I never thought it could happen to me.
That’s what we all say when we start out. It begins as a quick session here and there to jumble our minds, blur our uninspired realities, and feel the rapture — but only in social settings. In high school, my friends and I would study together in someone’s basement after school let out. I’d lie to my mom and say we were playing basketball when really we were passing around a book, getting high off the realization that ideas never died. Those excerpts left our lips in a sweet release that Hemingway himself couldn’t huff. Then the world moved in negative time when we discovered that Shakespeare was hilarious. We laughed and laughed and ate all the Doritos in the pantry with grabby hands and giddy hearts. You should’ve seen Johnny — his eyes red from his sleepless nights with Huxley and Kerouac, then Carver and Fitzgerald. He was keeping an impressive stash so I offered up my place, at least until his parents cooled down. But, I never gave the books back.
As the August spell baked tree leaves to a crisp and I sharpened my Ticonderoga, I beckoned a season of my own below the red maples. The wind and I blew through pages of my notebook, my writing as light as my state of mind. But smoking my small town experiences became dry, and I moved on to bigger game — the kind of stuff I pledged to stay away from in middle school with a red ribbon secured loosely to my shirt pocket. I never saw myself as the college type, but heck — I was young, I was willing, and I was feeling alive the only way I knew how.
My friends back home said I was in too deep, that I turned this young habit into a lifestyle. But by the time I realized it, I was legally classified as a “lifelong learner” — a hopeless path, so I decided to try it all.
My first trip with journalism was a sweaty and dizzy ordeal where my senses boiled beneath my skin and I experienced people and events like epilepsy. In an interview with an expert in ancient scriptures, I heard his body language, felt his words, cut his dialogue with my own creative license, and lived to see my hallucination on the front page of the school newspaper. It was terrifying and dazzling at the same time, on par with the intensity of the Crown Jewels.
At one point, I even did some lines with this girl Stacey, but it was a one-time thing and bad poetry anyway.
My most addictive high came with my first hit of literary nonfiction. The feeling lasted ten seconds, fifteen seconds at most, but it’s the sole reason I keep writing, scratching, and editing, hoping to surpass the craft of the first brilliant sentence I ever wrote. They say you never beat your first and so I became a slave to re-achieving that feeling of euphoria, of self-worth because my mind was capable of creating something so poignant.
***
I sit, body dead and eyes lighted, over my laptop on the kitchen counter trying to think of a good closing line. I’m stuck — stuck on this line and stuck in education’s chokehold over every foolish person who ever thought they had freewill when it came to learning. The kicker about this addiction is that there is no possible recovery and the urge is never satisfied. Once you start, you’re committed for life.
The dependency manifests itself in you and transcends physical resources because the heart of your addiction lies much closer than the nearest textbook. It’s a sick and parasitic system that you will never escape alive because to give up on learning is to give up on yourself.