What if No One's Watching?

You know, while you are doing it, that you are going to hate yourself for it later. You know that in a week, or a day, or even the moment you've finished it, you will start with the taunts. You will tell yourself how weak you are, how stupid, how shallow. You will promise yourself one more time not to do it again. You will make one more vow to learn moderation.

When you know while you are doing it that it is going to make you hate yourself later, it takes whatever was originally joyful out of doing it in the first place. It turns pleasure into compulsion. You are no longer doing it because you want to, you are doing it because you are indolent, slothful, an addict.

So if it's not fun afterwards, and it's not fun during, then why are you still doing it? For one thing, it is still fun before. Thinking about doing it, planning it, reveling it--that's still fun. It's fun because you can tell yourself that you are only thinking about it, that this time you are going to be virtuous and good and it will end before it gets out of hand. You have a double pleasure, then, both thinking about the thing itself and thinking about what a great person you are for not imbibing.

You also do it because you don't know what else to do, don't know how else to fill the space that pops up all around you whenever you have a spare minute. You can distract yourself with this or that for a little while, but eventually it gets quiet again, and you are terrified of that kind of quiet, so you fill it with your noisy craving, and eventually with your gluttony. You tell yourself, in your self-flagellating after-sessions (like this one) that you have to find something else to fill that space or the cycle will never be broken. But nothing fills it quite the way this does. Sure, you can do other, healthier things, but none of them give you the same spark this does.

You know it is "out of hand" and has been for quite some time. Much as you dislike the term, you know you are an addict. And knowing makes it all even worse. Knowing is not half the battle. Knowing just makes the beratement of yourself afterwards more vitriolic. After all, it's not like you can use ignorance as an excuse.

The cycle consumes you on more days than it doesn't, and you are left feeling huge and empty, surrounded by everything you have insisted you must consume, even if you never enjoy it.