Okay, Karen, I'll Tell You What Heroin Feels Like

I've gotten this question many times. It's a question only posed by non abusers, and one that usually throws me for a loop. I’ve gotten this in my mom groups a surprisingly great deal, mostly from your standard Karens that don’t really know me, but want a vicarious thrill. It’s a ballsy question, honestly. But today, today’s the day I answer the question, ‘What does heroin feel like’?

First you have to understand how someone gets to heroin in the first place. It’s not a drug you just pick up one day, and it’s not one that anyone actually wants to use. It comes from a place of necessity and survival. A place where you have to feed your body that which it is dependent and now needs to survive. It’s a drug that kills you at the same time you think it’s what’s keeping you alive. That, my friends, is the cunning reality of addiction. I myself could no longer afford pain pills, which are far more expensive than heroin. That’s usually how it starts, in basic financial terms anyway. The emotional aspect is far more complex. Using is not about feeling good, but rather about not feeling bad, or even more than that, not feeling anything. Some of us, myself included, have a deep rooted trauma, or traumas, that are too difficult to face, and your body and mind seek alternatives to typical coping mechanisms. If you think you’re better than your standard dope user, you better climb right down from that fucking ivory tower of yours, because you likely just had better choices available to you in life. But that is one reason I think this information is important to share, because you just can’t know how cunning drugs like heroin and fentanyl are, until you do. I’m here to help you understand, not to help you judge.

Second, you have to understand the lowly place someone like myself comes from, before the high. I’m the adult child of two addicts, administered hard drugs at nine, addicted before I knew that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny weren’t real. I had severe anxiety, growing up in a home rife with addiction and domestic violence; there is a bullet hole still lodged in the wall of my childhood home. If you took a tape measurer down the middle of it, that bullet hole lines up nearly dead center the bed I slept in as a child. I craved attention, and predators picked up on it. I was ‘promiscuous’ as a child, or at least that’s what people called it back then. Today it would be referred to as sexual assault since children can’t mentally consent to sex with adults. I was addicted throughout the latter part of elementary school, and throughout all of high school. I moved out at sixteen, and moved in with my significantly older coke dealer boyfriend, instead of staying at home and experiencing parental abuse. This led to more abuse, eventually being strangled nearly to death by my abusive partner. I experienced homelessness, worked almost full time, and didn’t have any extra curricular activities as my job was to keep a roof over my head. As I stated, there was a period of time where I failed at that even. I am genetically predisposed to addiction on both my maternal and paternal parent’s side, and environmentally predisposed as well. In short, I was pretty fucked all around, and it’s not surprising I eventually graduated to heroin.

The first time I stuck a needle in my vein, it felt like God came down from Heaven, and whispered into every inch of my body that he loved me, and that I’d never hurt again. Like he created an angel just for me, and as soon as I pressed down on the plunger, she flew into my body and kissed every last inch of me, filling me with a warmth and love that is unparalleled on earth. It’s a euphoria that makes you think you never lived before that moment, and that you’ll never live again without it. And just like that, you’re in it. After awhile, you start to realize it wasn’t God that filled the syringe, it was fucking Satan, but it’s already too late for that information to matter. You are fucking in it now. Buckle up, baby, you’re on your way to hell, you just don’t know it yet.

Before the days were long, and now they’re not long enough to experience all the bliss that is being offered. Before you obsessed over your pain, and now you feel so good that there is no pain here. The numbness is the most magical thing you’ve ever experienced, and the fact that my parents didn’t love me didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore, except of course, feeling that nirvana inside me forever.

Everything is warm like you’re being held in a blanket straight out of the dryer that tingles inside you, and is every orgasm you’ve ever felt all at once and in every second for hours on end. It’s knowing that you could die in those moments, and it won’t matter, because you’ve already touched heaven, and God put an angel on earth just for your pleasure. How could anything ever compare to that again? Well, like I said, I realized soon that wasn’t God at all.

Now that you understand, as best you can, what it feels like, you may ask yourself then why every addict says they wish they’d never used in the first place. Imagine, if it feels THAT good, then why would anyone regret doing it? How could any consequences possibly ever outweigh that feeling? If you’re asking that, that’s the exact right question. Knowing how good it feels, will give you a slight idea of the exact opposite world you’re about to visit. I’ve been to hell, and it’s everything you’ve ever heard about it, and everything you haven’t. It’s your thoughts brutally gang raping your mind, while it desperately tries to escape your body to no avail. It’s being dead inside your body, while you still fucking breathe, but wished you didn’t. It’s why I now know, going to heaven isn’t worth going to hell. Whatever good you felt, is now about to be overshadowed by the most unimaginable pain, hatred, shame, and endless wishes for a death that you simultaneously know will not come, at least not fast enough anyway.

Once your body is dependent, it won’t let you organically stop, but worse than that is that your mind won’t. It doesn’t work that way. That’s the price of the feeling, and it’s one that you can never repay. It’s a silent and unknowing deal that you initially made with the devil, and your contract is in blood, literally. You don’t have enough to give back what you need to pay, and even your life will never square the deal. That was the devil seeping into your veins, and you don’t know that until it’s too late.

The seizures began when I could no longer feed my body the copious amounts that it needed to function on a daily basis. It’s never enough, and you always need more. The more you feed it, the more you need, and the cycle never ends until one of you dies. It’s you or the devil, and those aren’t great odds. I paid with my life once, overdosing on the dirty floor of a trap house, that’s drug house to you, and being resurrected from death just in time to take another hit. It’s now as though there are monsters clawing at your eyelids, and just to stop them temporarily, you need to feed them. You must feed them every couple hours, or they will tear at your skull and eat all of your humanity until you will do anything to prevent them from seeking asylum inside your brain.

I couldn’t even get out of bed in the mornings without it, and some days I would literally be so sick that I would crawl to put on my pajama pants, just to go get more of what my body needed to function: heroin, fentanyl, opiates. That which calmed and killed me at the same time. The poisonous air I needed to breathe that killed me at the same time it kept me alive. It didn’t matter if I was so sick that I couldn’t bare to stand, because I was a slave to the drug that I needed to go procure, or else I would be in an even worse hell than I already was. And just when you would think that there was no way that the next day could possibly be worse than the last, it would be exponentially worse to the point that you wish you were dead every day. But even worse than that, you’re still breathing, because it’s remarkable what your body can physically sustain without dying. If you’re thinking “rock bottom”, that’s a cute term that non abusers created to try to put some sort of words or phrase to the hell that is completely immeasurable unless you lived inside it. There are no words, no phrases, for the hell in which you live and are resigned to during drug addiction.

So, Karen, the question isn’t what does heroin feel like. It’s not how good heroin feels that matters. If you ask those questions, be prepared to get an answer of what hell feels like instead.

(Sosobermom.com Blog)