The Poltergeist

Your love needs to die so you can live.

They say grief is love that has nowhere to go. That sometimes it leaves, but returns when you least expect it, as fresh and sharp as the day it first arrived.

I think addiction is the same. But worse.

Every addiction begins as a kindness. A soft place to land when the world is hard and unforgiving. A hand extended in the dark. You reach for it because you are hurting, because reality has grown too loud, heavy…bleak, and this thing, whatever it is, turns the volume down. It becomes yours. You love it the way you love anything that has saved you.

But this salvation comes with a price. And one day you wake up and realize the thing that once carried you has been quietly breaking your legs. That the bandage has become the wound.

So you gather everything you have and you say enough. This thing I love needs to die so that I can live.

And here is where addiction parts ways with grief entirely. Because grief mourns the dead. But addiction is still breathing. Still waiting. It does not become a memory, it becomes a ghost. Not the quiet, fading kind, but a poltergeist. Heavy on your back. Floating in the corners of your hardest days. Breaking dishes in the silence. A loved one who refuses to cross over.

This is why the first step cannot simply be willpower. It must be mourning. Honest, unflinching mourning. To sit with the thing you loved, acknowledge what it gave you, and grieve the loss of it, even knowing it was killing you. Especially knowing that.

Because you cannot leave behind what you have never properly said goodbye to.

So I pray we find the courage to mourn well. To honor the comfort it gave without returning to the harm. To let the ghost finally rest. And to choose, every day, the quiet, hard, beautiful work of living without it.