I was 17 when I taught myself to shoot up in my mother’s bathroom while on the phone with my 24 year old boyfriend. Up until that point, he had refused to teach me how…but now I was threatening him now: “tell me how or I’ll botch the job jabbing myself endlessly.” I don’t remember what happened…how I eventually got the nerve. All I know is that I figured it out. I figured out how to kill myself even faster.
I shouldn’t be alive. The way I used and the things I did to get it … I was living the riskiest kind of life a person can live.
I spent the better part of 10 years chasing that first high, but also chasing away loneliness, chasing away pain, chasing away any thoughts or feeling at all. I was living in the state of total obliteration and numbness. I hadn’t breathed my last breath, but I was dead as a person can be without dying.
So sobriety brings you to life, right?
Well, not at first. First, it tears you open. And leaves you open. There is no escape hatch, nowhere to run and hide. You take all the stabilizers off your life. There is nothing to hold onto because this is deeply internal work, and you have to show up every day.
Everything suppressed rises to the surface.
Everything you’ve ever pushed down, ignored, batted away, held off facing, comes to to face you like some demon in a trilogy movie the franchise will not stop making.
It’s now your job to scrutinize everything as it presents itself. You are being given a chance to exorcise them for good.
When the dust starts to settle, what remains in the wake is an entirely new understanding of the world.
It’s like a yearlong gut-punch, but somehow, doubled over, you learn to smile. And then, to laugh. Then, suddenly, it’s like the world is in technicolor with the volume turned all the way up. It’s overwhelming at first and you have to keep adjusting your eyes… but eventually he wake up to the beauty of it, and you cannot get enough.
The way I experience life now is
enormously profound. I get to live it in total awe and appreciation… people pay good money for this. People learn to meditate and go to therapy and read every book under the sun to try to be more present in their lives. All I had to do was destroy my life to get it. But I wouldn’t take it back. Not for anything.
B 🤍