You Shall Not Die The Death

After a week of detox from nicotine, I think I'm beginning to round a corner and at three am, felt ready and able to write again. Thanks for bearing with me. 

It's been an incredibly hard week, physically and psychologically, and I found taking that break to focus on, well, surviving it, was a good reset. I couldn't write even if I wanted to--I felt like I was in a fog and my brain was re-calibrating to find a new equilibrium sans nicotine dependency. Someone who had also quit years ago wrote to me as I was going through it that it can take a week to deplete your brain's nicotine receptors--but that it only takes two puffs from a cigarette to re-saturate them. That was high stakes and sobering. Because I really don't want to have to go through this week again if I can help it.

If anything could be gleaned from this special hell week, though, it's the gift of knowing a lie. 

Our whole history as fallen man starts in the Garden with a lie that we didn't recognize, the consequence of which we are still working to reconcile today. The serpent in the garden told Eve "you shall not die the death" were she to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil which she was commanded not to eat from. She eats it and endures the very banishment and death the serpent promised she would not have to endure.  

The lie I was faced with this past week wasn't "You shall not die," but rather "You will die (without x)". In other words, persisting in extrication from something I had grown so dependent on felt like a terror, because I had been conditioned for so long to believe that I could not actually live without nicotine. Like anyone who has lived through suicidal ideation, you have to almost cling to a kind of blind faith that you will in fact continue to exist in spite of the feeling that you cannot continue to bear to live in the current suffering, and that it will not be forever. It's made harder by what I referenced earlier--in the case of nicotine, two hits and all this suffering can go away, and you can return to a comfortable slavery. But I didn't want to go back. Sometimes avoiding our crosses brings us more suffering than picking them up. Even though it felt like I was going to at times, I didn't die. I didn't need nicotine either. It was all a bald-faced flipping lie. 

What else was I being lied to about? Having deleted my Facebook account in disgust back in January at the weaponized envy and leveraged vanity I was engaging and being engaged in, I knew (but only in retrospect, after a similar detox) that the social media bullshit machine is, indeed, "risky behavior" as one analyst put it. I believed the lies that people on my friends list cared about me or were there for me in times of need in any meaningful way, when really that number could be counted on one or two hands. I believed the lie that I needed to know everything that was happening in the world and the Church or risk being existentially 'lost in space' where no one knows I exist anymore. 

I got caught up in a lot of misinformation and tribalism and outrage culture that seems to be a feature, not a bug, of the social media matrix. I couldn't deactivate or simply not use the app; it was too pernicious, so personally I had to cut ship altogether and delete my account. But I have seen people take extended breaks and then come back with a vengeance engaging in the same bullshit that led them to take the break in the first place. I don't know if they missed the attention or the false sense of connection with other isolated moms or the self-reinforcing pavlovian like-share generation, but it can be a tough drug to kick. If anybody asked me my opinion, I would tell them it's a bloody plague and get off as soon as you can unless you like being hooked up to the Matrix or you enjoy fooling yourself into thinking your too important to live without it.

One of the nice byproducts of eliminating this has been how living the present moments and the investment in the local have really increased as a result. I didn't need social media to live my life; it was a lie that told me I couldn't live without it, or if I could, that life wouldn't be worth it due to such a loss. What happened instead is our on-the-ground friendships deepened and we started doing more--hosting events at our home, having dinners at other people's homes, getting families together more and putting out energies into building up that Catholic fellowship not in a "virtual" or "online" sense (faux-community) but in real life. I became more present to my family. I was able to weed out the people who really do care about me from those who wouldn't notice if something happened to me. 

One unfortunate byproduct of the age we are living in is I don't believe anyone or anything anymore. Everything is camped up to be a false dichotomy, whether it's politics or masks or covid or vaccines or Tradition or whathaveyou, and everyone is a self-appointed expert. And the people who dig in like bulldogs and refuse to be corrected if they were wrong is only exasperated by having to have a public opinion about every damn thing so that you can be herded into Camp A or Camp B. It's actually a rare thing for someone to have the grace and humility to admit error, but I always appreciate it when I see it; tribalism has a way of keeping us in our camps though. 

I've written about all this stuff before. But like I said, opening your eyes after thinking and feeling like you're going to die and that you can't live like this is really, idk...empowering. You wake up and realize, 'hey I didn't die. God preserved my life. And in fact, I feel pretty damn good.' Like, what other lies have I been believing that have kept me chained for years, things I was told I couldn't live without?