Before the weight of benzos had pulled me into the abyss, when each day blurred into an unbearable haze, I found myself entangled in a situation that was not simply about the drug itself, but about the fundamental nature of attraction versus love—an odd parallel that mirrors our misunderstanding of honesty in the world. You see, attraction is primal, it’s immediate. It’s a bit like the lobster—those ancient creatures whose lives revolve around dominance hierarchies and instinctual drives. Lobsters are driven by attraction to dominance; they fight to maintain their status. It’s visceral, it’s deeply biological, it’s embedded in our nervous system, and that’s attraction—it’s automatic, reactive, and based on evolutionary imperatives.

Now, love, on the other hand, love is something far more sophisticated, something that requires attention, patience, the willingness to sacrifice the immediate for the sake of the future. Love transcends attraction in the same way honesty transcends deception. When you are honest, really honest, it’s not just about saying what’s true in the moment. It’s about building a structure that stands the test of time, much like love. Love, when true, is intertwined with a form of honesty, a painful honesty at times, one that forces you to confront the parts of yourself you don’t want to see.

And it was during those benzo-fueled nights that I realized how far I’d drifted from that honesty. I wasn’t honest with myself, nor with those I cared about. I had fallen into a relationship with attraction—attraction to comfort, attraction to numbness—rather than the hard but necessary task of confronting the chaos of existence. I was playing the game like the lobster plays the dominance hierarchy—scratching, clawing to stay above the abyss, but it was a losing battle because, without love, without honesty, I had nothing solid beneath me.

The benzos, they offered an easy way out, much like false promises do. They pull you in like attraction does, feeding that part of you that just wants to avoid the pain. But love, true love, insists that you face the pain, that you endure it for something greater. It’s like honesty in that sense, you can’t lie your way to love. You can’t medicate your way to an honest life.

And so, as I drifted further and further away from both love and honesty, I sank deeper into the fog. My attraction to benzos was just another manifestation of my own dishonesty. I wasn’t admitting to myself the price I was paying, nor the depth of the suffering I was causing—not just to myself, but to everyone who loved me. It was only after being forced into a coma, a descent into oblivion more profound than any I could have orchestrated myself, that I was given the space to understand these distinctions again.

It’s remarkable, really, how the lobster, for all its simplicity, can teach us these profound lessons. It never pretends to be something it’s not. It fights for dominance, not out of love, but out of necessity. And when it loses, it accepts its place, tail curled beneath its body, as it retreats into a more honest existence. We humans, with all our pretensions, we are often so much worse at this. We lie to ourselves, fall for attraction when we should be striving for love, fall for comfort when we should be confronting the truth.

And so it was—before the coma—that I was lost in that in-between place, where I neither loved nor was honest, driven by the mindless attraction to the temporary, to the escape that benzos offered. But lobsters, they don’t have a choice. We do. We can choose love, and we can choose honesty, but only if we are brave enough to face the chaos and climb, once more, out of the abyss to clean our rooms.