i told you i was trouble

Over the past month I replaced my past addictions with an addiction to celeb gossip, which cleanly satisfied me for a while but of late has severely let me down. Honestly, I would like to know if actual, my-aged people find Britney, Lindsay, or Amy Winehouse's in-and-out-of-rehab-on-and-off-the-wagon sagas interesting in any way. Yeah, they're fucked up, yeah, they might be bipolar, but who seriously cares? Isn't everyone bipolar nowadays? And isn't it inherently characteristic of undiagnosed sufferers of bipolar disorder and similar ailments to be alcoholic/drug addicted? And isn't it completely unreasonable to ask a twenty one year old to never have a drink again?

While my heart seriously fears for Amy Winehouse's well-being as I need her to live for my OWN sanity's sake, I can't take hearing about these three women and every little slightly crazy antic which ensues in their lives for one more second. It's obvious why they're all drug addicts: for the same reason WE are drug addicts: because drugs exist, we have money, and we are BORED. And nothing's fun anymore. And we have no confidence.

But these things will change, as they do with everyone. I'm not saying they don't need rehab, or that they don't need help if they're bipolar, but I think we need to stay the fuck out of their lives for the drug addict's and bipolar sufferer's around us sanity's sake. They're drug abuse makes ours look glamourous, and it makes it look like drug binges and the insanity which follows are our own person cries for help, so we are allowed to fuck up in our lives...we need "help". We've had perfectly traumatic suburban lives which led us to this mess. It's a cracked-out vacation disguised as a breakdown. They media doesn't realize...the breakdown happens well before the drugs.

Yes, these ladies are supposed to be role models. But they're also twenty somethings, as am I, and I know the life I live. No one would know of their antics had the media not existed to blow them up. As someone trying to change, it makes me cringe everytime I turn on the tv, or try to read about how badly dressed the celebs are these days, to instead see them act the exact way that I'm trying to forget. Not to mention the fact that blowing up drug use undermines the actual problems in these people's lives. Amy Winehouse is codependent...only not with substances, but with men. This is what leads to addiction. Her music, as well as Rolling Stone cover story expose this fact, yet no one makes anything of this. The blaringly ugly need for her man on Amy's album is what makes it so torturously human, and amazing ("You go back to her, and I go back to us"?). In her first album, she even addresses her distaste with the way she looks, and her shock that a man even likes her. She clearly uses men to validate herself, a quality I've witnessed in drunk bitches everywhere.

The media makes it seem like stopping drugs/drinking will end one's problems when it's in fact the problems that cause the "addictions". I bet fixing one's generic life problems would end their altogether desire for the substances. There's a lot of talk in health classes about addiction and withdrawal, as though the drug is the thing making you addicted, and not your desire for the effects of the drug. Whether they just let you forget for a little while, or they make you feel smart, confident and as though everything is ok, it's obvious that once everything IS ok, you would no longer need the drug. The truth is that we're more addicted to having problems than feeling OK. Drugs don't actually make people feel good. Maybe the first few times, but the more you do them, the more your problems learn to permeate through the drug and still prod at you in your fucked up state. It's like we're just trying to train our bodies into feeling pain and torture no matter what. We smoke so that we can't breathe, we drink to be hungover, we get high to be paranoid, and we get coked up to talk endlessly about our problems, and the world's problems (cocaine is always the most ambitious pain-causer). Then we cry for help, get better, realize our faces are still too fat and no one could ever love someone who had to pluck their eyebrows every week, and fall right back off the wagon.

Monday, February 4, 2008