Some people abstain from alcohol or drugs because the attempt to use intoxicants in moderation has not agreed with them. The glittering substances may look beautiful, but for these people they are all destructive, all the time.
As an adult I have been involved in two abusive relationships. Each coerced me to stay. Each situation was also inverosimil enough that it was hard to believe it was really taking place. For a long time I forgot that I had the right to question not just the problems in these relationships, but the relationships themselves. I forgot that I had the option to leave. I believed I must find a way to make things work through negotiation.
The first of these relationships was with Reeducation, and the next with a person. In both cases, I attempted to negotiate for a long time. But the only answer was to pull out the thorns. By their roots.
I am uncomfortable with the addiction model, and more uncomfortable with its extension to areas of life not involving any actual substances. Therefore I will not speculate as to whether these abusive relationships were also “addictive.” I think they were more like mental incarceration, in which I was coerced to collude – this, of course, being the objective of abuse. I will say, however, that these relationships could not be negotiated with. They had to be dropped completely, the way some people drop whiskey or morphine.
Reeducation, however, wanted me to drop research and research oriented writing like that. For my own reasons dropped a research project, but I would not drop my research job. So Reeducation took my research field and poisoned it. The scene of work was now a devastated marsh. I was performing obsolete operations on a dead patient.
I have pulled Reeducation out by the root. It still seems to be a ghost, however, and it stalks me. I am definitely not a pacifist, or nonviolent, or a Bodhisattva – or a namby-pamby white girl in a position to simper and “let it go.” I do not consider it a sin to be angry and I do not believe anger is a cover for anything else. When I catch Reeducation on my path I kick it in the stomach with my Mexican cowboy boot. It falls off the pier and sinks into the bayou. I watch the bubbles until they stop coming up. Soon it will be permanently dead and I, relieved and satisfied.
Already on many days the words and ideas are lush and easy in my study, breezy and green like banana palms, growing before my eyes, shimmering in late sun.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Excellent post. As I say often: “If you are not angry, you are not paying attention.” I don’t buy the story that anger is always self-destructive, but I’ve seldom seen that idea as well-articulated as here.
The principle of insufficiency can be of use here too — for what is the worst that can happen if you pull out the poisonous roots that are bothering you? The worst is that you and the other party will both be reduced to your own individual insufficiencies — which is everybody’s natural state.
I had actually written this post weeks ago in a moment of clarity – I have weeks in which I write many posts, and weeks in which I write none, but they are programmed to come up at the rate of about one a day. Today, oddly, the day this one was programmed to come up, does seem to be the day on which I kicked the habit. (I am still watching out, of course ;-)).
Good one!
“Already on many days the words and ideas are lush and easy in my study, breezy and green like banana palms, growing before my eyes, shimmering in late sun.”
That sounds so good.