It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction Addiction Recovery Aging Growth Healing Mental Illness Recovery

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction Coping Drug Addiction Growing Healing Heroin Mental Illness Recovery

The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction Addiction Recovery Drugs Heroin Mental Illness Recovery

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway, never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction Addiction Recovery Aging Death Mental Illness Recovery Time

The fear of the drugs running out is managable-the fear of time running down isn't.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction Recovery Drug Addiction Drugs Heroin Mental Illness Recovery

Once upon a time the future was supposed to be brighter, shinier and more fun. When did that vision pass? When did the word 'new' lose it's luster? Now the past is supposed to hold the hopes we once confided to the future. We're directing attachments that used to go forward backward.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction Addiction Recovery Death Fear Nostalgia Recovery Time Aging

Addiction is a bargain with the cosmos: only stay time, and I'll remain in this holding pattern, too. The uncrossable gap between now and the past is given tangible form and conquered, daily, in the real but bridgeable gap between what I need and what I can get. Addiction creates a god so that time will stop--why all gods are created. God might be another story.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction Heroin

If I had to offer up a one sentence definition of addiction, I'd call it a form of mourning for the irrecoverable glories of the first time...addiction can show us what is deeply suspect about nostalgia. That drive to return to the past isn't an innocent one. It's about stopping your passage to the future, it's a symptom of fear of death, and the love of predictable experience. And the love of predictable experience, not the drug itself, is the major damage done to users.

~ Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe Addiction And Recovery Drug Addiction Drugs Recovery