Aoife Henry

If you are one of my regular (three) readers, you’ll know that the topics of addiction, recovery, and more generally, compulsive behaviours we (I) adopt to control or distract from feelings we judge as painful, are recurring themes of my blog. I had an insight recently, regarding a run-of-the-mill compulsive behaviour I don’t consider problematic. It occurred to me, that the kick I got out of engaging with this behaviour was:

a) tragically fleeting in duration, and

b) dismally limited in terms of the joy I could derive from it because it was flanked on one side by the dark feelings that preceded the impulse to numb, and on the other side by the even darker feelings that would follow when the “kick” drained from my body and shame that I tried to cope in an unhelpful way took its place.

And suddenly the behaviour didn’t seem worth it. The brief, tainted joy “high” didn’t seem worth it. Its ineffectiveness to quell by demons didn’t seem worth it. And spiralling into a darker darkness of much longer duration certainly did not seem worth it.

And then, I posited, what if the darkness I had made a misguided attempt to illuminate wasn’t as terrifying as I had perceived it to be? What if it was the cozy darkness of your bed, a hug, or a night sky? What if you rendered it terrifying by believing your thoughts and acting on them compulsively?

So I wrote a poem about it. Read it or leave it.

x A

Like lighting a match 
In a cupped palm 

Amidst a velvet darkness that
Refuses to be infused by such a feeble spark

I didn’t know that I needn’t
Fear the darkness

I didn’t know that lighting the match
Would turn velvet to gravel 

I didn’t know
How ephemeral
That high
Would be

How little light it gave 

How much darker things would seem
When it snuffed.