the journey reflected in these writings demanded it of me.  Because I found it easy to do so - and in celebration of that ease.

2009
“‘Of all there is to me in this world,’ he whispered in dim agony, more to himself and to Kahlan than to his implacable captor, ‘there is only one thing that is irreplaceable: Kahlan. If I must be a slave in order for Kahlan to live, then I shall be a slave.’” --Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen

There’s the rub, right there: of all there is to me in this world, there is nothing that is irreplaceable.  If you remove all of me from this world, everyone left behind will carry on.  If you remove all that is precious to me from this world, you could take nothing that would as B follows A take me right along with it.  I am not just single; I am sole.  Solitary: fundamentally unconnected, unbonded.  And it is not a natural state.  When all of my friends had imaginary friends, I had two; they were a couple. The odd practicality that touched my toddler’s imagination named them: just as my teddy bear was named T-Bear, my imaginary friends were simply Boyfriend and Girlfriend.  The bulk of my interactions with my imaginary friend-couple consisted of me observing their imaginary relationship.  And this is me at four years old.  I was simply not built for singlehood.  I was a family boy; I am a family man.  And I’ve had no romantic relationship last longer than a full-term pregnancy.  Stranger still: I consider it a victory – if also a cold comfort – that in the years since I failed to make it work with the one woman I would still lay it all on the line for, each successive relationship has lasted less and less time.  I see it this way: it’s taken me less and less time to realize that no, this is not a woman I could make it work with in the long haul.  She is not The One.  Grr.

My best friend challenged me recently to get on a plane, fly to New York, and propose to the one who might have been The One.  But I’m reminded of the scene in Fellowship (the novel), when Bilbo volunteers to take the One Ring to Mordor.  Gandalf advises him that the Ring is beyond him now; to take it back would do more harm than good.  (She might not appreciate being compared to the source of Ultimate Evil in the world, but she is precious to me.)  She has gone beyond me.  She is no longer mine to propose to.  She might have been that other half, that essential part of me – but, though I still love her after all these years, I’m not for her.  She’ll find her mate, or she won’t, but it’s not me.  The fact that I still perceive her as my lost mate is my burden to bear.
 
2011, Part 1
And now, I know.  I know that I will always love her.  That, were we to meet in another seven years, and another seven, I would still take in the first sight of her with craving eyes.  Only my present understanding of unconditional love prevents me from laying this on her shoulders— aaaand that’s a lie.  More than that, more powerful, is the simple knowledge that were I to tell her the truth – lay bare this secret – I would lose the little of her I retain.  That, I cannot bear.

So I give of myself in the measure she’s willing to receive, neither asking nor expecting, nor hoping for anything more.  But in my heart of hearts, I wish for more.  I wish, as she does in her way, that we could turn back the pages and choose a different adventure.  “Separate and unscathed,” is her wish.  “You can’t unscathe a human being,” is my reply.  And I never want to be separate from you.  But I will be.  We can’t continue in this holding pattern forever.  I must say goodbye to whom I cherish.  I let her go, and I let her go, and she keeps coming back into my heart.

Which suggests to me that I haven’t let her go in any way, other than to let her live her life free of my – my what? My influence?  My wreckage?  In any case, I let her go seven years ago, and I held onto a fantasy.  The tragedy of the fantasy is not its immateriality – the tragedy lies in all the realities in which the fantasy finds purchase.  Still so easy between us.  Still that understanding that pierces the ease and sees through – on both sides – to the discomfort beneath.

2011, Part 2
I have let her go.  When I did, I still wanted that piece.  When I did, I still loved her.  After years of wondering how to do this thing – how to let go of the closest thing to true I’d ever known – the trick was simple.  All I had to do was let her go before I wanted to let her go.  Hindsight isn’t just perfect vision, it also – always – makes understanding seem like it should have been easier to attain.

Well, that’s not all I had to do.  I had to tell her – not face-to-face, I’m not that bold – just how bright was the torch I still carried.  I said what I had to.  She said what I knew she would.  And immediately that piece of her diminished in me.
Now, the construct of her resides in my memory, more than in my present.  That’s all I have needed for years.  And – finally – it is what I want.
So who’s next?

2016
And think about it – we call that person in our lives, nearly all of us, “The One Who Got Away.”  Just how right could a relationship have been for you if you refer to its end as your partner’s escape from you?