My Substance Abuse

On withdrawal

I used to take large doses of psychedelics in the hope of fixing my problems, healing my pain, and waking up in another reality. It didn’t work.

The dissociation in my life had begun long before that. A slow disconnection from what was true and real, which created pain, and the pain created more things that required dissociation, which created more pain. Every bandaid became a new wound that needed its own bandaid. Every escape created a new thing to escape from.

Cheating was the culmination of a long process of checking out. I had been unable to sit with myself for years, and so I reached for a hit of something that let me avoid feeling my pain.

Then came hiding. I was no longer just running from the original pain, I was now running from what I did while running from it. My nervous system was wired, I always felt like the next moment I would be exposed. I performed various roles, and the stress of maintaining the show was splitting me from the inside out.

Then came substances. Mushrooms, trying to find an answer that would appear somewhere “out there.” Secretly using ketamine, which didn’t just numb the pain but disconnected me from the person feeling it. Marijuana to soften the edges. Nicotine to try and regulate a system that was constantly in pain. I almost overdosed on cocaine alone in my meditation room. The place I built for presence became the place I nearly died trying to escape it. I would come down from one substance and reach for the next.

Then came spirituality. I would sit in ceremony hoping the medicine would do the work I was too afraid to do sober. I read books about consciousness while my conscience was screaming at me to just tell the truth. I would meditate in silence hoping that would replace the conversation I needed to have out loud. I could build an entire identity around awakening while using every tool of it to avoid the one thing that actually needed to be faced.

Each step was its own medicine along the journey. But I was still trying to escape what was there all along.

All that running, hiding, and avoiding generated its own chaos, and the chaos became another addiction. I got hooked on the dysregulated existence itself. The drama, the crisis, the conflict, all of it started to feel like being alive because simply being felt like dying. So I kept manufacturing intensity, because the alternative was truly feeling.

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An addict doesn’t keep using because the drug feels good. An addict keeps using because the moment between hits is where the pain lives. Israel lives in that cycle. Another crisis before the last one ends. Another war before the grief settles. Another slogan before the silence. Together we will win. Am Yisrael Chai. We love life.

Music festivals, nightlife, pride parades, yoga classes, coffee shops, just miles from the walls of a concentration camp. These things may look like celebrations of life and joy, but you can’t celebrate life while participating in industrial death and destruction down the road.

People drive to work just miles from the rubble where millions of people once had homes. They pass through checkpoints without internalizing what checkpoints even mean, or what they do to the people who don’t get to pass through them freely. They watch the news and see total destruction, and the images don’t register.

The incoherence is everywhere, invisible to the people inside it.

That invisibility is not ignorance, it is dissociation. I was not ignorant of what I had done in my personal life. I knew, and my body knew, but I could function as if it wasn’t there. Israel is not ignorant. Israel knows. Soldiers film it themselves. Politicians say it out loud. Media broadcasts it plainly. But the dissociation allows it to function as if it doesn’t.

I championed Zionism as a way to feel connected to something bigger because being myself was too hard without it. I could outsource my identity to this collective thing rather than become sovereign in my own. The slogans, stories, flags, and ribbons functioned the same way my ketamine functioned, removing me from the person who would have to feel something unbearable. A collective break from reality maintained by the same mechanism that kept me in hiding for years, each act of avoidance convincing me I was actually fine.

Stopping doesn’t require a new ideology or a better argument or more information. It requires the willingness to stop reaching for the next thing that will take the edge off, and to sit with the withdrawal.

Withdrawal was the hardest thing I have ever done. Not from any single substance but from everything. The substances, the stories, the dramas, the performing, the hiding, the spiritual bypassing, the identity I built to avoid being with my pain.

When I finally sat with all of it, I could see what was right in front of me. The people I had been taught to fear were human. The system I had been taught to protect was not benevolent. The pain I was dissociating from was mine. It had all been visible the entire time. I just couldn’t see it because seeing it would have required me to feel it, and feeling it would have required me to change, and change is hard and costly.

But the cost of change is nothing compared to the cost of staying the same.

כאן

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