Bad Habits

That’s what some people can’t seem to grasp: old habits die hard, they’re even harder to kill when they’re bad habits.

When people tell me to stop cutting, they’re asking me to abolish the only coping mechanism I had. When I tried to stop, all that achieved was gaining a new bad habit because you can’t force me to stop and expect nothing but recovery – it doesn’t work like that. I will have withdrawals. I will have relapses. The bad habit doesn’t suddenly disappear, it ends up getting replaced by something else.

And that something else is usually worse than what I was already doing. And next thing you know, I have a revolving set of bad habits that have all become coping mechanisms of sorts because you keep forcing me to just let it go.

The truth is that I can’t just cut it out or switch it off. It doesn’t work like that. I have to lessen the power it has over me before I can eradicate it. Now instead of having one strong bad babit, I have four latched onto me with almost equal strength. And they always interchange with one another.

Now tell me, how is this any better?