The Lion and the Leftovers

“There is a lion in my living room. I feed it raw meat

so it does not hurt me. It is a strange thing

to nourish what could kill you

in the hopes it does not kill you.

We have lived like this, it and I, for so many years.

Sometimes it feels like we have always lived like this.

Sometimes I think I have always been like this".

― Clementine von Radics, The Lion

I first stumbled across this poem in a short anthology collection a week or so before my admission to rehab. Immediately, I felt drawn to the protagonist’s casual appeasement to this wild animal that resides in her home, poses an imminent danger, and yet the marked, evident dependency each being bestows on each other. Although the lion is clearly metaphorical, the same dependency resides. The lion occupies and consumes the homebody, so much so that the protagonist has entered into an internal negotiation, with the awareness that the lion is very likely to kill her. There is hope – perhaps blind optimism – that the lion can be tamed, domesticated even. But also a stark acceptance: as long as the protagonist feeds the lion, it will always remain; prowling, cowering, but always expecting. 

Problem is: if you completely starve the lion, it will grow volatile. You have seen it before; the gentle begging, the persistent gnawing, the relentless pacing up and down. Then the attacks, the roaring that penetrates your skull, the physical weakness from fighting and hiding. So it is easier to throw scraps of leftovers, provide the bare minimum to this animal in the vague hope it will leave you alone, or at least give you time to recuperate until the next confrontation. Only leftovers make it worse – it feeds but doesn’t satisfy, if anything, it sparks greater cravings. 

Now let’s replace the lion with alcohol. Or drugs. Or an abuser. Or any damn addiction that demands so much and provides so little. What does it offer? Familiarity? Protection? Possibly. A sick sort of dependency? Maybe. A consciousness so close to destruction that you can almost taste it? Definitely. The danger excites you at first, fuels you even. The lion makes you invincible. But after a while, it also makes you insane. Totally, fucking insane. 

You are confined to your living room now because the lion comes first. Keeping him docile and sated is your only priority. Food for you becomes irrelevant, you can survive off of the leftovers. Feeding the lion is the first thing you think of when you wake up and the last thing you remember before going to sleep (not that you sleep much these days anyway). It becomes your ONLY thought.

(TW for scars)

End up in hospital from an attack from the lion? Head wounds, bruises, a seizure or two, some sliced arms? Patch it up, it's not the lion's fault. You were just being stupid, careless, and by now, you should know how to handle it better. And anyway, you need to escape so you can sneak out and buy more for the lion to keep it calm and collected after the outburst. People warn you that the lion will kill you, slowly through deprivation or quickly in a spontaneous attack. You fear, deep down, that they might be right. But you are stuck with the lion now. Existence without the animal feels empty, terrifying, unfathomable. 

So you feed the thing that will eventually kill you. You prioritise it's needs. You stop going out to look after it. You stop buying things for yourself to make sure you can provide for it. People tell you, you are mad and need help. You resist, after all, the lion is kinder now. It demands more but is more forgiving. It throws you it's leftover scraps. It comforts you with an open frame as you fall down, the world spinning. It catches you, cradles and cushions your bruised body, fastening the chains it once had around its neck around yours. There is no pressure: you have reached the bottom.

This is how I was dragged into detox; not exactly bound in chains but strongly reluctant and with a concrete plan to discharge myself as soon as my ten days were up. Other people missed their lions, in fact, they were mostly all we spoke about, sometimes with resentment but mainly with nostalgia. How often they got us into trouble, the lengths we would go to, to feed our lions when we couldn’t feed ourselves. Our destructive dependency on nourishing them and protecting their safety at all costs; even if that meant sacrificing our own.

And that was when I realised the lion had mutated, I just hadn’t noticed because it had become as familiar to me as my own drunken, shrunken reflection. It had morphed from a wild, starving cub that needed help, to a distraught animal that demanded comfort, to a resentful, restless beast that needed to be restrained – or released. And to let go of such a crippling dual reliance felt worse than severing my own limbs for the animal to feed on. 

So here I state the paradox: hurting yourself to mend yourself is an illogical stance, yet to mend requires the most unbearable pain possible: change. Even worse is grieving for a part of yourself that others openly celebrate in its departure. So when I go back looking for the lion and beg it to come back and sit in my living room, understand this – I do not have a death wish – quite the opposite, I have a desperate wish to live but this is the only way I know how to do so.