Running in Circles: A Memoir

by Eva Yin

Heroin is a painkiller but it doesn’t only work for physical pain, it distances you from emotions too. You can still feel sad but the euphoria makes it easier to bear. You can watch your feelings with the detachment of an observer, like you’re floating above them on some cloud.

Besides you had to care about something to be afraid of losing it. I’d distanced myself from my feelings so much that I had almost convinced myself that there was nothing I cared about — besides getting high.

Your thoughts still as the wave of euphoria radiates from the center of your being. With pleasure so intense, the ability of coherent thought is lost, there’s no place for it — you are overcome. You disappear. This is the moment that addicts chase, over and over again.

Worst of all is the discomfort, the anxiety, the inability to sit still — the root of which stems from the frustration of desire, the pressing need to get high — to chase that feeling of eternity. Because despite all of this — the sickness, fucking up your relationships, wrecking your life — junkies always chase that moment because in that moment you lose yourself. Your problems fade away along with everything else because there’s no longer a self to deal with them.

We were honest about what our relationship was from the beginning but then he started telling me that he loved me and I started saying it back — it was easy to when I was high. But then I kept saying it, even after I stopped feeling it. At the time, I don’t think I was aware that I didn’t love him — as many people do, I mistook comfort and familiarity for love.

“So what you’re saying is that punk is about rebellion and not giving a shit about social norms, but it’s also about conforming, about fitting in to other social norms?” I looked at him, smiling and quizzical.

As long as you’re running, you’re never free — you’ve become a slave to your fear.

At the time I didn’t really believe in anything, but I wanted to. I considered myself an atheist but really I was a practicing hedonist. Because I felt like this life was all there was, I wanted to make the most of it, which I equated to having as much pleasure as possible. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already starting to become disenchanted with that kind of existence. I was starting to realize that there was no end to the feeding of pleasure, of desire, because in the end it only made me more hungry.

It was a losing battle. I couldn’t win because every time you run away from something, you are admitting that it is more powerful than you — I was running away from pain but all the time it was becoming more powerful, dictating my actions, gaining more control. Thus I had been running faster and faster in circles yet getting nowhere.

It was a long hard path to recovery. I strayed, I veered, and sometimes I circled back, but in the end I just had to keep on walking — one foot in front of the other — it was that simple. Eventually I got to where I needed to be.

I had been chasing the highs, chasing happiness to run away from pain without realizing that pleasure and pain are intermingled, inseparable. I realized that seeking pleasure was the same as rejecting pain. There was nothing wrong with happiness or sorrow, but that does not mean you have to be ruled by them — chasing feelings or pushing them away only made them stronger: only gave them control.

I surrendered to the beauty, to the suffering, to the indescribable joy and misery that is life and in that acceptance there was a new awareness, a new appreciation.

For all of us running in circles, may we lift our tear-streaked faces to the sky and learn to take a step without feet.