The Chicken or the Egg?

I was working on an important document earlier and I just couldn’t focus. I resented the effort, despised each word I was being forced to create. My mind wandered and I got up periodically, searching for some excuse to leave my toil behind. I began washing my clothes and cleaning the kitchen. These are petty tasks that normally annoy me. But today they felt like relief from the slave driver that is my job.

It’s easy for me to blame my history of drug and alcohol abuse for my lack of concentration. I think of all the mushrooms and LSD ingested, all the dope smoked, ecstasy popped, cocaine and speed snorted and booze guzzled down. And of course there have been cerebral as well as physical consequences of all these years of bodily neglect. It’s impossible to believe otherwise.

But there’s also those distant memories of little me, eleven years old, hunched over the kitchen table with my mathematics homework, wanting nothing else than to be free of the burden and go outside and play. I can remember the feeling that welled up within me in school, at church or as the adults droned on at the dinner table: a sensation of unlimited frustration, of being trapped like a prisoner in my own body. I desperately wanted out then just as I do now. So I know it’s impossible for me to blame my bad habits alone.

And I don’t want to make excuses. I’m not trying to be like some parent declaring, “My kid suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder.” But still, I have to wonder where this frustration, impatience and longing for escape came from. It was there from the beginning, right? I’ve exacerbated it through my compulsive behavior, right? Is my compulsive behavior a byproduct of this thing that has lived within me from before I was ever exposed to booze or drugs? Was it a predetermined condition, something that scientists will one day be able to test for in the womb? Or was it something I chose to develop?

And it’s okay that there will never be any definitive answers to these questions. But I do believe that I will be asking them for the rest of my life.