Will

by Will Smith

I stand up and head back out on deck. They’re still in the same spots, just floatin’ and yappin’. I couldn’t understand what they were doing. I was jittery, I was pacing, checking the time on my phone. And then I caught myself: I noticed the turbulence of my thoughts and feelings, which stood in stark contradistinction to my surroundings, and I thought, Oh shit, this is crackhead behavior. I could not sit still. My mind was agitated—I needed an activity, a target, a mission, an activity, an adventure. Something, anything, to do. I caught eyes with Roscoe, peeking over the curvature of yet another mango—this one’s bigger than his head. He was just looking at me sweetly, as if to say, “You know you look crazy, right?” It all slowly drifted into focus: Am I an addict? I don’t do drugs, I don’t really drink, I’m not hooked on sex like some ghetto hyena. But I did not know how to stop, or be still, or be quiet, or alone. I’m addicted to the approval of others, and to secure their approval, I became addicted to winning. And to guarantee and sustain my stream of massive victories, I became addicted to working, to grinding, and obsessively pursuing perfection. But there was a deeper issue at play. I saw downtime as the enemy, a place where you lose things. When I had left space between Melanie and me, she had cheated. Daddio saw the space between tasks at the shop as laziness. Darrell never wanted me to sit down in the gym—he saw downtime as the crack where the pleasure principle ...