Addiction to Other's Addictions

I have a thing for recovering addicts. Well, a thing for books about recovering addicts anyway. I love getting suggestions from people on what I should read. I mix those in with the classics and what I should have read in High School, sans Cliff this time around, and that keeps my book plate pretty full. Why there is such a process to this for me, is that I just (I feel like it's "just" it might be like three years now) started reading fiction.

Fiction, to me, was a waste of time. Why do I care what someone else made up? If I'm going to read I'm going to learn something true about someone or something. Well, with a lot of free time on my hands during the winters in New York, I loosened my self-imposed restrictions and started taking suggestions on fiction from trusted sources and was pleasantly pleased with the outcome. So long story, very long, I read fiction now. However, I still have this huge tendency toward autobiographical stuff.

A few months ago, pre my Palahniuk phase, I was reading some of the book in my "suggestions" category. After about three, all of which I enjoyed, I started to realized that there was a common theme. How easy it is to see them now that I don't have to write papers on them. People kept giving me books to read that were personal recounts of people who at the time were going through rehab. Addition to alcohol, drugs, sex, all three and then some.

This was interesting to me on a couple of levels. I do not have an addictive personality. Obsessive, yes. Addictive, no. Yet, I was really into reading what it is like to be addicted, to need, to crave, to be completely out of control. Then there was the steps that they took to beat it, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but always with relapses and set-backs. I guess I just always thought that people, myself included, enjoyed consuming media that they could relate to and wouldn't necessarily gravitate toward a subject matter so absent from their own lives (this is extra interesting to me in this case as I was reading about being self-destructive. I get when people stray from stuff they can directly relate to for an escape, they go to happy places. The places I was going in these books were far from happy). After I got over the contradictions between my life and how I was filling my head in my free time, I started to wonder why my friends would keep suggesting these books to me, and why I subsequently sought them out on my own.

I know the first step is admitting you have a problem, but really? Maybe I'm addicted to books about addiction, now that would be messed up...especially because I don't think they have groups for that.