 13. Beautiful Losers. Have you ever noticed that addicts are often extremely interesting people? Addiction itself is excruciatingly boring. It's boring because it's predictable. The lies, the evasions, the transparent self-justifications, and self-exonerations. But the addict himself is often a colorful and fascinating person. If he has been a substance abuser for any length of time, his story often reads like a novel, packed with drama, conflict, and intrigue. If the addict's drug of choice is alcohol, the narrative is frequently one of job loss, domestic abuse, divorce, abandonment of children, bankruptcy. If class one narcotics or the culprit, the tale often includes troubles with the law, crime, prison time, violence, even death. Of course, you and I can be addicted to a number of things. To love, to sex, to worship of our own children, or our parents, to dominance, to submission. We can even be addicted to ourselves, see Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump. Such individuals can be absolutely fascinating at the same time that they're boring as hell. What then is the connection between addiction and resistance? 14. Art and Addiction For the past several years, I've written a weekly post on my website called Writing Wednesdays. Far and away, the most popular entries in that space have been in my Artist and Addict series. One of the points those posts made was that there's not that big a difference between an artist and an addict. Many artists are addicts and vice versa. Many are artists in one breath and addicts in another. What's the difference? The addict is the amateur, the artist is the professional. Both addict and artist are dealing with the same material, which is the pain of being human and the struggle against self-sabotage. But the addict slash amateur and the artist slash professional deal with these elements in fundamentally different ways. When I say addiction, by the way, I'm not referring only to the serious clinical maladies of alcoholism, drug dependence, domestic abuse, and so forth. Web surfing counts too. So do compulsive texting, sexting, twittering, and facebooking. Distractions. Displacement activities. When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling, meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves. Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard, it hurts. It demands entering the pain zone of effort, risk, and exposure. So we take the amateur route instead. Instead of composing our symphony, we create a shadow symphony, of which we ourselves are the orchestra, the conductor, the composer, and the audience. Our life becomes a shadow drama, a shadow startup company, a shadow philanthropic venture. Have you ever been to New Orleans? In Tennessee Williams-esque Southern cities, Savannah and Charleston also come to mind. You find characters, the colorful old lady with 39 cats, the purple-haired dude who has turned his apartment into a shrine to James Dean. In the South, you can get away with that stuff. It's kind of cool. The shadow enactment has been elevated to such a level that it becomes folklore, even almost art. My life used to be a shadow novel. It had plot, characters, sex scenes, action scenes. It had mood, atmosphere, texture. It was scary. It was weird. It was exciting. I had friends who were living out shadow movies or creating shadow art or initiating shadow industries. These were our addictions and we worked them for all they were worth. It was only one problem. None of us was writing a real novel or painting a real painting or starting a real business. We were amateurs living in the past or dreaming of the future while failing utterly to do the work necessary to progress in the present. When you turn pro, your life gets very simple. The zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often lead lives so plain they're practically invisible. Miyamoto Musashi's dojo was smaller than my living room. Things became superfluous for him. In the end, he didn't even need a sword. The amateur is an egotist. He takes the material of his personal pain and uses it to draw attention to himself. He creates a life, a character, a personality. The artist and the professional on the other hand have turned a corner in their minds. They have succeeded in stepping back from themselves. They have grown so bored with themselves and so sick of their petty bullshit that they can manipulate those elements the way a hazmat technician handles weapons-grade plutonium. They manipulate them for the good of others. What were once their shadow symphonies become real symphonies. The color and drama that were once outside now move inside. Turning pro is an act of self-abnegation. Not self with a capital S but little S self. Ego, distraction, displacement, addiction. When we turn pro, the energy that once went into the shadow novel goes into the real novel. What we once thought was real, the world, including its epicenter ourselves, turns out to be only a shadow. And what it seemed to be only a dream becomes now the reality of our lives. 15. Resistance and Addiction. The pre-addictive individual, i.e. you and I when we're young, experiences a calling to art, to service, to honorable sacrifice. In other words, we experience positive aspiration, a vision of the higher realized self we might become. The intimation of this calling is followed immediately by the apparition of resistance, fear, self-doubt, self-sabotage. What makes this moment so soul precarious is that most of us are unconscious in the event of both our aspirations and our resistance. We're asleep. We know only that something is wrong and we don't know how to fix it. We're restless. We're bored. We're angry. We burn to accomplish something great, but we don't know where to begin. And even if we did, we'd still be so terrified that we couldn't take a step. Enter a drink, a lover, a habit. Addiction replaces aspiration. The quick fix wins out over the long, slow haul. 16. Addiction and Shadow Careers. When we can't stand the fear, the shame, and the self-reproach that we feel, we obliterate it with an addiction. The addiction becomes the shadow version, the evil twin of our calling to service or to art. That's why addicts are so interesting and so boring at the same time. They're interesting because they're called to something. Something new, something unique, something that we, watching, can't wait to see them bring forth into manifestation. At the same time, they're boring because they never do the work. Instead, the addict enacts his aspiration in shadow form. The addiction becomes his novel, his adventure, his great love. The work of art or service that might have been produced is replaced by the drama, conflict, and suffering of the addict's crazy, haunted, shattered life. 17. The Addict as Dramatic Hero. Robert McKee in his story seminars testifies that the essential quality in a fictional protagonist, i.e. the hero in a book or a movie, is that he or she must possess the passion and the will to push the story to the limits of human experience in order to achieve their goal. Otherwise, there would be no story. This heroic monomania is also the definition of the addict. The lush or the junkie will sell her own mother to score the substance she is jonesing for. 18. Why I Don't Knock Addiction. Addictions are not bad. They are simply the shadow forms of a more noble and exalted calling. Our addictions are our callings themselves, only encrypted and incognito. They are a metaphor for our best selves, the coded version of our higher aspirations. Addictions and shadow careers are messages in a bottle from our unconscious. Our self, in the Jungian sense, is trying to get our attention, to have an intervention with us. The question we need to ask of a shadow career or an addiction is the same question the psychotherapist asks of a dream. What is our unconscious trying to tell us?