My son found this on reddit. It is a reply to the question’what does addiction feel like?’. It’s so powerful I had to re-blog. For the original go here
“Ok. I’ll try. It’s a bit rambling because I should have gone to bed a while ago. And it kind of starts in the middle because there was another bit before what I wrote but I was copypasting stuff around and it all ended up a bit of a mess but I hope it gives some sense of what my experience was.
So the only reprieve you have from crappiness is to get into the drug. People call it getting high but I think that’s one of the most misleading words associated with drugs, I always think of drugs as like going and sitting in this room where everything is alright, the rooms are different but they all serve that same purpose. Of course not when you first start, at first you want to see the room, all the cool stuff, it’s so interesting, amazing look that! Wow man, can you dig it? Yeah bro. It’s nice. Reaallly nice man, like the best everrrrrrrrr.
And that’s fucking cool. And if you just visit a few times that’s what you remember. But if you stay in the room too long you get used to it in there, how nice and warm it is. How interesting it is. How much you like everyone while you’re in there. And the more time you spend in there, the colder you notice it is outside, how the lights start to hurt your eyes and everything is a bit too garish and discordant and all that stuff people want you to do and the people themselves… well they just start to grate on you and seems now you can’t wait to get away from them, back to your cocoon. That’s all you want, more than anything, if everyone would just leave you alone and let you do that then there would be no problem, and guess what? You get your wish.
Because people will try a bit at the start, maybe your girlfriend will make a bit of a drama about it, maybe some people will have some sympathy for you or try to intervene but pretty soon they’ll all move on, but you won’t.
Because now you’re stuck, you and your little hidey hole, only it’s not so warm and cuddly now. Partly because the chemicals aren’t as effective any more, partly because you’re starting to deteriorate physically and partly because you probably are starting to have real problems holding your life together. When you’re not ‘high’ now you feel ill, nauseous, weak and shaky like someone has sapped all the energy out of the marrow of your bones. And it’s not just physical, emotionally everything is just bleak and shitty, nothing is worth anything and even if it was you feel too shitty to do anything about it anyway. And you’re trapped in this cycle, no-one trusts you, you’ve fucked everything up and the only people you have contact with would sell you out to get hold of drugs, and you’d do the same to them. Not because you’re nasty or they’re nasty but you all understand that everything else is secondary, you’d probably be nice and have friends if you could but it never works out that way, so you end up with kind of accomplices, temporary alliances based on mutual suspicion. You literally have no-one to turn to.
and you know the feeling where you’ve been out in the wet and cold all day and you’re just really tired and hungry and you’ve gotten home and eaten a hot meal then had a warm shower and you get into your bed under a big fluffy blanket and you can hear the rain ouside and everything is just so snuggly and warm that you wiggle your toes and smile to yourself. Well now that’s just a little packet of white powder away. And that’s why you can’t stop, not just because the drug is so great, but because everything else has turned to shit. By now you’ve become a living paradox, you would do anything to get your drug and at the same time your most heartfelt, soulful wish that you would trade anything for in the the universe would be for that drug to be extinguished from existence. All the normal people you see going to school, work, catching the bus, you would give anything just to have their normal constant life free from the hold of this thing. You are so jealous of them. It is all so unfair. You look out from the secret little hell that you’ve made for yourself and envy all the people in the other world, their obliviousness. Just to be without this knowledge would be the greatest blessing you can imagine.
And even if you stop taking the drugs that stuff doesn’t go away, the effects linger for years and years. It must knock something out of balance in your brain or hormones or something because you never seem to fit in again properly after that. There always seems to be stain on you that drags you down, separates you from normal life. Black depression, fantasies about how things could have been, if only… all the potential, all the beautiful people lost in that mess..
But then, ten years later, it all seems like a bad dream. A half remembered hazy different world like a movie I watched somewhere while I was falling asleep and never really grasped the narrative. I feel like I escaped it, but only just, I don’t think I had much left in me before it would have completely swallowed me up and been the rest of my life.
I honestly think it has taken me 15 years of abstinence, meditation and self reflection as well as just normal living to throw the shadow of this stuff off. And probably I still haven’t, it’s always hard to tell except in hindsight. The thing that always gets me though is the huge waste of time it’s all been. I’m talented. I’m good at stuff and yet half my life has just been frittered away on meaningless bullshit. I’m lucky if I’m back to square one.”
