sobriety as coming-of-age in a child-hating society
I’m connecting into the dimension of the meaning of the word sobriety that means something akin to “clarity”. In order for me to truly understand what that means, I need to do it. I want to be so clear-headed that I can see reality. Because how am I going to lead Little Ben into the world of adults without being clear headed.
When I think about the amount and frequency and compulsiveness with which I do substances, and I imagine literally raising a child of my own, I shudder. I would actually be an unfit parent. I would actually not be able to raise this child and not cause it harm. It makes me shudder because I am processing all of the anger, frustration, grief of how I was never raised properly as a child, only to realize that I would repeat that pattern, just in my own way.
I want to undergo my own transformation from child to adult, because I live in a genocidal society. I am reclaiming my own childhood and my own adulthood by doing so. The so called USA and American society eliminated the people who lived here already, whose ways of life were interdependent with the cycles of relationality that define life itself. The USA, as a cult and society of unnatural death, one of murder and genocide descending from the legacy of “Western Culture”, exterminated this knowledge and culture. When the French first arrived in the Great Lakes they wrote about the natives and how barbaric they were because they didn’t beat their kids. Today, the country of the USA is led by an open collaboration between rapists, pedophiles, and child-eaters. This is not new or unique. Where did George Washington’s teeth come from?
A natural, indigenous, and interdependent cultural relationship between humans and the earth, the material world, would require the adults to genuinely respect children. It would require the adults to see children as they see themselves: part of the earth which is the source of all life. Life and death as interrelated cycles is a fundamental axiom of this universe, and Western ideology seeks to usurp this natural law, wresting power of life and death itself as if it were a god. That is the belief underlying colonialism: that a kind of human being should have the authority to delineate who gets to live and who gets to die at what time and by whose means, and therefore, who on this green earth is designated as life worthy of living and life that needs to be exterminated. However, human beings were never meant to decide that, and to deceive oneself and to teach your children that is a fool’s wager, because those beings whose lives you control, are too from the earth, which is you and you are them, thus to kill is to die. By dehumanizing the fellow human, the colonizer has forfeited his own humanity too.
By violating the sacred contract between humans and the earth, the ancestors of the so called Western world have created a world for us where there is no logical metamorphosis from child to adult, and therefore no logical, healthy cycling of life. The metabolism of American society requires the vast majority of people to remain children, trapped in stasis because for one, powerful men demand a steady stream of pseudo-pubescent humans to exist as material for their pedophilic compulsions. This is a simple conclusion from the observation of a culture that has an intractibly substituted the honoring of the process of aging and reverence for elders with the fetishization of youth and child-like appearance.
As someone who was raised in this society, and thus was an abused child, not necessarily always in the literal sense of being abused by individual people per se (though not uniquely, but definitely sometimes that too), but in the sense that we all were by growing up here, I reached out for anything to act as surrogate for coming-of-age, and the thing that worked the best for the longest amount of time was psychoactive substances, though there were other common surrogates I attempted to use too, like being in a socially legible romantic relationship, trying to have a career, chasing status and social clout, etcetera. The only one I didn't really get to was having a biological child of my own.
In a counter-intuitive, upside-down way, the actual coming-of-age will transpire through my letting go of the surrogate coming-of-age. By releasing the child trapped underneath that premature development, I become that sage, that member of adult society who ushers Little Ben with true wisdom, with true, sober knowledge of the world.
In a healthy society of adults that actually respects children, I imagine that the line between child and adult is rendered more concrete and perceptible. The world of adults would actually be something desirable to live in, that contains properly solved mysteries for the child to become privy to. Instead of that, I live in a society where the line is blurry and nonexistent. A threshold is never fully crossed because there isn’t one offered. Therefore, I feel compelled to delineate one myself, and to thrust my adolescent body over it, but oh, how wrong it is to come of age as one, but no matter, because there is an Earth that will catch me on the other side.
Little Ben is asking for my assistance over this line, and to do that, to properly transform, we need to be sober. The extent to which I will shrug off the sedating layers of adolescence to fully enter the piercingly frigid airs of adulthood, bare-skinned and shivering, but in proper, sensational, unadulterated relationship with reality, will be directly correlated to the extent to which I commit to a sobriety-as-metamorphosis.
I am feeling the ritualism of January 1, 2027 as the new start date for a sobriety very strongly. It echoes the beginning of the start period of a sobriety I attempted in 2025. It overlaps and therefore creates constructive harmonic resonance with the day I intend to delete my Instagram account, which is an effort I have been putting into motion for months now. Finally, who knows what other delights await me on the other side, as a version of me who properly comes-of-age can emerge. Thus I name this intention and speak into reality through words.