Playing the Hand You've Been Dealt

I tried to quit smoking for Lent. Again. Maybe the millionth time I’ve tried to quit. It never works. I don’t even particularly want to quit. Lately, though, the act has begun to disgust me. Then the next morning comes. I take my first sip of coffee and immediately crave the comforting taste of a bogie. The mind reasserts itself, always, and the body follows.

Whatever you are, you are for life. Any trait, any addiction, pleasure, compulsion, self-destruction. It all sticks to you permanently. You might dress it up in different habits or redirect it toward different objects, but the core impulse never changes. Think of anything you’ve ever tried to quit. If something was so easy for you to quit, then you never really loved doing it to begin with. It was never a part of you. You were just doing it for an image.

People like to believe they have choices in regards to what traits they have. That they can curate themselves or swap out anything they don’t like. But when you are born, you are given a sack of marbles (traits). Some favourable, some repellent. You don’t get to trade any. You don’t get to remove any. You can try to pretend a certain marble isn’t there, but it is staring directly at you. The bag will remain intact your whole life, no matter how much you want to reach in and modify what’s inside. The only thing you can do is sling it across your shoulder and carry it with you through life.

So there’s no point in fighting against yourself. Every impulse and inclination is part of a larger mechanism of who you are. The harder you push against it, the more violently it will reassert itself. You cannot suppress what’s in you. The current is always stronger. Eventually, it pulls you back. The best you can do is swim with it. So working with what you have is the only thing that ever really sticks.

The idea of resistance is a modern myth. Some try to bury their anger, their desire, their instincts. They try to file themselves down into something smooth that won’t make a noise when it moves through the world. But edges never really disappear. They just grow inward and press against you. At some point, you will break.

Those traits you have will shape your entire life. There is no opting out. The ones who manage to function in the world are the ones who accept this. Not in some grand, self-aggrandizing way, but in the most practical sense possible. You take what you are and you dive into it. You let it carry you, instead of wasting your energy trying to redirect the tide.

This is precisely why rehabs have such a high relapse rate. People go in trying to get rid of something fundamental to them. They think they can purge the addiction, remove it, and come out clean. But the impulse was never external. It wasn’t a foreign object lodged in them that could be cut out. It was always part of the structure of who they are. Most of them never wanted to quit in the first place. They just wanted to want to quit. There’s a difference. They get clean for a while, ride the momentum of external pressure, but then the current takes them back. Because it was never gone. It was waiting, patient, still embedded in the machinery of who they are. And when they finally give in and snort that first line, it feels less like failure and more like returning home.

What they really needed wasn’t removal, but a slight turn of the dial. The discipline of an addict is a kind of devotion most people could only dream of. Every part of their day structured around the next score. The sheer force of will it takes to maintain an addiction, to organize a life around it, to plan, to acquire, to protect, is something most people could never muster. If that energy could be turned just a fraction, tilted a few degrees toward something else, it wouldn’t disappear. It would just find a new object of obsession. They would have successfully weaved their “negative” traits into their life.

Some traits will rot you from the inside out. Others sustain you even as they drag you down. But they’re all part of the same network. You don’t get to tinker. Even the parts that feel like they are leading you toward ruin are part of something larger that only makes sense in totality. There is no separating what is essential from what is harmful. The line doesn’t exist.

There is no purification or transcendence. There is only motion. You take what you’ve been given and you move forward. Do not waste your entire life in resistance of who you really are. Understand that the only path through is the one that was already laid out for you. Even destruction can be a kind of completion. Even compulsion can be a form of devotion. You do what comes naturally. You let it pull you. And you keep walking.

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