Addictions
February 3, 2025
I am an addictive person.
About 5 years ago after I was diagnosed with alcoholism I had a therapy session that’s still fresh in my memory. I asked my therapist whether it’s possible for me to quit drinking and smoking. Then he introduced me to the concept of the “board with nails”:
“Imagine that you are a wooden board with nails. Each of your decisions, every aspect of your personality, is a nail. And some of them are rusty, eaten away by corrosion, barely holding together. These are your addictions. Pulling out nails from the board is incredibly painful. I believe you can do it if you set your mind to it, but it’s natural that they’re deeply embedded, and it will take a lot of effort and cleverness to remove them. But I want to warn you about the second part of this. Even if you manage to pull out the nail, there will be a hole left behind — a hole that you’ll instinctively want to fill with something to make the pain less unbearable. And the quickest way to do that is with other rusty nails — because unlike the good ones, they’re always within reach. Our goal isn’t just to remove the rusty nail. Our goal is to seal the hole.”
Spoiler: our work together ended right after that session because I got so deeply lost in thought about it that I couldn’t keep up with our regular weekly meetings. Since then, I’ve replaced plenty of rusty nails with other rusty ones. Though there was some real progress, some nails never made it back in place. As a result, I could probably serve as a colander to drain pasta.
For a long time, I was afraid to face the truth and admit why I was so drawn to impulsive actions — what wound, exactly, I was trying to seal shut with this board of nails. Instead of lifting the lid and looking inside, I made endless chess-like substitutions of nails: alcohol — tobacco — drugs — numerous sexual encounters — pornography — risky trips and expeditions, periodically replaced by more “harmless” things like overworking — constant studying — emotional dependency in relationships — obsessively reading the news — diagnosing and treating my own illnesses.
What’s ironic is that because of my perfectionism and heightened sense of falseness, I never quite aligned with the addiction of people around me — I dropped out of social media entirely, deleting almost all of my accounts, and only partially returned to that space via messaging apps. This distanced me even further from the people I cared about, and I kept flowing from one outwardly visible unhealthy state to another one hidden deep inside.
—
I know I carry a lot of pain. Starting with childhood family trauma, difficulties connecting with parents who themselves were once parentless, witnessing gender-based violence — both toward loved ones and toward myself. I lived in a dictatorship country that was rapidly descending into discrimination against me for my age, gender, sexual orientation, free thinking, and moral integrity.
Between the ages of 16 and 20 I went through many partners (mostly men), many of whom were significantly older than me. Only later did I realize how many dangerous situations I had been in — physically and mentally — and how much older people manipulated my vulnerabilities and inexperience.
Get Mary Ya’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
At the same time, I fell in love for the first time and felt it was illegal to tell anyone — my parents, my friends, my teachers, even myself — because I had fallen for a girl, in a country where homophobia was only growing stronger. And the more I felt my infatuation (and its wrongness) the more I tried to “heal” myself through supposedly healthier connections (heterosexual ones) with emotionally immature adults who only pushed my own emotional maturity further away. But my role in this shouldn’t be limited to that of a victim — in response, I myself generated toxicity and verbal-psychological abuse in my relationships. We were drowning each other, and the whole thing kept spinning in circles.
Later, I was in a relationship with a woman, and I had to lie constantly at work and in school about it. While we were already together, my partner was raped by someone I knew. Beyond the horror of what he did to both of us, I was crushed by the fact that we couldn’t go to the police — being LGBTQ+ person meant that reporting could bring even more harm and trauma.
I’ve traveled a lot and spoken to many people. So I’ve seen on my own the people fighting for survival in remote areas of poor countries, the hidden horrors of the drug trade and human trafficking in wealthy countries, the broken prison systems, and the devastating stories of former inmates and sex workers. The global pandemic shattered my sense of future and took away one of the few things that gave me joy — travel — and intensified my fears about the growing oppression of citizens in Russia.
Then came one war, launched by my own country, against a neighboring nation where half of my family comes from. Then another war, in a country where some of my friends had found refuge and now spend their days going in and out of bomb shelters.
I migrated to another continent and went through what refugees go through: with no language, no connections, no understanding of how the system works, and no financial cushion to fall back on. And all of this against the backdrop of Argentina’s current social, political, and economic turmoil, and the looming consequences of climate change, hanging like a storm over those of us who are most informed.
I don’t want to say that everything was entirely bad or that my life was pure hell — I’ve met so many truly wonderful people, some of whom I shared the purest, most mutual connection with, and who helped pull me out of the places I was sinking into. In fact, if it weren’t for those encounters, my very existence today would be deeply uncertain. I would even say that I’m a happy person no matter what. But I realize that going through all listed above by the age of 25 is a tremendous load, especially considering that most of the world’s disasters and my deepest personal traumas happened in just the last five-seven years.
I know that this board of nails isn’t peacefully covering a healing wound — I’m sitting on it like on the lid of an overstuffed suitcase, which is ready to burst open. But what I really have to do each time is to close it and place it next to the door, ready for the next move — which keeps happening every few months. So yes, perhaps what matters more is what travels in my suitcase than whether I’m smoking while sitting on it or feverishly finishing a lecture.
—
Even if the global madness was to end tomorrow, I still don’t know how many more years — 10, 30, 50 — it would take me to heal everything I’ve managed to tear apart inside myself by the age of 25. But no matter how hard it is, and no matter how much I’d like to shift all the blame for my problems onto circumstances, I give the final breath of each day to the jaws of reflection, sending out silent cries for help to my therapist, wrapped in nervous laughter.
Her strategy of silence (of not asking the very questions I’m clearly dying to answer) somehow works wonders. Because all the terrible things start pouring out in a flood of words onto the page, taking shape as a tangible monster. And a monster I see then is a monster I certainly can fight.
All that’s left is to believe that I’ve finally found the very environment where I can grow and change the way I want — not in spite of it, but because of it.
