yeah, so

To heal a wound you need to stop touching it.

What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you.

It’s easier to be brave when you’re not alone.

There is nothing more exciting and alive than a blank page at the age of five when you wonder  why the crisp white sheet, so big it could cover a double bed  like a duvet for all your thoughts stuffed into pillows like eiderdown could drown you,  but your parents toes still poke out the bottom. Every rose has its thorn so I went to sleep last night on a bed of roses, and every sound that left your lips every grunt, every snore fell jumbled to the street like a kid, beat up and muddled by the words he’d heard  through the walls at home when his mother  tried to hold her ground but the ground held her first; I pricked until I bled and so did she. And no matter how hard I tried  while you screamed and cried on the outside  and every tissue I gave you withered and died with tears that ran  like a kid at a marathon with a stitch in his side in a wound that tried to heal and never could but should have. And if I could count every lash on your face and every follicle on your chin  and every freckle on your skin  would it be a sin if I began with the sun  that burns less brightly than you because your smile made up the universe, even if the lines between your teeth aren’t straight enough for drunks to walk down soberly  and the big bang is just a metaphor for how we fuck. You whispered soft secrets so loud  that an orchestra with the volume turned all the way up couldn’t drown you out like the waves that crash through your skull drown your thoughts, and the candle you burnt at both ends caught fire and the smoke trailed a little higher till it touched the ceiling like you touched my soul, and it started to peel like an orange in a hurry to shed its own skin. And you say that our words fall on deaf ears so I will use my hands to scream, and every finger will linger in your mind like a line of poetry made for the blind because everyone deserves a second chance to laugh. And when I can no longer use my hands  then I’ll just stand and dig a grave in my soul for every word you’ve known while you stay home and count backwards from ten.

having depression and anxiety is so conflicting because

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need.  The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.