addiction metaphor

Maybe for you it comes in bottles, or neat little pills, or injections; maybe you smoke it out of packs with the large cancer warning labels plastered on the front; maybe it is too much or too little food, or both, by turns; maybe it's the way that you treat your body, hurt it, undermine it; maybe it's the way you let others take advantage of you.

Whatever it may be - the pull, constant, and the weight of that pull, comfortingly familiar and yet so damned heavy. Maybe there was a thrill of excitement once, at first, when you were younger, when the effects where still abstract, easily pushed aside, ignored. Maybe once you were impressed by your own cleverness - that it was different for you, not nearly so difficult or dangers as people were saying.

How easy it is to be fooled, by others or by your own mind, bit by bit. The puppet strings that bind you, the chains, grow tighter slowly. Patterns develop over years, habits that become so ingrained that it becomes near-impossible to remember how things were before.

You drag yourself forward through the grass, back aching, balancing that burden that is yours to bear, always. Do you see people standing upright in the distance? Yes, you can see them running and laughing wildly and you wonder how that can be, how they can move so quickly with so much energy when it takes so much determined effort for you just to crawl. How can they be so free?

How? You grow so tired of it. You tell yourself that enough is enough - today will be different. This time, I will stop, I will do something different, I will refrain, take control of myself, my life. You tell yourself and...hours, days, a few weeks and...there it is, that devil, attractive as always. You know damned well by now whats behind that handsome facade - the shame, the dozens of tiny humiliations that slowly wear away at your soul, the things you'd once have sworn you'd never do that now you brush off with a certain nonchalant air because what else is there to do, what choice do you have. You see and yet drawn you are all the same.

The devil you know. He crushes you - you body, your soul, your mind - in tiny increments that add up to so much over years, and long after you know damned well what he is all about, long after you grow so sick of the same, miserable repetition day after day...break away for a few moments and return. Do it again. Dance away from the big changes, breaking that chain for good because...the devil you know. That pentacle glow, that dazzling, false light which remains...so familiar.