Many blame the "disease" of addiction saying he should have been attending meetings, he should have been in recovery. What they fail to recognize is that, to one degree or another, we are all in recovery and there is just not enough room in the meeting halls for all of us. The denial of this runs rampant in a culture that sees things in black and white. One moment a hero the next moment a slob and a drunk. It is the age old story of the tragic hero.
I am not ashamed to admit that I can relate to his despair and I feel deep compassion for him as he stood over the abyss of his own old, deep, inner wounds. Perhaps because he soared so high he did not think it was possible to still feel broken and flawed. I would imagine that this would make the shame deeper and the fall greater.
I sincerely wish he knew that, no matter how much or how little money and success we have, we are all broken. We all fall somewhere on the spectrum of addiction. We are all driven by a need to distract ourselves from our own pain and to look away from our own essential needs. We are all to one degree or another addicts only the substance and the type of "high" differs.
How is it that a person walking down the street with their head in their smart phone running around busy, rushing, over scheduled, successful differs from the addict lying on the street? How is one who uses food, alcohol, tobacco, power or greed, to stomp down their pain, unlike the addict. Perhaps it is only a matter of degrees, but if we shift our perception we would see that the of process addiction, that which distracts us from our suffering, takes many forms. The average person just looks prettier and more acceptable in their suffering. They can walk away holding their head high in disgust or in a flash of insight they may see the reflection of their own suffering... and still they may look away.
