The Curious Case of Mistress White & Olfactory Monomania

Twenty years. Not a raucous summer of love. Not a dysfunctional coping ritual born of child stardom. And definitely not a neat redemption arc complete with turning point and feel-good epilogue. Just two decades of glacial collapse into absolute fucking oblivion. If you’re in need of a lightly poetic metaphor to regurgitate at your next sharing circle: imagine a lightbulb dimming so gradually you don’t even notice it’s gone until your hands are shaking in the dark and you’re scrabbling around for crumbs of cocaine like a newly blind person picking up dog shit. That was me, over and over for years. Life passed me by as the sun came up, then retreated as it always does and I sat in one room shovelling escapism into my auxiliary breathing holes like a drunk piggy feasting on a newly discovered haul of fallen fermented apples.

The myth of innocent enjoyment in life faded with each dusty inhale and was replaced with an insatiable desire to chemically guarantee any form of artificial happiness, no matter how emotionally meagre. I never stopped to smell the roses because I only had receptors for one scent. I was monogamous to an aroma — a human narcotics-sniffer-dog with no loyalty to the law. Call it olfactory monomania if you like: the more ridiculous my diagnosis sounded, the truer it felt. Everything else blurred. Everything else was background noise.

Some people give themselves to God and I suppose I did the same. I gave my soul to the resplendent Mistress White. A flawless companion, sparkling and pure. She was an infatuation, the love of my life, and she abused me with such deliberate cruelty that I became addicted to the bruises. She destroyed me, and I thanked her. I crawled back. I begged for more. Not a dramatic free-fall, not a spectacular breakdown. Just slow suffocation, quiet panic, night after night.

The rules eroded. “I’ll never do that” evaporated. The things I swore I’d never try became routine: suffocating stunts and humiliation dressed up as penance, four sleepless days followed by decisions made at the ragged edge. Escorts came not for sex but for expensive conversation. I rationalised my entitlement as allyship and balanced it on a tightrope of misogyny. I sniffed cocaine and lectured about Ian Curtis until someone found me unresponsive, overdosed but underdead — and my panic-ridden emergency protocol was to escalate rather than call for help.

Recover, then repeat. Rummage through drawers, swallow a forgotten quarter of an ecstasy pill, vomit it back up, fish the fragment from the sink and swallow it again. Every night was a charade of flirting with the edge — stamping the cliff’s crumbling sediment periphery until the whole thing gave way. It occurs to me that at this particular moment in my little tale, a tidy and structured narrative would have me stop myself at the last second. Sense grabbed me by the back of my neck and I never touched a drug ever again, not even a paracetamol. I would even vocally object if someone said, tongue-in-cheek, that love a drug. That would be a lie. One day I jumped. Of course I jumped. The edge had long stopped being an edge; the plunge was no longer a spectacle, it was a dare to death, a gauntlet I threw down at society and myself. Jump. The sound closed around me as I plunged into the darkness. At first I climbed out each morning. Then the bank collapsed beneath my hands. Habit turned into a second-by-second game of Russian roulette, and I stayed in the darkness.

Like a young Gollum, I became submerged in the pool I’d made: my only finished project. A mire filled with forced tears, floating cum, rust-coloured piss and foetid sweat. The water crept over my mouth, then my nose, then my eyes. I wasn’t violently drowning, just slipping under enough to panic, but still able to gulp air when I had to. Maybe I die, maybe I don’t. Fuck it. It was the long, slow drowning of someone too tired to swim and too stubborn to let go.

But over time my resolve softened, until it was depleted entirely. My eyes slowly drooped shut and water seeped intp my lungs. The velvet pull of nothing cradled me. This is it. No! A surge of lightning cracked through my body. I kicked. Live! The word pulsed. Live! Do whatever it takes, just live! I dropped the weights I’d been carrying — shame, self-punishment, worn-out rituals — and I swam for the light. I decided to break the membrane between me and sanity, between breathing and decomposing before my time. I climbed. I came up. I was coming back to the surface. I was coming back to the surface. I was…coming back to the fucking surface. Finally. I wondered if I could still breathe up there.

***

Let’s be clear here: this isn’t a self-help primer. It isn’t a puffed up manifesto about choosing life, and it certainly isn’t a polished tale of cultural appropriation wrapped in a shroud of redemption. I’m not an expert. I’m still fighting. These topically fragmented yet fundamentally connected pieces chart a leap of faith toward living at least ten more years. Mundane, selfish, necessary. I want to be around to see England lift the World Cup. If that’s trivial, then so be it.

This is an ode to anyone who’s felt addiction’s double-edged bliss and irreparable agony. For the people who were told to “get over it,” for the ones branded bad for missing a life event, for everyone who’s rationalised, lied, or crawled back: I see you. For those who sneer from the outside. Remember: addiction sits on every street corner, in every office and living room. We choose shame over understanding, punishment over care. That’s the real crime you smug twat.

This is about an ordinary man with an all-too-ordinary experience. Extraordinary to some, horrifying in places. But if you’re standing with friends now, one of them already knows this story because inside, it’s the same as theirs. They just haven’t written it down.