42

Fighting an addiction is difficult. Fighting an addiction alone is one of the hardest things one can ever do. For someone like me who’s been addicted for so long to my addiction (LOL), I know my weak points or trigger conditions like the back of my hand. Knowing them however is a whole different universe away from protecting myself against them.

I’ve been fighting this addiction for a while years and each time I’ve set myself a benchmark of going 6 weeks “clean”; a target I have never achieved until now. Today actually marks 45 days of “cleanliness” stretching back to Christmas Day of 2015. There were times when the going seemed easy, when I was so busy that the days seemed to pass by like a speeding train and 42 days seemed an easy mark to attain. Other times however, it seemed like I was stuck in a traffic of days, the hour hand of the clock only moving an inch in weeks.

The last few days have been the toughest. The conditions were so torturous that I have almost given in more than once. I had set February 7th as the end of my 6-week journey but it seemed to be taking its merry time to arrive and so yesterday, on one of those occasions when the prospect of giving in began to feel very attractive, I counted the days I had stayed “clean” and realised my 6-week or 42-day mark had already been surpassed. It was an anti-climax. I had been waiting so long for a particular moment and it had just passed me by unknowingly.

Now I’m fighting a different battle. A part of me wants to give in now: “break” on my own terms, when the chain of days is still relatively short and when I can deal with the aftermath of giving in, than to give in later in a time of weakness, when I have gone “clean” for so long and when the regret and despondency at the aftermath would probably send me into another spiral of addiction.

I can’t afford to look to far into the future so I am just going to take each day as it comes and fight the battles each day presents and hopefully, there’ll come a time when I can look at the clock without counting down to how long I have left to be able to mark the day as “clean”. ~Senam