Withdrawal Logic: A Dispatch from the Edge

Essays and Poems Series

Content Warning:

The following essay and poem address serious themes surrounding addiction, emotional manipulation, and survival logic misfired. They include references to risky behaviors, psychological distress, and relational trauma. Reader discretion is advised; especially for those navigating recovery or emotionally triggering experiences. This work is offered not to sensationalize, but to reflect and repair. Break the stigma. Addiction is not a moral failure; it’s a condition that demands thoughtful attention, compassion, and systemic understanding.

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Addiction rewires intimacy: tenderness becomes transaction, presence becomes performance. For those caught in its orbit (not as users, but as companions) the line between care and collapse blurs. You want to help. You want to stay. But sometimes, the most radical act of love is departure. Not abandonment. Not revenge. Just the refusal to be consumed.

When addiction becomes the architecture of a relationship, staying often means enabling. Leaving, though brutal, becomes the rupture that makes reconstruction possible. To walk away is not to stop loving. It’s to stop being the sedative, the stimulant, the fix. It’s to say: I will not be your dosage. I will not be the platform that holds up your pathology. In that absence, the addict may finally meet the bottom they’ve avoided; where help becomes possible, and healing can begin. Love, in its most rigorous form, sometimes demands distance. Not because you’ve given up, but because you believe they still can rebuild.

Withdrawal Logic
(after the last sedative)

Sit.
If you haven’t hit bottom,
you will.
It gets worse before it cracks.
I caught the bricks:
the lies, the tricks,
the architecture of manipulation.

Your commitment was never to one.
We were just dosage:
uppers, sedatives,
a rotation of relief.

I’m not speaking from righteousness.
I’m speaking from ruin.
Your pathology infiltrated my life,
turned sweetness into spoil,
tenderness into transaction.

You think you’re in control.
That illusion is the high.
But truth be told, you shape-shift:
sweet, hot, victim, seductress,
sometimes clever enough to pass.
You become what’s needed
to hustle what you crave.
Not intimacy. Not connection.
Just the next fix.

You don’t love.
You perform.
You calibrate your face
to match the room.
You mirror desire
until it reflects you back
as something worth consuming.

You’ve become a parasite.
You fill your empty vessel
with uppers, downers,
risk stacked on risk…
none of it satisfies the hunger.
You feed, but you never digest.

You consume, but you never metabolize.
You never respected me.
You don’t know how.
You only know the fix.
Without withdrawal,
you hop…
from my quiet to another’s thrill
to the rideshare driver’s gaze.
Always between stimulant and sedative,
you consume to feel less empty.

I loved you once.
Perhaps.
But now I feel nothing.
I’ve reached the bottom
while you chase the next reward.

Your addiction is not romance gone wrong.
It’s a foundation
bricks built from trauma,
abandonment,
low self-worth,
or something deeper
I can’t name alone.

I’ve heard your apologies,
your rehearsed amendments.
But your addiction is insatiable.

You care for no one.
Not even yourself.
You are a slave to the reward,
a puppet with no strings left.

Own it.
You dragged me into this.
Now I push you out.
I won’t grant you my anger.
You’re a hungry soul.
I’m not here for revenge.
I’m here for repair.

You are careless.
You are ruthless.
Dopamine will not fill your vessel.
You and I
we are not the same.

Your pathology evolves through recital.
You lack self-esteem,
so you outsource identity.
You dose yourself
one, then another,
then another.

You don’t seek connection.
You seek calibration.
You idealize what you lack,
pressure partners into prosthetics,
collapse boundaries
to preserve the high.

Love becomes sedative,
stimulant,
mirror.

Never digested.
Only consumed.

You forge craving into machinery.
It creates nothing but obsessive bonds.
Love addiction isn’t desire.
It’s survival logic misfired.
It’s intimacy
built on the wreckage
of self.

This drug will end you.
You were an incubus,
spreading lies like breath,
just to get the high
and the hush.

You broke this.
You ruined it.
Own it.

I hope you find help.
I hope you find happiness.
All humans deserve that.
Even you.

IMPORTANT

If you or someone you know is navigating sex and love addiction, seek help. This is not about weakness. It’s about survival logic misfired. Addiction rewires intimacy, and recovery requires rupture.

Professional support, community scaffolding, and diagnostic clarity can rebuild what compulsive attachment has eroded. You are not alone.

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