Recognizing A Hero In Addict (Chapters 4&5)

4.

People don't want to believe there's actually an opposing force so strong it threatens to dismantle the very foundation of one of the oldest, most sacred, and widely agreed upon core beliefs that there is nothing stronger than a Mother's love; no bond more powerful than the one shared between a Mother and her child.

I get it. I have spent the past several decades being one of those people that don't want to believe it, but I can no longer deny the reality that my mother is as toxic as the pills she would and did choose over me every day. I have now broken this cycle with my son, who my Mother has and will never meet, due to her refusing to admit or seek help for her crippling addiction.

The way I remember my mother's hands are extended with a variety of pills in them for me to take, under the guise of them being "vitamins". I was in the third grade and nine years old when I unknowingly became dependent on a variety of narcotics. The question I always get is the same one I've been trying to get an answer to my whole life, and if you find out why, do please let me know. Why did my mother feed me drugs? I have many theories, but ultimately it's irrelevant because I really just don't know, and I have finally accepted that my mother will take the answer to her grave before she tells me. What I do know is what happened as a result.

My mother was a gorgeous and vibrant woman, but she was troubled with her own childhood demons and a crumbling marriage to my father who routinely beat her in front of us kids, and once she got her first script from the doctor for a back injury, she found in the pills a numbness that for the first time drowned out these sickening truths that screamed inside her brain. She has continued to try to drown them out until the only truth she can hear and knows now is that she can't breathe without them, and she won't.

With my Father, take this story and repeat. The only difference is that he didn't feed me pills until later in life. It's often a vicious cycle, and they didn't know how to break it, so they broke me.

As intensely as my Mom and Dad fought, is as intensely as they expressed their love. They could go from writing each other sweet love notes to pulling and firing a gun at one another within minutes at any given time. There is a bullet stilled lodged in the wall of my parent's bedroom in my childhood home. It's worth noting that the wall it is lodged in is the same one that connected directly to my bedroom, and if you took a tape measure down the middle, it lines up almost perfectly down the dead center of the bed I slept in as a child.

That's a rare instance though of something separating us kids from the havoc they wreaked on each other, and us as a result. There ordinarily wasn't a wall separating us from their incessant screaming and the beatings. If there was, it was usually the one my Dad was throwing my Mom against. He had a lot of pet names that he enjoyed screaming in her face, usually as he would slam her against said walls, we would hear them ring out as "saggy, baggy elephant" for one. This was his cute way of thanking my Mom for birthing three children, two of which were his and one that wasn't who he would remind of this fact while he emotionally abused him mercilessly.

My Mom would taunt my dad relentlessly until he would finally hit her. While this doesn't make the physical abuse acceptable or excusable, she did emotionally abuse my Father as enthusiastically as he physically abused her. My Mom was a veritable master with emotional abuse, and I would have preferred a beating from her any day of the week over her emotional abuse and the psychological effects I still suffer from today as a result. The physical scars are the ones that fade, but the psychological ones remain embedded in a place inside your mind that you can't escape while they play endlessly year after year like a broken record until you find a way to stop it.

In my experience, there's only three ways to stop it, and I've personally tried my hand at all of them. Although, killing myself was inadvertent, that is one route to go. While drugs won't stop it, they will and certainly did drown out the noise to a tolerable level. Then there is the healthiest but longest route, and the one I highly recommend above the others, and that is therapy. It is also the one I recommend starting and ending with as therapy is painstakingly long in comparison to the instant gratification of the others which make addiction to drugs almost impossible to recover. The brutal truth is that there's just no fixing me, and there's no reason we should all be so steadfast in our belief that broken needs to be fixed at all. As I mentioned, I am irreparably damaged from a variety of factors that can never be mended. Pain, abuse, tragedy all break people to different extents and varying degrees, but there is no doubt they also mold people in unique and endearing ways they wouldn't have been extended to otherwise. The addiction community is full of some of the most empathetic, talented, generous, loving, and beautiful people I have ever met in my life. If we admired the beauty in the broken more, we the broken would be so much less likely to try to find a quick fix.

5.

The first time I overdosed on heroin, I was twenty three. Nobody ever thinks they're going to sink that far into their addiction. Being an intravenous drug user isn't exactly something you plan to be when you grow up, and in fact, I always planned to be quite the opposite. My life just didn't go according to plan.

Everyone has a particular view of your stereotypical IV drug user, and I just was not it. I was on no one's radar. Despite opioid addiction being an epidemic, this skewed view of the stereotypical drug addict is so shockingly prevalent that it was even shared by a large majority of doctors and staff in the rehab facilities, methadone clinic, suboxone clinic, and many other treatment facilities and clinics I would encounter over the years. They would tell me I was too good or too pretty to be "doing that stuff", but they didn't even know me prior to their statements. They called it "stuff", because they didn't even want to associate the mere word "heroin" with me. Since I was a little girl I kept this shameful secret, and this was a big reason why. I never felt like I belonged anywhere, and even some members of the addiction community would treat me that way before they knew or met me. I was a decently attractive twenty three year old white girl that maintained a job throughout the better part of my addiction until recently. I was smart, funny, and charming, and that's what people saw. If they'd have looked closer they would have seen the track marks, penchant for self destruction, self loathing, and flesh and blood skeleton I had turned into who was a mere shell of a human being. I was high functioning, and they saw that. I am absolutely positive that if not for my appearance, I would have been found out much sooner. I was having terrible seizures at work towards the end and no one suspected still. This disguise other people were dressing me in was truly a curse in the end. People just don't want to believe this force, this beast, could grab hold and never let go of two generations of pretty white women from a half decent neighborhood. Make no mistake, I am not complaining about being semi attractive or white. I am however pointing out that there is a reason Ted Bundy was able to lure and kill so many women over the years undetected.

I once shook a man's stump in place of his hand, and I wasn't forewarned by my colleagues who previously met him and knew, nor was I given a heads up from the gentleman. This was so jarring to my mind that my body reacted before I could tell it how wildly inappropriate and offensive this would be. I was expecting to get a hand, and it was so far removed in my mind from the realm of possibility that I would get a stump that I reacted without thinking, and I jumped backward because I was so taken aback. Sorry handless man, I empathize with how shitty I made you feel. Almost no one outside the addiction community even knows I was a drug user,let alone abuser. Any time I have told someone outside the addiction community this fact, let alone tried to share one of these intensely dark secrets, they are so blown away that they react in shocking and offensive ways before they even realize they're doing it. They just don't see it coming.

I cannot impress upon you enough that addiction simply does NOT discriminate. It certainly mitigates your odds if you have a happy childhood and no genetic predispositions to addiction, but even that will not guarantee you will not join our dreaded club. Admission is free for everyone. It's just the price you pay to get out that varies.

I now live on borrowed time after I almost paid with my life, twice. Thank God "junkies" and angels don't live up to all their stereotypes, because the angel that saved my life was a junkie named June Bug.