Greetings all,

After a good deal of pressure from OA members, I bent to the inexorable logic of gradualism and modified my definition of abstinence until it encompassed most of what I was already eating. So although not eating all that differently from before, I now called myself abstinent. And I have been so for eight days. This in addition to 55 days of sobriety in my other addiction.

The pain I am going through is difficult even for me to describe.

Today I have hardly moved a muscle all day. I woke up in the morning and felt depressed almost at once. I was utterly exhausted, dispirited, and worn out by the sheer, vicious brutality of my emotions. They come at me like merciless bullets, bent om rending bare my last thread of dignity or self-respect I possess. I ate only one meal that day and rose from bed only to call or write emails to people in program. That helped a little, but only a little.

It has been like that throughout the abstinent week. Depression has nearly got me fired from work; I managed to plead a stay of execution but the sword of Damocles still hangs malignantly over me.

And from this rises the baleful storm of fear. Naked, unending fear. At 5 am I wake up, and a wave of terror seizes my heart like a grinning demon. I stare wildly around the darkened room, realize what is happening but tired and sleepy to the bone. Then I scream. I scream again. And again. I just hope my neighbours don't wake up. I roll over and slam my face into the pillow. I pant wildly and hug tightly onto the pillow like a talisman.

At work my eyes glaze over and I sit at my desk in a trance-like state, shell-shocked, hardly able to think due to fear and despair. Other times a wave of pain stabs over me and I rush to the washroom and cry, tearlessly, but no less painfully. My massive potbelly wiggles like an elephant as I sob, heaving with the madness of a man who has utterly lost control of his emotions.

Grief and pain sit by my side, chained to me with the brutally unbreakable shackles of my own mind. They hover there malignantly, knowing how thoroughly they dominate my life, that with or without my addictions their triumph is assured.

What about God? Sometimes he hears me, sometimes not. Often I plead with God, desperately, for something resembling mercy or relief, but nothing happens. Perhaps I deserve nothing from God after all. Perhaps the grim conceptions of punishment and sin were right after all, and I am getting the punishment I deserve.

I lie on the bed and cradle desperately with the pillow. It is late at night and all I could call have gone to sleep. I know no one who would take kindly to being called this late. I crave for a hug now, crave it with the desperation of the insane. Yet imagination does not suffice. No human arms are around me. No one sees what state I am in.

Sometimes I think I am a preschooler again, and I wish the soft hands of the mother would descend over me and I would be held, and loved, and cherished. Then I become a teenager again and I feel the cold pull of my mother's dislike and the disgust as she contemplated all that I was, and could have been. And I long again for the soft comfort of a human hand on my cheek, the caring stroke of a loving one on my arm...

...but there is only the emptiness, the yawning emptiness, the hollow pit of despair that knows neither end nor limit, fey and drunk with the glories of its strangling grip on my soul.

Am I narcissistic and self-absorbed to constantly crave this affection? Sometimes I still think so, and the old self-hatred rises up again, intellectually armed like a champion. It cites every critic of the Pity Pot who has ever lived. The depressed person is depressed because he is selfish; ergo, he deserves to be depressed. Worthless cur that I am! Woe is me!

The battle does not end. Strangely, there is hardly any urge to overeat. I almost wish there were; surely that would be easier than this. A pair of arms around me late at night would make all the difference in the world. But no one is there and no one will come. So I continue, as always, miserable, and alone.

Oasis, Sept. 30, 1996.