Freedom

Recently I've been studying a bit about addiction, mainly through youtube videos of a doctor named Gabor Mate. He states that addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. From my experience, this is definitely true. In fact, my addiction was just one long road of pain. A road my family unfortunately walked down with me. I've heard a lot of addicts in recovery say they 'fantasise' or even 'miss' memories of them using. The glamorous 'champagne and cocaine' days, if you will. But, for me, when I look back - all I see is destruction. That isn't to say I don't get cravings, but when I do get cravings, the image in my mind that comes with them is of me sat chained to a pipe and a sheet of tin foil next to a bucket of my own blood and vomit - insanity at its finest.

When I started drinking and using at 11 years old, it was traumatic right from the start. As if drinking and using at 11 years old wasn't bad enough, the way I got the alcohol and drugs was even worse. The second time I drank I ended up in hospital getting my stomach pumped. Between three of us little girls we downed a gallon of green apple vodka in one chug each. At 12 I was hospitalised again for drinking, this time 15 minutes from death with hypothermia after being thrown into the ocean in winter by my "friends". And again at 14 I was taken out of a bookstore on a stretcher for alcohol and cocaine abuse. By 15, I started dabbling with crack and heroin and my life was unbelievable chaos. I'd sneak out every night and get in cars with god knows who to do god knows what. As long as there was drink and drugs I'd go anywhere with anyone. I'd get home sometimes just minutes before my dad would call me to wake me up for school. I've been looking back a lot lately and I struggle to understand why I continued through 11 years of using, because I don't remember practically any good times.

I guess I thought and hoped that at some point drugs would do something positive for me, that they would give me something I so badly needed, whatever that was. Because I didn't know any better. I worked my way through alcohol, weed, pills, mkat, cocaine, ketamine, hallucinogenics.. all the way to crack and heroin and still didn't find the relief or pleasure I had been searching for from the start. And where do I go from there? I've been to 4 psych wards, 6 rehabs, 2 sober homes and countless outpatient programs and therapies, all to try and not just get clean but to stop suffering. Because with or without drugs that's all I was doing. So I can imagine your now thinking, if I was suffering either way, why didn't I just choose to not use drugs? And I have asked myself that question over and over again. But at the end of the day, living as a drug addict seems easier at the time than actually living life. My only problem or concern was using and getting money to use more, everything else was just blocked out like I had tunnel vision. I didn't know how to cope with not just the big things, that haunted, and still haunt, my mind most days but with the little everyday tasks and problems.

Today, I still don't really know how to cope a lot of the time but I do know that no matter what problem comes my way in life, alcohol/drugs/gambling/etc will only make it worse. In active addiction, my life is just one big massive unsolvable problem - and the problem is me. Today, I'm not living with rat shit in the corners of my bedroom, I'm not sleeping in a bush, I'm not trying to kill myself but most importantly I'm not being controlled by inanimate objects. The beauty in recovery is not that life just magically gets better, but at least I now have a choice in how I deal with every situation that comes my way. Drugs take that freedom away.

I wrote this post because theres a massive stigma when it comes to drug addiction - especially crack and heroin. People are too quick to judge and look down, as if drug addicts want to live the way they’re living, as if they are just the most selfish people on the planet. Now my understanding of selfish is doing something that hurts others but benefits yourself - yes drugs hurt those around you so there is definitely an element of selfishness to addiction, but in the end it is the addicts life on the line and not all addicts want to die. We're just scared to live. I mean, ask yourself: would you want to change places with the homeless man with no teeth zonked out with a needle still in his arm?

Drug addicts, just like everyone else in this world, have basic needs and for some reason or another we thought we could find those needs in drugs.

The biggest thing I ever regretted was taking drugs. But I don't regret it anymore. I've realised I would never know freedom, joy, peace or happiness, the way I do today without the past 11 years. Sometimes pain in necessary. But that pain doesn't have to be dragged out through drug addiction - if I could help even just one person not go down that dead end road, it will all have been worth it.

I've attached a small clip from a video I found of me using about 5 years ago. I hope you can see that drugs are not all fun and games. They are a solution to a problem. And that problem is pain.

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