My addiction Story
My addiction story starts at a very young age, the first time i really became addicted to drugs was when i was about 9 years old. I was picked on and attacked by a school bully in the playground and was picked up and thrown to the ground, I extended my arm in order to break my fall and ended up fracturing my arm, I had fractured my arm a few times before this, but this one broke my skin and severed my main artery, I remember trying to get up and couldn't comprehend why i couldn't feel my left arm, and when i looked over to my left side, i saw that i was loosing blood and a lot of it.
After passing out from the blood loss and being transported to Westmead Children's Hospital for surgery, I began the long recovery process in the hospital. The doctors prescribed Morphine through a drip and we're pumping me with so much of it, all i could do was sleep, vomit and halucinate..
It was fucking horrible and i hated it, I think that's the first time i really became depressed, I had doctors finding new viens in my feet and sticking needles everywhere they could, trying to find new places to put another drip, so i could get some more morphine into my small adsolescent body. Coming off the morphine was probably one of the worst experiences of my life, excacerbated by the fact i was just a kid and also the fact that at that point in my life, I hadnt really had to overcome much before that. What doesn't break you or kill you makes you stronger and things get easier with practice.
Interestingly enough, because of that experience i actually really hated drugs, I was surrounded by drugs growing up in my low socio-economic neighbourhood, we grew up behind a man made creek and lived next door to an alley way where we used to find needles all the time, they used to end up in our backyard thrown over the fence, after some junkie had taken thier hit and moved on. I came across a lot of drug use and abuse as a teenager playing drums for a touring band, I was partying a lot and i saw my fair share of drugs on the road, but i totally despised other users and addicts, I really didnt enjoy taking any drugs at all and it was because i had this fear of having to go through that process of coming down again, so in that regard, I was lucky i was able to learn from a very young age that drugs were bad.
So instead i turned to legal ways of getting high and low, things like alcohol and cough syrup.. yeah, i actually thoroughly enjoyed and became addicted to cough mixture, just the sight of a Robitussen dry cough forte mixture box gets me excited still to this day, thinking about the various stages of the journey that is DMT. For some reason i was better able to justify taking such large amounts of this stuff because it was legal and not generally considered a drug.
I could could lie to myself and give myself enough of an illusion to keep it up.
Let me tell you something.. I had a lot of friends around me that loved taking drugs and the way they used to look down on me when i took some cough mixture was fucking awful and terryifying it was like as though i was diseased and i was like "but youre smoking crack, shooting up meth and popping pills" it took me a long time to see that i had developed a problem, like... other drug addicts were now looking down on me.
One of the tell tale signs of being an addict is that the addict is completely contradictory, and they justify thier addictions in some of the most outlandish, manipulative and unbelievable ways. I hated drugs, drugs were bad and i hated addicts, addicts were bad, but here i was hanging out at a local skate park letting 10 year old kids do tricks on my head.. (whilst wearing a hemlet) telling myself that i wasn't using drugs and i didn't have a drug problem.
I quite famously attended court in a clown costume, to be honest i attended court a few times whilst i was as high as a fucking kite could possibly fly way up in the sky.
One day i was called for jury duty, and i thought "you know what, this experience would be a lot more fun if i was high" so i showed up to court completely off my face and presented for jury duty, I was so fucked up that no matter what the other jury members were going with, a guilty, or not guilty verdict, I was going to swing the opposite way just for fun.
Fortunately for the defendant, the victim and the whole legal system there in that courthouse on that day, I was excused.
Now, my dad was an alcoholic and for that reason my mum was always worried i too, would become an alcoholic and guess what? I did just that!
I have been pulled over, arrested and charged with drink driving four times now, and i just could not help myself, the first time i drunk drove was to pick my dad up from the pub, with his encouragement i stayed for a few beers until he was REALLY ready to leave and on the way home i was pulled over. I was pulled over by a detective, (head of the asian gangs crime squad) who lived around the corner from us, He said i was swerving over the road wasn't indicating, I was also texting and changing a cd all at the same time.. Dangerous combination.
He pulled me over and was shocked to see just how completely wasted i was, he drives that way home each day and usually has his children in the car, he was pretty upset to know that there were people like me driving around like that.
Let me tell you where my dad was when i was in that hospital as alittle kid. My dad was in jail, serving time for drink driving, the very thing my mother was so afraid of me replicating, something i promised i would never do, a situation i promised i would never find myself in, yet here i was following in my dear old dads footsteps. I was disqualified from driving for 9 months and as a result had to ask my dad to drive me to a few jobs and not a week or two later, on a job, with my dad.. I got myself into an accident.
We decided to head to the pub for lunch, one or two beers would be ok and he could still drive but we ended up having a few more then intended. I ended up having surgery that day. I was cutting a plastic cap off a liquid nails bottle with a stanley knife blade and cut the tip of my finger so, i repositioned my hand so as not to repeat myself and cut my finger again, only this time i went and sliced right through my hand, through my skin, my tendons and everything right on down to the bone in my knuckles across three fingers. After the surgery i had to keep my hand in a special sling for 6 weeks and after the 6 weeks, I had to re-learn how to move my fingers as my tendons were regrowing and healing, i had to do a lot of therapy and physio to get my hand back to normal.
For most addicts the only real point of change comes when you have truly hit rock bottom, and that was it for me, i was running a business and had staff dependant on me making things work, i had a partner at the time that wasn't too happy or supportive when it came to driving my ass around all the time and i needed to step my game up. For me rock bottom fortunately wasn't all that bad, for some people it can literally mean a knock on deaths door or worse.. for people i know now, rock bottom has been overdosing, checking out the pearly gates and coming back from death after a really hard jab with a really big (adrenaline) needle. (not recommended)
Years later, when i was jailed (temporarily for things i didnt do), I was able to spend a lot of time with people struggling with addictions, there was more drugs in the jail than out of it and i was surrounded by users, people that used because it took the pain of past trauma away, people that used in order to make it through the boring, monotonous day to day of life inside, and those that just used for the sake of it, because thier peers were offering. I started reading a lot in jail and worked my way through over 200 self help and educational books in under six months, I enrolled in a double Law and Psychology degre with USQ while i was in custody and really started to understand addicts, atleast.. thats what i thought. Really, I was just finally starting to understand myself.
When i was released i put myself through as many courses and programs as i could find, i was like a knowledge sponge, i went to NA group meetings, AA, and Al-ANON, I went to drug and alcohol information sessions and did drug and alcohol programs, believe it or not.. i even went to church. All that time i guess i was learning and searching at the same time, trying to understand myself and who i was, my identity, why i had become addicted, what would stop me from falling back into those self destructive behaviours and routines again, the mindsets and the tricks.
The reason why most people are addicts is not because the drug is SO GOOD or the high SO GREAT but because it is an escape, its a bandaid for a trauma, a negative experience or perhaps the combination of many bad experiences throughout our childhood and life and in order to really heal we must get to the core of those problems, and thats exactly what i have done, now i am here and i am actively helping others struggling with thier addictions, I have the knowledge and the understanding, because i have been there too.