point of no return

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
~ Rumi

I once met a person recovering from a cocaine addiction.  He’d come to a place where he said he just knew he had to stop.  He said that, if he had passed that point, he might never have been able to get his life back. 

I asked him why he thought that was.  Why would it have been so difficult to stop beyond that point?

He said that it was like drinking.  That your system could only absorb so much until you started to puke.  He wasn’t talking about the illegal substance; he was talking about the lies that were poisoning his life.  

He explained how it began with one small lie to his wife, saying he’d lent five hundred bucks to a friend when he’d actually blown it on a fix.  The next time he lied to her, he said, it was easier, and the time after that even easier than the time before.  It got to the point where he knew that his whole life was about to get sucked into a vortex of deceit and that, beyond that point, he’d have lost himself.

Lots of things are like that, I thought.  Lies, yelling, theft, abuse, murder.   Hurting others and losing yourself.  You cross the line once, twice...  But once you pass that point of no return, it’s too hard to take it in and, instead, it starts to take you in.  You either keep the blinders on and keep going.   Or take them off and puke.