Vices

Most people judge people who have vices based on face value. Someone drinks or someone smokes, and suddenly they’re labeled as bad people, or not necessarily bad, but undesirable. I used to be one of those people. As a kid, I would always say I’m not gonna be like my father who wastes money on liquor when we were barely eating. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t let go of my faith in God because I was raised as a religious person. But now here I am, the person I never saw myself becoming when I was younger.

I used to think people with drinking habits were stupid. Like, bakit ka magsasayang ng pera sa inumin na pagkatapos mong inumin, mawawalan ka lang ng malay? Yung tipong magiging parang baliw ka. It just didn’t make sense to me back then. So yeah, if you call me a hypocrite now, I won’t even deny it. Because now that I’ve become that person, I finally understand.

Life can get heavy. Everything starts pressing down on you, almost breaking you into your smallest form. Bills need to be paid, food needs to be on the table, and there are problems, some that life gives you, and some you created yourself out of stupidity, lack of responsibility, or not being informed. And somewhere in all of that pressure, something inside you starts looking for a way out.

That’s when I realized that addiction isn’t really the main problem. It’s something deeper than that. The root cause of addiction isn’t the drugs or the alcohol, it’s the reason why you took it in the first place. I used to justify my drinking as “pampatulog” and my smoking as “pampawala ng stress.” But if I’m being honest, every time I drink or smoke, there’s always something on my mind, something important, something heavy, something I don’t want to deal with.

These are numbing substances used to ease the pain from within. And I’m not saying this to justify bad habits or addiction. I just think that there’s always more going on inside a person than what we see from a third-person perspective.

x, myle.