addictions
maybe i really am addicted to lip balm. my friend "a" told me there really is such a thing. so i looked it up on the web and found a quiz on ivillage. i have several tubes of lip balm: one in my bathroom cabinet, one in my bag, one in my car, one on my dresser in my apt. bedroom, one on the dresser in my room at my parents' house, one in the duffel bag i take to the gym, and one in my cute little clinique makeup bag.
in all seriousness, i've been thinking about kurt cobain's journal and what it elicited in me as i skimmed it.
i might sound like a hypocrite for saying what i'm going to say since i've now joined a community of online diarists complete with links to my favorite reads, and people who read me. but it gave me a strange almost uncomfortable feeling to be reading all of these handwritten spiral notebook pages that i'm not sure kurt himself would have wanted the world to see. i have mixed feelings about courtney love's decision to publish her late husband's journals and expose his innermost thoughts and torment. i don't know. maybe it's just me. nonetheless, since it was published and out there in the book section at costco, i'm only human and couldn't help but pick it up with an overwhelming feeling of curiosity and yet the feeling i was somehow spying on someone. it's always so fascinating to get a glimpse into other people's lives and a diary is the purest form you can get because that's where a person is vulnerable and stripped to honesty. when it's done right, a diary lets readers see the real deal. having majored in english, i can easily say that some of my favorite works in school were autobiographies, biographies and diaries. having said this,with my online journal sometimes i get tempted to censor some of the things i say here for fear of being judged or offending people with my raw emotions. sometimes i worry that people feel uncomfortable and find me too intense. sometimes i worry that the wrong people will gain access to my page and, if they're people i know in rl, my life will become fodder for their gossip. a few times i've thought about password protecting my journal and only giving access to those who have listed me as a favorite. (but at least for now i've decided not to do it).
kurt cobain's journal didn't really leave any answers to questions surrounding his death. but i was struck by his 2nd to last entry (written sometime in 1993). he wrote about heroin addiction and so much of it exemplified the stuff i learned in my substance abuse theory class and in my actual work doing substance abuse intakes and assessments with a college age population. in a way it was poignant and saddened me as i read about how a person falls into the grips of heroin use, how so many people struggle to overcome addiction for 15-20 years or more. the length of time it takes to get clean (and many never succeed in getting there) is really sobering (no pun intended). i don't know specifically how long kurt cobain battled his drug demons. however what i do know is that development and growth stop when drug abuse and addiction start. it's so sad because you can have a 35-year-old client who is essentially still a 15-year-old. as i closed the cover and set it back down on the pile of books i felt kind of sad. despite the well-known hits he released in the early 1990's, his really was a life of wasted talent. so sad.
anyway i guess in my rambling i wanted to say that the word addiction is overused and that i don't really think my lip balm use is a problem. . . or is it?
