It seems that addiction, or any self-destructive behavior, starts when we walk out of hearing distance from our own voices. We listen to our parents, our church, or teachers, our TVs and radios, and we are rarely told to listen to ourselves, our souls. Once we are released on our own, we have no idea what to do with ourselves without being told by outside influences. We trip, we fall, we fall again, and again and again, and because of what we are taught early on, we see this as failure. We feel guilt, we hate how the guilt and the "bad" emotions feel, so we ignore them, we try to numb them, we bury them and in doing so bury who we truly are. As so many wise people have pointed out, you cannot have good without bad. It is impossible.

This is not to say that we should not listen or learn from others, rather, we should discover our own set of My People who speak to our souls. It seems that the soul needs constant renewal; from beauty, from struggle, from joy, from trial and error, from wisdom and freedom and wishes color and successes and victories.

If we ignore our soul, we become lemmings, and once we realize that we are being led to the cliff over the sea, it might be too late. Though I am coming to believe that even those lemmings could've said - "whoa. Wait a minute. We're gonna do what now? No thanks. I'll just step to the side and live."