Recognizing A Hero In Addict

Recognizing A Hero In Addict
How I won my life and death battle with addiction, but am still fighting to change the narrative on a war waged by it's stigma.

Chapter 1

Fuck suitcases.

My earliest memory, 20 years ago, involves this same suitcase in front of me, in this same room, being packed in the same furious fashion by a crazed, deranged, and drug addicted woman. It's destination is bleak, as it was then. Like Mother, like daughter, I thought to my 24 year old self.

At four years old, in the middle of the night, My Mom ushered the packed case and I into the truck where my Dad was waiting.

We're taking you to the orphanage to live, she said again as coldly as she did the first time, but louder now to ensure I heard her over my sobs. We won't have time to visit you, because we have the boys to look after. Stop crying, you brought this on yourself. We'll try to send you a letter in a few years if we have time, but don't count on it.

I am begging now, pleading between sobs to let me come home.

My Dad drove two towns away, over the old stone bridge with the creek running beneath it, then a sharp left, and into the parking lot of the orphanage . He didn't announce our arrival, and neither did my Mother. They didn't have to tell me. They knew I knew we had arrived, and instead they let the surroundings speak for themselves. This was a brilliantly horrifying touch on their part, and a true testament to their well honed, adept skillset and mastery of using psychological annihilation to instill the maximum amount of fear in me. The orphanage was a huge, ominous, dilapidated two story building on a pitch dark night.

My Dad left the headlights of his Chevy on, and their meager illumination only served to highlight the intense isolation that encompassed the orphanage on all four sides. It looks exactly like what a four year old would imagine an orphanage to look like-when a four year old is forced to imagine what an orphanage looks like.

She pulls the suitcase and I from the truck, and starts to drag me towards the building kicking and screaming crying. When she can't go on dragging me anymore, she turns and looks at me, straight faced and cold. Are you going to be good from now on if we let you come home? When I cried yes, she put the suitcase back in the truck and told my Dad to go home, because she was nice enough to give me one last chance to be good.

Then we pulled out from what I only know now, as a 24 year old junkie addicted to pills and heroin, was simply an abandoned factory. It's been twenty years, and here I sit with this same suitcase, packed for rehab-a second time, knowing only one thing in this moment. The same thing. I have one last chance to "be good".

LET ME SAVE YOU THE SUSPENSE.

It's important I tell you before you read any further, that Broken 24 year old addict packing the suitcase, she's already dead. She knows it, I know it, and so should you. It's not death that scares her. Not enough to stop using anyway. Nor is it jails or institutions. It's what came after she experienced all three that scares her. She's not going to treatment because she thinks she's going to die. Like I told you, she is dead-it's just a far worse fate than the literal kind. What scares her is what scares all addicts, scares us desperate to try anything. She's seeking treatment not because she actually believes she can get better. She doesn't. She has in fact died already in the literal sense that stopped her heart from beating and stopped her lungs from breathing. What scares her, the reason she is going, is not because they stopped, but because they started again.

Some people are too broken to repair. They are irreparably damaged. There is no fix even in a fix. There is a hurt in their souls that will remain until their last breath. These are my people. These are her people. This is our story.

2.

I find comfort in the Dysfunctionality that permeates through the air of a rehab facility in the same way that I imagine the smell of fresh baked cookies take most normal people back to the familiarity of their childhood. There's a beauty in the broken unlike any I've ever seen before, and typically the more tragic a life story, the more broken and beautiful. The most beautiful people I've ever met never had a choice in the matter.

A prime example of my general rule of thumb is an exquisite twenty something year old girl sitting next to me on a dilapidated chair in rehab number two. She's pretty, but that's not what makes her beautiful. She's creepily whispering, in a little girl's voice, the eerie phrase, "No, Daddy, No", as she stares into the abyss in terror.

Oh fuck, this is too heavy for me to handle right now. I have had a gun pressed into the back of my head, been punched in the face by a grown man wielding a knife, and this is easily the most frightened I have ever been as my arms swell with the goose bumps that are a side effect of the palpable fear she's eminating in this most wretched of memory. These are the memories, the pieces of herself she's trying to kill. God bless this poor girl, because she is likely going to kill herself before she can kill these memories. She doesn't want to kill herself either though, and that's why she's here in this rehab beside me. She's desperate too.

Can I borrow your lighter?, she asks me a minute later in as normal a tone and affect as would ordinarily accompany this simple request. Yeah, sure of course, I tell her. Anything, I am thinking, if it will get me out of this terrible god damned and forsaken memory lane you've taken me on with you. This is a temporarily forgiving thought as you must understand, I am in the depths of detox despair that is my own personal hell without adding someone else's into the mix. She calmly takes the lighter and instead of the normal thank you that is merited with such an exchange, replies Great, I need to go burn the notebook in my room!, and quickly scurries off to presumably her room to burn this whole motherfucker to the ground with all of us degenerates in it.

FUCKKKKK. Do I have to get up now and inform someone of this imminent arson? I am in the throes of heavy heroin and methadone withdrawal, and her burning this motherfucker to the ground might just be my best option out of this hell right now. I'd rather be burned alive than get up from this fucking chair in this condition. This is just another case of a choice that isn't someone's to make. My body is calling the shots, and it's in no shape to physically stand and present any sort of debate to an orderly that this isn't our best demise. That's not even a debate I'm willing to wager winning in my own mind, let alone out loud to another human being. While I'm hashing out the details of my best form of death, and how it's imminent in either one brutal fashion or another, I hear a commotion down the hall.

The girl is screaming to such an extent and wail that my broken counterparts in the community room start taking bets on whether she's going to be baker acted. If this were the outside world, no one would even know that term, let alone what it meant. But this is rehab, and we all know this to mean she may have to be committed to a mental institution on an involuntary 72 hour hold to ensure she doesn't hurt herself or anyone else. As a seasoned vet and witness to this type of behavior, I don't need to bet; it wouldn't be fair. Being a party to the preceding event wasn't even a factor, because I heard those screams, and those are the screams of someone that is most definitely about to be baker acted.

A few days later, after her release from the aforementioned involuntary hold she was placed under, she made me privy to the contents of the notebook and why the necessity to burn the evidence of it's very existence. The childlike state she reverted to before the lighter exchange was a result of her previously filling the entirety of said notebook with a record of abuse, abuse suffered at the hands of her father, dating all the way back to a small child.

Her father was a well respected doctor in their community. The same community that shunned and labeled her as a crazy, worthless drug addict is the one she was worried about wrecking her father's reputation within. No one in her neighborhood ever thought to ask her why she hurt herself, and who hurt her first. Despite this, she was so cut by their words, and scared about their judgement that she grappled for over a decade with whether or not to even write down the horror he'd subjected her to throughout her life.

She chronicled the abuse that began when she was four or five years old when her dad would come into her room carrying his medical bag equipped with a syringe he used to sedate her if the molestation made her cry out in pain, as it almost always did. This was, she presumed, so her mother wouldn't hear or suspect anything. This syringe was as much the only relief to her then as the one she fills and injects herself with now willingly. The one she is in rehab to try and stop from killing her before the pain of these memories do.

She finally put the secret down on paper after all these years. She wrote down every single instance she could remember of the incestuous evil, and in doing so hoped to review it with the on staff therapist to alleviate the shame that accompanied these traumatizing memories. Then she came out of her room, sat beside me where she reverted back to a child like state and voice, reflecting on her protests of "No, Daddy, No" before being shoved in her closet and routinely raped.

Then instead of being subjected to the almost certain judgement she would face from within her community if she were to unleash these secrets to them, she asked me to borrow a lighter. Before they strapped her to the gurney, before the screams, she set the notebook ablaze. She didn't have a choice, she said.

3.

I was sixteen, and in 10th grade, when I moved in with my twenty three year old coke dealer boyfriend. My fate and the determining factor in this, the matter of my living situation, was decided by the time honored and sacred tradition of the white trash: a street fight. The two contenders being my father, and this twenty three year old man. The latter was the victor, and thus they concluded to he go the spoils. I now live with him in an apartment above the local pizza shop, in his main amphetamine distribution center, while I finish high school. I was a teenager living above the coolest joint in town, and I scored the hottest and most coveted bad boy around. I thought I was hot shit. Not one adult thought to correct this obviously fucked up scenario by impressing upon me the reality of the situation that I can now in my mid thirties appropriately put in perspective. I was a confused little girl who lived with an abusive predator stupid enough to sell drugs out of our house- to kids frequenting a pizza parlor owned by an equally pathetic man who allowed said kids to blow lines off the bathroom toilet. In addition to an already raging opiate addiction, within two years I will also acquire a massive coke habit from my pedophile boyfriend who kept me in unlimited supply, and by whom will also beat and choke me within an inch of my life.

My parents were my main source of supply prior to Brad, and I was happy to reduce my pill intake considerably for the first time in my life. The problem with developing a habit at nine years old, besides the obvious one, is that I had no idea who I was without the drugs. There was this gaping hole of blackness inside me that made me feel empty without them, and void of everything except the memories I wanted to kill. I wasn't a person without them, or rather I wasn't the person I knew how to be and present to the world without them. The person I cultivated whilst high for the past seven years of my life, I am just now finding out, is not real and the traits I have exuded and claimed as my own to the world, are in fact not mine to claim at all, but rather a byproduct of the drugs. There were a bare minimum of pills I had to take daily to stave off the sickness and to function as human, and that had been non negotiable with my body since as long as I could remember. But then there were the amount I had to take to be the false version of myself I created that was charismatic, confident, strong, funny, outspoken, social, and everything else I needed her to be, including and especially, numb.

Everybody wants to know, didn't anybody notice something was wrong? They did, but not when I was secretly fulfilling my habit by snorting lines in the high school bathroom between periods. They didn't notice when I missed sixty some days of school because it is exhausting maintaining a high school career, in addition to an almost full time job, and a coke and opioid dependency simultaneously. They didn't notice the handprint bruises embedded into my neck. But I can tell you the first time I tried to stop using anything above and beyond the bare minimum, they fucking noticed immediately. In all of elementary and high school I never had anyone ask me what was wrong with me until I tried to actually stop using at 16. They wanted to know what was wrong with me that I wasn't funny, confident, or social anymore. They wanted to know right up until I filled the void with a coke habit, and magically transformed back into "myself" again. This is the first time in my young life that I will be made aware of this foreign and ironic phenomena of people only thinking I was on drugs when I tried to quit using drugs, but it certainly won't be the last. I just won't encounter it again for another three years when I try to quit again after high school.