19 August 2011
Addiction. A word that almost immediately brings to mind a dark alley with few shabby men exchanging money between their fingers. Some by the corner sniffing and injecting themselves, some others smoking. Then the image of a crowded liquor shop rushes in with so many bodies in a tiny room, sweating...as the air conditioner fails to keep up with the increase in temperatures and claustrophobia is overcome through intoxication. What does that mean? Aren't we all addicts in one way or another? Some of us are addicted to our work, we leave behind our lives and dive head first into our careers , we push everything and everyone we once valued onto the side walk and quickly pass them by. We justify all this by coining new terms- workaholic. Isn't that addiction? Someone once told me that addicts live in denial of their situation and some even go to the extent of believing it’s normal…Who are we to call them abnormal and what then to us is normalcy? Is this a world addicted to what we call “socially approved” addiction..or do we at all call it anything.? Our addictions range from money to fame, from power to religion, from hierarchies to philosophies and to a whole system. We live in denial just as once someone told me..
We call ourselves normal and are ready to point fingers and judge and abuse everything that questions our denial and tugs at our masks. We use and abuse religion, policies, money, fame, imagination and creativity to paint our masks and to tie it down so hard onto our faces that we can feel it cutting through our skin and we bleed from the sides until the memories of our face vanishes and we become one with the mask. We judge those in rehab or curse a neighbor who gets drunk, we banish a gay couple at the mall to hell and we warn our son about his friend who smokes pot. Actually he’s not a friend we tell the world just a boy he knows...who walks a dark alley and exchanges money between his fingers…as we turn out the lights.
hey Alina, great work..
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