Addiction
I am an addict. I don’t mean that I am addicted to a substance like caffeine, sugar, or drugs — but that I become addicted to many things. The phrase, “addictive personality” is a confusing term. Often, one would consider someone with an addictive personality to have a higher chance for substance abuse, or that addiction runs in their DNA. To me, addiction is the need for something. The need to know what happens next in my favorite fictional book series– will Kvothe avenge his parents’ death, or die trying? The need to get in the shower, blasting The Cure’s 1987 hit single, Just Like Heaven, just to satisfy my brain’s repetition of the melody all day long. The need to go to the park, to practice the basketball moves I had been day-dreaming up all day. Addiction shows itself in many forms, but the perfect example for me was in 7th grade.
I had recently gotten out of the hospital and was back at school, ready to see all my friends and most of all, go to recess. Except there was a problem, I couldn’t participate in any physical activity for the next few months. During what was usually my favorite time of the day, I was secluded to the lamest place in the school, the library. Desperate to make the agonizing pain of being in the library go by quicker, I did the unthinkable and picked up a book. Naruto looked like any other Japanese comic, but it wasn’t. The fictional ninja world engulfed me, swallowing all thoughts of recess or PE into a never-ending abyss. On the car ride home from school, I looked out the window, imagining a ninja running from rooftop to rooftop, slinging off of street lamps, and sliding down shingling all just to keep the same pace as me in the car. I would be trapped in my room, reading the next volume online because the library didn’t have it. I would be sent out of class because I just couldn’t stop reading what happened next in the book.
Naruto became the only thing I thought about. I pushed away homework, meals, playtime, and socializing. For weeks my only concern was that of what would happen next in Naruto; that is until it happened. I stood there frozen as if my life was being sucked out of me by a dementor from Harry Potter. The library had run out of Naruto volumes. I tried to read as many as I could online, but eventually, I hit a dead-end there too. I felt lost as if a part of me had been ripped away and would never return.
Eventually, the part of me ripped away by Naruto was returned by another addiction, endlessly repeating the cycle. My whole life I have had experiences like this one, where I am overcome by the need for something, and once it is taken away, it can only be replaced by another addiction.
