One in Four

by Lucinda Berry

She didn’t spend time thinking about what turned her light off. She didn’t want to relive those moments ever again or talk about them with anyone either. She tried that once. It didn’t work. But she did spend a lot of time on wondering if her light would ever get turned back on. Like, once it went out, did it stay that way forever?

As if the moment you took alcohol or a chemical into your system, your body became possessed by some kind of devil and you lost all control. No. You made a wrong choice. You got drunk or high. Whatever it was. But your brain was still the same. Your brain hadn’t actually changed. They called it the “phenomenon of craving” that developed and that once you started drinking, you couldn’t stop. Even though the physiological experience of craving was real, there was no scientific evidence showing that it was true, but they’d been taught to believe that it was so, so that was the way they acted. Created a self-fulfilling prophecy.