So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night.

1 Thessalonians‬ ‭5‬:‭6‬-‭7

My former, presumptuous, misinformed self scoffed at taking seriously passages like these.

I’d hide behind pretense, youth, context, twists of justification. And that was only when I felt pangs of guilt. At a point, I stopped paying attention to those as well.

The great temptation is to believe that the darkness has no lasting consequences.

This is what I did not believe and yet what I ended up living by. If I truly believed it, I would have examined my actions sooner, more thoroughly and with a clear head.

Addiction snares us with its insistence on sneaking into little bits of our lives and then taking over. It coerces us to minimize the effects of our continued use. It whispers to us to keep on and to do more.

It happily feeds our misplaced desire for more.

And it physically chains us to itself.

No cliche is strong enough to arm me against the subtle urging of unformed addiction. My hope in looking back is that my pathway through it might resonate with someone at the onset enough to cause pause.

I had opportunities to exit. They would have been uncomfortable too, but the further I continued, the more pain I guaranteed my future self.

Wake up.

Snap out of it long enough to take honest stock. Open your eyes. Choose while you still can. Exit the highway.

God, give me the attentiveness I need to leave the road that kills me.