A Beast With No Spine

I grew up just like most of the kids around me grew up. I went to school, I played basketball, I got presents on Christmas morning, I went on vacations to the beach with the family, I got into fights with my brothers. We lived in modestly nice houses in safe neighborhoods. We went trick-or-treating on Halloween. Anybody could look at a snapshot of my childhood and have no reason to assume that I would end up doing the things I did and that I would find myself wandering down the road that I so painstakingly trudged along. My brothers and I never wanted for anything. We had everything we needed, and then some. Dad brought in plenty of money from his job and made sure that our wants and needs were taken care of. So how did I end up being the person that was stealing things, and lying to the people I loved, in order to chase an elusive high? Why was it that I turned into that person that woke up covered in sweat, shaking and writhing in pain every morning until that next hit was in me? What was it inside of me that brought me to a place where I was so obsessed with the dope that I left my grandfathers house while he was on his death bed just to scheme up some money for another bag? These aren’t questions that beg for answers necessarily. The only reason I ask them is because you may know somebody who turned out to be this same type of person, and you have no idea what happened or where anybody went wrong. I don’t believe there’s any blame to be put on anyone particularly In these situations. The reality is, this kind of thing happens to people. Not just bad people, not just unfortunate people, and not just foolish people — but just people. Some of these people never make it out. Some of them lose their lives to this tragedy. Some people have the nearly fortuitous experience of seeing what life can be after a drug addiction is arrested. That’s my story today, and this experience has shaped me into the human that I am currently.

I mentioned growing up just like the kids around me did. This is mostly true, except for one detail that separated me from many of the other kids I knew. When I was five years old, my mother passed away suddenly. I won’t go into the the details of her passing within this piece of writing, but it changed the trajectory and feel of my early years growing up. My step-mother became part of our life shortly (within the next year or two) after, and it left me growing up with many feelings that I was never sure how to explain. I felt like the world had taken something from me that I could never get back. Even though it gave me back a mother figure (which she has been the most wonderful mother figure I could have asked for) it still didn’t feel fair to me. It felt as if nothing was legitimate in the world. It felt like everything that came into my life was just a cheaper, duller, replacement of the real, original thing. My friendships felt shallow, my interests bleak, my passion for anything was practically nonexistent. The one thing in life that I had any interest in at all was basketball.

This one thing that I held so near and dear to my heart, basketball, was the only thing I really felt like I was good at. When I finally tried out for the school basketball team in eighth grade, I made it all the way to the last cut of the tryouts, and I was surpassed by a kid who was unnaturally tall for our age. Of course they wanted him on the team. Anyways, my soul was crushed upon reading the results of the final tryouts. I almost cried in the hallway when I read the names on the list posted outside of the principle’s office. I felt defeated; I felt like a loser. I practically gave up on trying to be any better at basketball from that point on. That summer, I ended up making a decision out of curiosity that would end up unraveling the fabric of my inner most being and tear me apart slowly over the next decade or so.

I found my curiosity being peaked by the romanticizing of weed and alcohol in some of the popular music that was around at the time. I ended up expressing that curiosity to a friend of mine, Austin, and he told me he had actually tried smoking pot rather recently. To make a short story even shorter, this conversation went in the direction of, “I know a guy”, and the two of us, along with another friend, ended up smoking a joint that weekend. When I got high for the first time in my life, I din’t have the feeling that many addicts talk about — that “I finally feel whole” or that “this is what I’ve been searching for” feeling. What I can remember most specifically about this first high of my life, is that my first thought was, “When am I going to do this again?”

We were instantly “hooked.” Psychologically at least. Our weeks were spent looking forward to the weekend when we could have another smoke session. Our school work fell to the side, our friendships took backseats to those that didn’t include people that wanted to get high, and our overall ambitions became clouded with a thick, pungent, dank air of carelessness and irresponsibility. To give some context about where this all ended up about ten years down the line, Austin died of an overdose in July of 2020, just a few days before his twenty-fifth birthday. I overdosed as well just two months later, but was fortunate enough to have made it through that experience alive. From the time we took our first hit of that first joint of our lives, to the time Austin took the last hit of anything he would ever take, a whole journey shaped me into the person I am today.

I spent the next decade or more of my life dedicated to the pursuit of finding the next high. It started out as just having fun, and eventually It became a necessity. I lived out my “party” phase, where I used with friends and coworkers at gatherings and events. My using didn’t stop when theirs did though. I would use by myself after the party was over, I would use in the bathroom at work, I would use before I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning. The more I used, the less satisfied I would be with how much I was using. It wasn’t fun anymore. My world had shrunk down into this tiny, microscopic space that was never any bigger than a bathroom stall or my bedroom or the front seat of my car.

On top of that, the more drugs I needed, the less resources I had to support what I was doing. I had to make something work to get the fix I needed. I won’t go into the details of the things I did, but I did things I’m not proud of. I did things I knew were wrong. I stole from the people closest to me, I said horrible things to people who didn’t deserve it. I pushed aside the people who cared about me, and I gravitated to and spent most of my time with the most unsavory of characters. I lost myself completely — mind, body, and spirit. I used drugs I never thought I would touch and used them in ways I swore to myself I never would. I went from a basketball-playing, cartoon-watching, trick-or-treating, innocent young boy, to a fiend shooting up in every gas station bathroom I passed. I became obsessed with the needle. I even used a needle I found in a ditch by the road. I reached a point where I was completely uncertain if I wanted to live or die. My thoughts mostly favored the dying part at any given time during all of this.

I don’t aim to go into the details of the events that brought me to a point of getting help for my problem. In short, the first time I went to treatment was after I went through a blackout from a cocktail of various drugs coupled with alcohol and basically demolished my brother’s house with my bare hands. I couldn’t keep a lid on my problem any more. Everybody knew it was out of hand. My father asked me to come talk with him at his office, and the conversation ended up with him asking, “Do you need some sort of help?” I felt there was no proper way to answer this other than, “Yes.” Within the next month or so, I was on a plane to California for my first rehab experience.

I’d like to say that my trip to California cured me of my addiction and I sailed off into the sunset to live a picturesque life where I carried on as a normal person. My story, like many other addicts I know personally, did not go in that direction. I found myself in treatment three more times over the next five years. Every relapse was worse than the one before it, and my last relapse almost killed me. It would always come back to the same place: me — alone, sweating, crying, thrashing, kicking, cramping, craving, and ultimately wishing and praying for a way out. Dreaming of everything I could have been if I hadn’t put another one in me. But I’m back here, thinking “if I could just get well and not be sick for a moment, I could figure it all out and this will be over.” How did this happen again? How did I not think I would end up right back here, sick as a dog, wishing I had anybody’s life but my own?

My dad would ask me, “won’t you ever learn?” Or “What’s different this time?” Or offer me short anecdotes like, “if you touched a hot stove a burned your hand, would you go back and touch that stove again?” I never knew how to answer these questions or give him the closure that he needed in order to ease his worries about me. The truth was, I was never sure if I would straighten out either. I wanted so bad to be clean and move on with my life.

I’ll have to backtrack a little bit to reveal what it was that finally gave me what I needed to start figuring this whole thing out. It was when my dad (who was actually my employer at the time) basically fired me and told me to get my life together. The times I had been to treatment before, it was all under my family’s support and financial grace. This time, I had to figure it out on my own. The pressure was more real. The gravity of it sank in a little deeper. But also, there was more of a sense of pride in it for me that time. I greatly appreciate my family for doing all that they have done for me to help me kick the junk, but it took on a whole new meaning when I orchestrated my last treatment visit. I found a place that would fly me out for their treatment program on a payment plan (pretty sure that’s actually illegal, but oh well). From there, I moved into a sober house and made my own moves. I got a place with a couple friends outside of the sober house, and life went on for a bit. Lo and behold, I relapsed AGAIN. That relapse went on for a few months until I found myself being woken up with a shot of Narcan up the nostril. My roommates (who were also in recovery and clean at the time) hugged me and told me they loved me and that they were glad I was alive. I didn’t know what was going on until I felt the precipitated withdrawals kick in. At that moment, the last twelve or so years of my life had all came to a head. This is real. This is life or death. This is me.

That was the last time I ever used. That was September 03, 2020. Today is November 01, 2021. The best way I could describe what life has been like without the shackles of dope would be “Freedom”. Living through addiction was a nightmare come to life. It was fear from the second I woke up in the morning to the moment I took the last hit before dozing off in bed. It was living in secrecy and shadows. It was lying, cheating, hurting, moving, scheming, vomiting, snorting, shooting, thrashing, screaming, and crying my way through one miserable day after another. The most confusing thing about it is I never had any good “reason” to use other than the fact that at one point I felt like I had to. All the problems that cropped up in my life were ones that sprouted from my using. They could all go away if I just stopped. So when I finally was blessed with the events that led my stopping and being able to stay stopped, my life took on a whole new direction. I don’t have the life I always “dreamed of” when I was caught up in the middle of my addiction, but the freedom from using drugs every day is plenty to suffice on the days when I’m not feeling too proud of myself. I feel a new sense of worth these days. On my worst days, I have something to look back on and realize it could be much worse. Coming through to the other side of addiction, I’m automatically equipped with something that could potentially help somebody else struggling to get out of that life. On that same note, there’s people who have been clean longer than I have, and I lean on them to to help me out when I’m unsure about how to keep going. I finally can feel like I have some sort of future ahead of me that doesn’t involve getting up every day to begin the grueling process of getting and using a drug just to not feel sick. The experience of drug addiction shaped me into a person I never thought I would be. That person is more prone to feelings of gratitude; that person feels things and sees things differently. I’m not always too sure of where my place is in this world, but it’s definitely not the place I was in before.

I’d like to say there’s some magic, universal formula to cure anybody and everybody’s troubles with addiction, but I don’t believe there is. Everybody has a story they experience — a life they live. And we all reach a point in that story, a pivotal moment, where there’s a choice or an opportunity to find a better way. Sometimes this opportunity is divine in the way it happens, sometimes it’s a judgement based on morals and logic perhaps. However it may be, going through this type of thing will make or break a person. On the other side, it leaves the shape of something far different from where it started. Addiction knows no bounds. It doesn’t choose people for any specific reasons, and nobody chooses it themselves. I’ve seen and heard stories of people from all walks of life struggling with the same thing. Addiction is the same beast, no matter who’s fighting against it. It’s a strong beast, but it’s spineless. It’s dishonest and shady. It’s distasteful and dishonorable. It is one beast, though, and addicts are many people. Together, it can be conquered, but alone, it is a beast too mighty to defeat.