Analysis Of An Insatiable Emptiness By Evelyn Lau

It is a universally held beleif that addiction ruins lives. Affecting the young and old, male and female, and people from different ethnicities, cultures, and social brackets, addiction is widely regarded as a societal illness with no easy solution. A particularily damaging assumption is that a drug or sex addict, for instance, is the root cause of their own suffering. This can potentially lead to a chain reaction where the guilt placed upon a human being strengthens the desire to escape from said guilt. This is particularily damaging to a teenager, to whom an external stimuli is no longer required after a few years of guilt inflicted by their parents. Causes for and solutions to harmful and addictive behaivour have been explored thoroughly,

Many theories about it 's root causes have been postulated by both experts and laypeople alike: economic troubles, a family history of addiction, and genetic predisposition are often proposed. The truth is so complex in nature that no one root cause can be identified as universal, and yet first hand accounts from current and past sufferers give us a clearer glimpse into the life of a person in pain. Evelyn Lau, a young woman who penned a provocative and informative article describing her childhood as it relates to her past. In her essay, "An Insatiable Emptiness," Lau describes how body issues brought on by her puberty caused an early self-hatred for her physical body that lead to awkwardness at home. It is safe to assume that if you 're living in today 's world, you 've self esteem problems. According to Lau, "[her] body had become a vessel filled with secret, terrible workings," a fairly common feeling among those going through puberty. Many are not damaged for life as a result, getting boosts of self esteem from the wisdom of adults. Parental influence is arguably the strongest, so any strife at home can have a profound psychological effect: "... my mother . . . frequently made me undress in front of her so she could ridicule [my breast size.]" Parents who rob their progeny of self esteem strongly convince the children that there is something inherantly wrong with them, a pervasive thought that has the potential to follow them for

By the time an addiction changes shape into something more harmful than the initial one, signs of body wear are detected. The feeling that one is invincible and can therefor comfort themselves through inadvisable habit-forming actions is erased. A drug user may develop symptoms such as infected needle marks and liver damage. Lau 's teeth, "once so enamel white. . . had . . . turned pitted and yellow," were reacting to the hydrocholric acid from her stomach. Initial signs of ware don 't usually spark a change: "I waited for the day when I would throw up blood." At this stage, psychological counselling is often required to allow a sufferer to realize that they never deserved the humiliation in the first place. They even know in their hearts that all of the self-torture is rediculous, and realize that counselling can help. Often times, a person cannot push themselves to the finish line for whatever reason, prolonging the eventual recovery: "Twelve months later I called again, but by this time the [waiting list to see a psychiatrist] was even longer." Many times, this is tragically coupled with declining health or, in the case of a gambling addiction, savings. It sometimes takes a terrible medical development to prove to the individual that they are not in fact invincible. Lau writes ". . . I understood for the first time that my body did not possess some secret store of replacement parts." Knowing that there is a real psychological component to their illness can equate