For All the Recovery Girls

 I’ve met all sorts of crazy characters while living a life of recovery from drugs and alcohol. In a sober home in Newton, Massachusetts, of all places, there was an 18 year old there with me from Bangor, Maine who got arrested for selling narcotics and was set to go to court sometime during her stay at the house. In her mugshot she didn’t look a day over 15. Her social media pages were filled with reels of her holding guns, shaking her ass with an empty cardboard box of white claw on her head and snorting dope. Here is a literal child shaking her ass on the way to jail. She was a party girl of the heroin variety, constantly surrounded by people she was using with, down to do pretty much any drug that was on the table, and stoned to the bone all the while. I had never met anyone that young who lived a life like that. That’s not something I had even seen in movies. Probably because they don’t make movies about girls like us. People would be way too uncomfortable seeing such beautiful people running their lives into the ground. No one likes staring at wasted youth. 

Everyone in America loves to hate drug addicts, thinking they are the scum of the earth and if they die from using drugs then they simply got what was coming to them. No one wants to walk away from life knowing that addiction comes to those who are vulnerable. And everyone is vulnerable at some point. People want to feel strong. They want to feel like they are living life the right way. They want to stand tall and they want to judge others who don’t fit into their narrow perception of strength. It’s as if these people have never had a bad decade. Shit, maybe they haven’t. I hope they never do. It’s a hopeless feeling waking up day after day still feeling the same shit you’ve felt for years. The sadness, the pain, the dread, the fear. It makes you feel so weak. So I used drugs because they made me feel strong. Coke made me invincible. Painkillers made me feel warm and fuzzy and delighted to be alive. Alcohol made me euphoric. I didn’t mind being an addict that much. I felt safe in that title. Life felt like it didn’t matter, which meant I could do anything. Of course I always spent the day drinking, but if nothing matters then what’s a few more drinks gonna do? Being high was great while it lasted. I didn’t mind living life the wrong way. 

I think most people who look down on drug addicts are just scared. They know that they could be living the right way for decades on end and somewhere down the road tragedy will strike and they won’t know how to handle it, so they’ll start drinking more than before. Everyone knows this is a possibility that isn’t so far out of reach. Sure, most of them won’t live a life of guns and dope and posting about it on TikTok, but at some point they will all know about the death of the soul that comes from feeling like you don’t have any other options. In active addiction you learn about all the fun places drugs can take you. You can shake your ass on the way to court and because you’re only 18 it doesn’t feel like a big deal. In sobriety you learn about choices. How few of them you have, how little time you have to make them, the aftereffects of the choices you make and how they can influence the trajectory of your life. Non users look like babies to me. Because they still don’t know about choices. They think they can win at life if they only make the good ones. They even are foolish enough to think there’s such a thing as “good” choices. Those anti drug people have no interest in thinking about a time when they might be just as vulnerable as the addicts we see on the street. There comes a time in everyone’s life when they’re not so sure whether they want to live or die. If they’re smart, at least. This is a cruel fact of life. And then what? You probably won’t make such good choices. You might find yourself snorting the fattest line at 3am and hitting up your dealer for more even though you just scored earlier that night. You might even go on a desperate quest to find alcohol after the bars are all closed, end up ordering it off uber eats so you don’t have to leave your apartment. You might end up doctor shopping for Vicodin. No, no one wants that to be them. So they turn their nose up at addicts, boycott safe injection sites, bitch about the degenerates of the world. Not me, could never be me, they think with a scowl. I’ll make better choices. That’s going to be what saves me. Nothing can save us, babes. Everyone leaves behind their body at some point. And a holier than thou soul won’t buy you a ticket into heaven. Trouble is in the past and trouble is in front of you. This one moment is all we got. Better use it being compassionate before you’re the one who’s in need of compassion. 

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I have a friend who’s about to go into rehab for a coke addiction. She is the most hardworking, career oriented person that I know. She’s a bright light in this world. A very glamorous woman, getting her start in the modeling industry when she was in college and breaking away to do something she found more powerful. I have a feeling once she gets her mind right it’s a great possibility she’ll leave me in the dust, basking in bright lights with her name in newspapers and business magazines. Married to an ultra rich and powerful man. She will be the one who breaks the internet. A gloriously ambitious woman with a twisted past that she prefers to keep private, a very rare and refreshing life skill in the age of the oversharing internet. She’s gonna be one of the few who takes rehab as an opportunity to leave her addiction behind for good. I have to believe that. So few of us make it. I need my friends to be the ones who do. 

She told me that she was shocked how much coke it took to get her high, how embarrassing it was to be constantly texting her dealer for more. She said she’s unemployable at this point, no longer able to function because her whole life has turned to shit. I think she’s a little taken aback that she really is an addict. She is a career woman, after all. She’s traveled the world and lived in the greatest cities in America. She grew up in a nice house. She’s educated, went to a good school. But her addiction isn’t shocking to me at all. Not in the slightest. I know all the different ways that addiction can sneak up on even the most stereotypically successful person. Not all addicts are degenerates. The common denominator is that we’re all running from something that scares us. I guess that means those anti drug people are much closer to using than they would like to think. I know when she gets sober she’ll start to see it’s not such a bad thing being an addict. You just have to let go of all the shame. That shit will eat you alive. It’s no good to be ashamed of yourself. What’s there to be ashamed of anyways? You made some choices that sent your life spiraling down the drain. Oh well. Now she has the chance to clean up her act a bit. I see no shame in that. 

This girl was the one who first got me into coke, which makes her sound like an awfully careless person, but we were so young at the time. Years away from being old enough to drink and even further away from getting a firm grasp on what addiction looks like. We’ve been texting a lot recently while I’ve been traveling and she’s been laying in bed delaying the inevitable brutal departure from a drugged out haze into rehab. It’s a horrible shock to the system getting clean. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Mostly because I want my enemies to stay sick until it kills them. That’s how bad some of them hurt me. But those are stories for another time. 

Last time we talked she asked me if I miss alcohol. I don’t. Not in the slightest. Alcohol fucking sucks. It gives you the spins when combined with the drugs I prefer doing (cocaine) and dampens the high one gets from LSD. It makes sex a dreadful experience. It makes people age really quickly and turns them into a miserable person when they decide to quit. All the alcoholics I know are insufferable. So whiny and quick to wallow in their own self-pity once they sober up. I should know. I’ve spent more than my fair share of time listening to other drunks take on a pseudo therapist role as sponsors, spouting off stupidly wrong life advice. One sponsor I had compared the death of her cat to the death of my step brother who died of cancer when he was in his 30’s. She said we grieve the same way because we’re alcoholics. I cannot stomach the bullshit of a sober drunk! They say things like “my worst day sober is better than my best day drinking.” All that means to me is they never really knew how to party. They just knew how to hate themselves. I tend to steer clear of alcoholics. I don’t judge them for drinking. I’m a drunk, too, afterall, but hating yourself is a way of life that just doesn’t resonate with me. I love who I am as a person. I think I’m a really fun, vibrant girl. In fact, I’m the coolest person that I know. I just don’t like the way that my mind fixates on all the horrible things that have gone down in my life. It was a relief to be able to tune out all that noise. Simple as that. 

Once I got sober I began to see things a little more clearly. Most people really fucking suck. The only ones I like are the wasted youth. They know the only interesting things that there are to know. You can have the most money, piss clean your entire life, go to ivy league colleges, have a whole wall of degrees, but if you don’t know what it’s like to befriend a young girl who started using heroin before she could drive a car, a girl who can still laugh, shake her ass, put her makeup on in the morning, get her GED and tell stories about getting arrested while living in a trap house like she’s talking about putting her socks on, then I’m not sure why you think you’re so much better than me. You haven’t lived at all. Not even close. As for the alcoholics: I suggest replacing your crippling addiction with shopping. Then you can show up to the AA meeting drippin’, and at least then you’ll have something going for you.