So, just saw your comment on Coin Toss amd ya'll literally put the words in our mouth, omg!!
We've been thinking about it the last two days in realization that there isn't a lot of things about substance use and addiction (which we personally have trouble understanding coming from a community where substance use and addicition is so prevalent here) and we do want to approach those subjects as someone whose been affected by them and seen the way they've affected others first hand.
Overall, we do want to give others a space where they feel like they can talk about Substance use and addiction, because it's not inherently a bad thing (and there's a whole tangent I could go on about that, but I will hold off for now) people all have their reasons (and I've seen many) for why they do such things and deserve as much understanding as everyone else.
Um, Basically this is me saying I'll be coining many (much) more Substance Use and Addiction related terms because of these thoughts. + If ya'll ever work up the courage to speak about such subjects I'll always love to hear of them, insight is everything.
(Please tell me if this is annoying in some capacity for me to respond like this 💔, you always have such good talking points)
This is a really wonderful ask to receive.
There really is not a lot of discussion in the MOGAI community around substance use and addiction. We& have some errant thoughts about why that could be, but we primarily believe it comes from the designation of substances as 'adult' topics. Given the skew towards community members being younger, as well as our anecdotal perception that moral OCD (as well as subclinical and non-pathological anxiety, fear, and discomfort around discussions of morality) is very prevalent here... We suspect that many people may be concerned that talking about it is somehow doing something wrong.
Then, of course, there are many who simply do not think about it. Who have not had much personal experience with substances or addiction, who may have been taught and internalized that substance users are an other from them, that you can always tell when someone has an addiction.
We are an addict. We are not shy about this. We are an alcoholic, we're addicted to caffeine, we're addicted to cannabis. We became an addict at age 15, stealing alcohol, going to appointments still tipsy, attending junior high hungover. We try to be loud about how substance use and addiction should not be considered an adults-only topic. Our alcoholism went unnoticed for many years in part because we had too much shame and guilt around drinking to ask for help, in part because the few adults who did notice dismissed it and didn't consider it serious. Just a teenager experimenting with alcohol, part of growing up.
We agree that substance use and addiction are not inherently bad things. If you are interested in sharing your tangent, we would be interested in listening. We joke that our views on addiction are radical; it is not so much a joke in that it is an exaggeration, but rather that in prefacing our discussions with that, people feel that we are self-aware and are more willing to hear us out, rather than dismissing us as a mindless addict who doesn't know what's good for itself. We think bodily autonomy applies to addicts too. We think forced recovery isn't recovery at all. We think it's okay to be an addict and choose to still use substances. We ourself are an addict with no plans to quit; the goal, to us, is to learn how to have a healthy relationship with substance use, not to cut it off completely. There are reasons we started using, and one of those is, plainly, that we enjoy it. We like the feeling of being high, we like the feeling of being drunk. Our issues don't come from us being high or drunk, but from our reliance on substance use over all other coping mechanisms, our struggle with self-control and being able to stick to it when we decide not to use, and the physical mechanisms of addiction and tolerance inside our body.
We'll be looking forward to the other terms you coin. I attempted to speak a bit on our experiences in this ask as it served as a prompt to do so. We have a continuous issue where we cannot believe our thoughts and experiences to be anything but intrusive unless we are externally prompted to speak on them, so I wanted to capitalize on the opportunity.
This ask was not annoying at all. It is well-received and greatly appreciated. Thank you, also. We at least like to consider ourself to be thoughtful and insightful. We like topics and conversations like these, we like having discussions, we like having back-and-forth exchanges with others. Sharing thoughts and counterarguments and insights and approaches, together reaching a point inaccessible on one's own.
