What is your base?

I had a good friend once, a room-mate.  She's still a friend, but since she lives in another state, it isn't the same--and we certainly don't live together.  Anyway, I know she won't mind it if I tell you that her thing was eating.  As in, my thing is drinking.  Her thing is, and was, eating.  Control, pressure, release, discipline, lack of it.  All of that, and more, except with food.  For drinking, for drinkers, for me, let's say, there's a problem that must be stopped--so, I go about ceasing that activity, writing a blog about the cessation, and whatnot. Tomorrow, I get up, go to the fridge, eat breakfast.  Tonight, I'll wake up at 3am and eat something. And I just won't have to worry that it will throw me off for weeks, or more.  She will.  She is forced to face her addiction on not just a daily basis, but at a microscopic level and on a daily basis.  Not only that, but the precise activity that I have trouble controlling, quantity, is the activity that she is forced to control whenever she consumes any food at all, and it is just as hard for her to do that (her brain offers up as many reasons to keep on going) each time she eats.

Which led to some pretty strange situations, I'll admit -- wherein, for instance, I was privy to her gorging herself on bread, at a restaurant, and I held the unenviable task of removing the bread and talking with her--a lucid, highly functioning hugely compassionate person whom I deeply admire and respect, and who has a higher verbal ability to talk about her problems and their specific roots and sources than I do.

Addiction is your brain saying that you have to survive, and you getting too much survival because of it.

The point of this story was something else, though.  It was a base.  She spoke of a base, of a point where you are (an age, and I think this is AA related) prior to use, where you were emotionally  (and consequently, the point of development that you most frequently act out in your binges/addictive behavior).  Pause for a moment and try not to see this as inherently suspect.  More on this soon.  I'm just too tired at this moment.