Trunk

I have read that the dis­trac­tions and addic­tions we play with are the branches and leaves of a tree. The trunk of the tree is called code­pen­dence, a ridicu­lous word with no rela­tion­ship by mean­ing to the word that makes it up. The sin­is­ter root of the addic­tion tree is shame. You can look up addic­tion tree on google and you will find many ads for rehab cen­ters that have the dia­gram to see. The tree gets a bad rap, I think, even though the metaphor might be use­ful. Code­pen­dence. It’s an annoy­ing word. What it tries to con­vey is that the per­son who is rid­dled with and rooted in shame looks out­ward for some sense of his own worth, which is not forth­com­ing out there, because it is inher­ent any­way. Any­way, when that fails, all the shiny leaves start to look good, and are good, for a while. Who knows, maybe they are good for a long time or for­ever. Let’s not judge.