Shadow Link. Or How to Run 100 laps
In Zelda Ocarina of Time during the brutally long and complicated Water Temple comes a spot where you have to fight yourself, a Shadow Link who kicks your ass over and over until you find the tricks to kill him. It’s a tough encounter, and takes retries. And this addiction thing is similar and a whole lot worse: it’s real, and I’m coming into this fight weak in exactly the ways I need to be strong and practically invincible in the ways I need to weaken. And yeah, Shadow Link kicks my ass. Shadow Link owns my ass right now.
I have no advice to anyone how to fix this shit. Least of all myself. When I kicked cigarettes a couple decades ago, I did it with hours of basketball and running, grinding past the withdrawal symptoms to get so tired I could ignore them. I dosed myself on a steady steam of endorphins, and to this day I’m still running, still exercising nearly every day and I haven’t looked a cigarette with longing for years. It isn’t that simple this time.
Back in Junior High I belated signed up for Track. I was always belatedly signing up for shit. My first workout, I didn’t have the right shoes — I think I ran in whatever basketball shoes I had, and all the workouts were taking place in the gym. Everyone ran twenty laps around the basketball court for a warmup, but one day I decided I’ll just see if I can run 100. I did. I think I presented a problem for nearly every grownup I encountered, which was that I’d just do shit like run 100 laps, ignoring the coaches, just doing it. No one had ever done it before, so I projected it as some kind of accomplishment.
What I want to recognize now, what I want to frame expressly is just how fucking lonely this feels — -to be aware as a kid that no one else believes in what you think is important in the world and to resort to fabricating goals that let you tune our a gym full of other kids and coaches, that’s some isolation right there. Late to the party, feeling ingored my message to the world which did not give a shit if I was around or not was right back at you, world, but I also recognized that doing my own thing had to be within boundaries.
Lap after lap in the gym, the sound of everyone else practicing, dodging anyone or everyone in my path, making sure not to cut the corners too much. I’m sure no one knew what to do with me, because sitting here I feel their frustration — — I don’t know what to do with myself either. Like my grandmother’s dog, I am shivering in shallow water, fishing for tiny silvery fish that will never be enough for a meal.
Throughout it all, it has been far easier to ignore the problems I present than to face them, just as Velma smoked her True Blues one after another, watching the bobber on her line drift slowly in front of her, turning a blind eye to the dog — who seemed to be enjoying himself. The coaches in Junior High Track had other fish to fry, other kids who would actually listen — so they could reasonably ignore me jogging around their court. For my parents, there were other kids. And they could write me off as being — - as my family still does from time to time — - the sensitive one.
Like Velma, like the coaches, like my parents and nearly everyone who’s every stepped in to try to help me, eventually I have thrown up my hands in exasperation, just as I have caved in a million times. Couple months ago, it was really dark for me, and maybe three people noticed: my spouse, my therapist, and my training partner. Everyone else was tuned out.