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Trigger Warning: Alcohol, Addiction

Ever attended an alcoholics anonymous(AA) meeting or an anything anonymous meeting? Or are you still in the drinking phase, waiting for your liver to raise the white flag?

I can tell you two things about addiction. One, too much will never be too much unless something clicks up there or, you die.That’s exactly why people will pay millions for rehab only for their guy to get out, go back to the bottle and start drunkenly yelling, “If I were you, I’d have spent the money galavanting in Coasto. My life’s going great, always has!”

Yes John, your life is going great as you try to break your ‘world record’ of shots taken in under a minute but hey, who are we to judge or help?

Two, some of these anonymous meetings will have you relapsing faster than the next politician can promise to end national debt. Emphasis on the word ‘some’. Now, before this gets way too serious, I’m not an addict nor am I in recovery for the serious isht but I am being choked by something very severe, chronic procrastination. It’s a habit I’ve been trying to kick but like most humans, I’ve not been making things easy for myself.

We procrastinators technically don’t have meetings (we’d keep postponing them anyway) but we do have online forums where a bunch of us randos will post about how we’re able to get about our day. That’s just peachy, yeah? You get on, hype other people up and in turn get hyped to do stuff. 

It’s usually all roses until Pakarathu from a town you can’t pronounce gets on and starts posting about exactly how they relapsed that day. Every day, it’s a different person with a different story on how they haven’t combed their hair in weeks or how they haven’t brushed their teeth two nights in a row because the bathroom is always too far away.

The thing, and why such kind of interactions threaten relapse, is that these posts add on to things your body suddenly doesn’t want to do. Now I don’t feel like brushing my teeth or combing my hair and it becomes a constant intrinsic struggle. 

Every once in a while, someone will name something that makes a huge part of my daily routine, and I simply won’t be able to resist chucking it out of the routine. The most recent addition to things I just won’t do is name things, my documents most especially. 

And for a student-cum-writer, it’s like putting a kid who can’t talk in a room full of candy and telling them they can have whatever they like as long as they name it. 

My Google Docs is full of about 500 untitled documents, and I’m trying not to cry because I’ve spent the last three hours trying to sift through and name them all. All because I’m looking for a golden letter I wrote for a certain someone’s birthday today. Hart the band ain’t never lie when they said love makes you do crazy things.

There are three cups of coffee and about 100 indie songs in my system because one thing you gotta admire about procrastinators is they always try to make amends when push comes to shove.

I look like an old lady who’s been rummaging around her home looking for that last jar of cat food. And she refuses to give up because she and Mr.Cat have been through hell together and she’d rather die than let him starve. 

My stories are everywhere because every writer will tell you how inspiration comes in the weirdest hour. You’ll be in a Kenya Mpya bus somewhere, having your bones crushed against a million bodies and boom, you think how cool it would be to write a story of a donda. A donda who always overfills buses so he can make a little money on the side to pay his kid’s medical bills.

Then you suddenly won’t feel so bad that you’re being squeezed to death, and you’ll get the urge to type the story the second you get breathing room.

To all my friends reading this, psssht no, that’s not how my phone got stolen. I was heroically saving a woman from getting mugged in a dark alley in Moi avenue like I always tell you. To the guy in a dark green coat and unkempt beard who said hi to me through the open window, si you holla we talk. Sitazubaa tena 😭.

Sometimes, you’ll be in class entertaining a lecturer who thinks he’s the Messiah by telling life stories to ensure we don’t die of boredom. No sir, we’ve been long dead inside. We’re just tolerating your class because someone told us we need degrees and now we have to stomach 5 gruesome years of this bs.

I’ll feel so passionately about thoughts like that and whip up my phone to furiously type. 

Other times I’ll be in a more calm state of mind, you know, overdosing on Nikita Kering’ and sipping some ginger tea as I unwind. Then I’ll get inspo and type one out- a long story that I’ll read a million times, proud of the things the human mind can conjure, proud that this is the kind of work I’ll leave behind once we’re all kaput.

The funny thing about all this is I won’t name these documents so by the time I feel ready to post or finish my ramblings, I have no clue where to find them. And no, sorting won’t work.

My sifting has gone horribly of course, and I’m starting to associate my indie songs with negative feelings. But instead of cussing out past me, I’m starting to wonder what other kind of other self-destructive habits people unknowingly have. The subtle ones that masquerade as leisure or self-care.

There are people who will spend 200 bob a day, shooting the shit while playing fifa because fifa. And then they’ll skip lunch-the 200 bob has to come from somewhere. How long before their bodies become malnourished and you hear nani died at 59 because they were constantly fighting one funny disease after another?

Others will quite literally be killed by their own kindness. The ‘How can you say no to someone in need?’ narrative. They’ll spend their entire lives giving until there’s nothing left to give. Yes, this is exactly how old ladies end up with 30 cats. Forgive me if I become one, it’s my calling.

Some of us will pop in our earphones every chance we get. After all, the world’s too loud and JCole gets us on a spiritual level. Our therapists could never. How long before we go deaf?

I could go on for days…fast food, smoking weed (which people will swear is not bad since weed is supposedly not cigarettes), binging Netflix, scrolling mindlessly on socials, overworking, mindless sex, sugar, comfort shopping.

Interesting thing is we’re all aware of these things to some level but take away these habits, and you take away our will to live. To be human is to have wants, and to have wants is to live. Si we’ll die regardless, kama mbaya mbaya.

This reminds me I’m yet to finish season 2 of Why Women Kill. I have to load up on cookies first, can’t watch nothing on an empty stomach. And maybe I’ll make nuggets too. I’m sure I saw the recipe somewhere on Tiktok.

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