It’s Complicated –
August 9, 2018 – “What I’ve learned is that this illness is not something that disappears or fades with time,” Demi Lovato recently said in a statement after being hospitalized for a drug overdose. “It is something I must continue to overcome and have not done yet.” Read that last sentence again: It is something I must continue to overcome and have not done yet. What tense are we in? What is being said? Continue suggests an ongoing effort; overcome implies something more final; have not done yet makes an odd fit with continue. Far from coming off as the work of PR by committee, the tangled phrasing seems to hold complex truth. Here we might discern the brain-bending reality of addiction as articulated by someone whose job has long been, on some level, to bend reality to an image…
