Recovery

He awoke with a jolt, sweat dripping down his brow, chest heaving for air. This was typical for him lately, since he stopped using illicit drugs to quell his deep seated anxiety. Twenty three years old, and he’s still suffering from night terrors like a child, more frightening still to him he could never recall what brought on the tremendous level of fear he endured. As he drew together the strength to crawl out of bed, like a worm from the dirt, he sighed. It felt like it had been months since he last felt the reprieve of an uneventful sleep.
Cocaine, Coke, Blow, whatever you called it, he wanted it. He craved it, much like the touch of a long lost love. It was truly his first love affair, a substance, a simple white powder. The feeling which filled every fibre of his being as he hastily inhaled. Stop, he reminded himself. Its tragic how an addict can romanticize absolutely everything to do with using.
Three weeks clean, or three years, it all felt the same. It never really mattered how long he was clean for, because it always felt like he was teetering on the brink of relapse. Its difficult because the absence of use doesn’t equate sobriety, the intoxication the drugs have over him don’t recede with the same haste as the high which flees his body. The state in which he found himself, was not a product of days or months. It was a disease which infected the vast majority of the decisions he had made over the course of the last five years. Half a decade of his life, wasted on pursuing a drug, chasing it all over the city, sacrificing portions of his soul through his depraved actions. Thats a quarter of his entire life, consumed in what only felt like a blink of an eye. As quickly as it had started it was over. His parents, astonished by his actions hadn’t the slightest notion of how fully the addiction had permeated his being. He blamed them, for his actions, in a meagre attempt to displace the shame he felt for whom, or what he had become. Never once considering that even a portion of it was his fault. Until he stopped using. The hardest part of getting clean isn’t abstaining from the use of the drugs, it is having to accept your actions from when you were high, and own them when your mind isn’t polluted.
He felt sick for all that he had done, the people whom he had hurt. He was nauseous with the repulsive, slug-like creature he was when he used. With a mind that focused on only one goal, to maintain just enough inebriation to hide from the feelings that ate away at the hole he had in his chest. That deep pit, which never seemed to fill up regardless of how many substances or lovers he tossed into it. That seething pit of hatred which bubbled up the venomous vile words he spewed at those who even attempted to make him aware of what he was doing to the people around him, to the people who loved him.
Another thing they don’t tell you at AA, or NA or any organization is that by the time you decide to get better, people will never trust you again. You’ll get encouraging words occasionally but you can feel the pity or disgust people truly feel when you meet their gaze. Nobody truly believes that addiction is a disease, and lets face it, even if it were a disease it’d be comparable to an STI, something self induced through reckless actions. Nobody but an addict can truly understand what the appeal is to being high. Being an addict is most definitively the easiest job in the world, you have one task to complete. You have to get high, and you can do that through any means necessary, you can beg borrow and steal your way to intoxication. You have no responsibility to anything except your addiction, no pressure to succeed because people only expect failure from you. It is a simple existence if you can get past the hatred and disgust people feel towards you.