I’ve long envied addicts their rehabs, their stints of unemployment, and their ability to allow themselves to be taken care of. Rehab sounds fabulous to me…especially the nicer ones, like the Lindsay Lohan rehabs where you do yoga and get facials and ride on ponies and go to meetings. I’d like to spend some time in a rehab like that…but even a kind of crappy, institutional one sounds a little nice. Spending time focusing on myself, devoting my days to nothing but working on my issues…that would be luxurious for me. And in my meetings, all the codependents end up struggling financially while the addicts in their lives are in early recovery or in active addiction. I’ve never been able to stop working from the time I was 16…I won’t let myself take it easy, and I’m terrified of the idea of being unemployed, of being reliant on someone else’s good will to take care of me.

So yeah, addicts, I’m jealous of some of the most painful side effects of your sickness. That’s what I’m saying.

Today, I realized another thing that makes me jealous. I’m jealous of crack houses and junky dens. I’m jealous of there being places where you can go to act out your addiction…like addict carnivals. I know from my own drugging days that these spots are generally pretty creepy…however, indulge me for a minute. I started thinking about all this because my husband was telling me about a hotel near our home that is reknowned as a residence for crack dealers, and how sometimes there’s heroin there as well.

It made me start thinking about what a codependent den of iniquity might look like, as I don’t think there are places like that for us…there’s no hotel that’s just chock-full of heroin addicts who will lie to me and make me feel beautiful and beloved and then reveal their deep woundednesses to me, making me feel vital to their livelihoods and recoveries and all that…

I keep giggling thinking about what these dens might look like…I’d love to hear from you all about other features of the codie den of iniquity…