#hypocrits

I feel like such a hypocrite watching My Strange Addiction. There was this one episode I was watching earlier where this one lady was eating mattresses. She was eating at least one square foot of mattress foam a day for twenty years. When the camera crew was there, she went into detail about how her burps tasted like sulfuric farts and sometimes when she went number 2, she would find chunks of mattress looking exactly the same way they did going in when they were coming out. When the show finally showed her going to the doctor and talking about these symptoms, the doctor told her that it could be from intestinal blockage and the reason it was coming out the way it was going in is because the material mattress foam is made of is unable to be digested the way normal food would be. She disregarded what the doctors were telling her. Her rebuttal to the doctors after hearing this news was that if she was really desperate, she would clean out the mattress chunks that she shit out in the toilet, wash them, clean them, dry them and eat them again. They even showed how the chunks looked in the toilet bowl after she went to the bathroom and they, in fact, looked exactly how they did before she ate them. Her family even said that the toilet would constantly be getting clogged because of this. The mattress eating lady no longer had a bed to sleep on because she ate the whole thing, so she would sneak into her mother’s room to rip apart pieces of her mattress so that she can eat them. Finally, the doctor told her that this habit she has can not only kill her but lead to an unpleasant death. He told her that her burps smell like farts because her intestines could be getting blocked, and gas that should be coming out of her ass is coming out of her mouth because there’s no other way for it to be released from her body. As I’m hearing all of this, in complete horror, I think it’s a no brainer to just stop eating mattresses. Despite what the doctor was telling her and highly recommending her to never eat another piece of mattress again, she fought on and on about how she can’t just stop. I’m watching this and just want to jump through the screen and shake her. I want to tell her to stop and ask her if eating mattresses is really worth the risk of losing her life. And then.... I realized my hypocrisy. Now, obviously eating mattresses and doing drugs are two different things. And quitting eating mattresses doesn’t come with the painful withdrawals that quitting drugs comes with. But... an addiction is an addiction. I still find that whole eating mattress crap completely repulsive. And even though I felt like I always understood my close friends and family wanting me to stop doing something that can kill me (drugs), I feel like I understand them so much more now. I understand both parties in this situation. It’s not easy to “just stop” doing something you’ve been doing for years... and twenty years for that matter. And I also understand her loved ones being frustrated because the obvious answer to them is for her to just stop. The show did a brief follow up on this lady. She has not quit eating mattresses but reduced her eating them from a daily thing to eating small bits only 4 times a week. And to be honest, and this also applies to drug addicts, we can only go by what she’s telling us. We don’t know if she sneaks bits of mattresses to eat any other day of the week. Just like we don’t know for sure if a drug addict is clean unless they take drug tests often and have some accountability. Even then, no one knows for sure except the addict. I know none of this is ground breaking, but I just found it interesting enough to share. It’s crazy how much our minds can play tricks on us.