Rebuilding Begins When My Arson Ends

I've spent so many years circling in the clouds, searching for life as it is meant to be lived, soaring on false wings given by heroin. But it turns out that all along, the life I was searching for was never one I could see from the air. I needed to land and breathe sober air and take sober steps before I could see that life? Life IS that pain I run from. Life is that sadness, sorrow, regret and fear. But life is also moments of joy, of peace, of sometimes feeling nothing but okay. Life is placing one foot in front of the other with no chemical buffer between my feet and the ground and knowing that the simple fact of my sobriety does not entitle me to anything more or anything less than anyone else gets- life as it is, with it's flaws and uncertainties and pains and triumphs. Because that is what life is, that is what living entails.

I sit here with a pair of days with absolutely no opiates at all in my system, after taking the last tiny bit of my suboxone the other day. No suboxone, no smack, no methadone or even kratom. I'm in withdrawal, my entire body hurts, my stomach is revolting and threatening to rip it's way out of my abdomen altogether, but I've no desire to walk away from where I am right now, both physically and emotionally, because I want what lies on the other side of these last couple days sick. I have an abscess on my upper arm that I'm fighting a losing battle against with double doses of three different antibiotics, and one in my neck I'm more hopeful will respond to the pills, and even that pain is welcome, because it is REAL. I've made it through the seizures, I've made it through the sleeplessness. I have made it through the daily moments where I would gladly and without second thought cut out and sell my own kidneys for relief of this sickness. I know $20 would relieve this sickness, but then what does that do for the deeper root of the sickness, my disease? It would set me back behind that wall between me and life as it is meant to be lived, a wall I was so sure, so absolutely, entirely certain, I would never see this side of again.

I've been absent here and on my corresponding Instagram, which is apparently now famous thanks to the way viral news reports have spread about the community of #junkiesofig, because my phone was stolen, ripped out of my hand at the bus stop. At the bus stop, on the way to go meet my dealer relapse. My ability to contact my dealer- not a dopehouse, he is a call and meet dealer- that day and get him to meet me at the bus stop went with my phone. Funny how things work sometimes. Since then, I've been simply too sick or too weak to write or think or do much not dictated by my most primitive brain functions. I've managed to take care of what needs taken care of thanks to one incredible and absolutely priceless thing- my mom. My mom, who I thought I'd lost forever, though not physically, emotionally. She said, the day I told her I was done, that this is it and I'm not using again, that she had no hope for me. That I would be dead in a gutter someday anyway and me pretending to try just hurt her too much, that she had detached. And I could not for one second blame her or feel anything but absolute shame. Shame, but also a determination to prove her wrong. I think she sees it now as I do, I think she sees the change in my soul I felt that day I slipped up and used last week, the day I knew the drugs were the same but I am different now. And she has been there for me. She has seen the choices I've made and the determination to not go back, to not let myself fall.

Who knows what next week will bring. Who knows if I will even be sober tomorrow. At this point, I don't even think whatever gods there are out there that have kept me alive this long know what my future holds. But I do know what it felt like the last time I shot dope. How instead of relief, it was as though I'd injected fire into my very soul itself, burning myself down from the heart on out. The shame, the instant wish that I could just pull the plunger back and undo what I had just done, that desire for a do-over I've felt so many times in my years as a junkie. I know it felt all wrong, and it wasn't a change in the drugs that made it feel that way. It was a change in me, a change in my heart and soul and knowing for a fact that I have found a better way.

I don't need to live like a rat anymore. I don't need to live as a zombie. I don't need to be a bottomless junkie. I can make my bottom wherever I choose to get off the sinking ship. And I'm off the ship today. I'm on land, though it is still just the very edge of a beach shrouded in mist, the rest of which I cannot see and don't know what is around the next chunk of fog, but I know I am in the right place right now. I know I am walking the right road right now. This is not easy and it hurts like nothing else and sometimes it feels like I am burning and engulfed in flames still, but I know, I KNOW these flames will burn themselves out. I am going to build my next life of brick, quit relying on the flimsy and flammable matchsticks I've always used before in my rebuilding attempts.

The city of Detroit burned almost to the ground three times in her history. I have burned my life almost to the ground countless times. Detroit rebuilt and is rebuilding again from a different type of fire today. I rebuilt, and am rebuilding again today. My self-arson is under control today. I am going to make mistakes. I am going to hurt beyond anything I can imagine. I am going to cry, I am going to laugh, I am going to feel joy about something other than free smack. I am going to fucking LIVE. I don't know if this is "it," if I'll never be strung out again, and frankly, I couldn't give a shit less. Today I'm not strung out, today I'm not giving my life away to heroin. Today is all I have and today?

Today, I am going to be okay.

Seek To Understand as We Seek to be Understood

An addict's greatest enemy is always themselves. We are the only ones in the end who can hold needle against vein and commit the act of piercing that vein. 

But one of our greatest challenges will always be the judgement, hate, cruelty and anger people without understanding and with closed minds dole out so freely and without solicitation. I knew by letting it all hang out on Instagram I was inviting a convention of haters to form. Yet at first, I still let it get to me. Still let it form new wounds on top of old scabs and rip out stitches on things I'd thought were worked or survived past. I let their words bite me to the core, not the ones who just threw out things like "junkie" or "dirtbag" or other simple insults like that; I already know and accept that I am a junkie and when using often am more than a bit of a dirtbag, and am not at all offended when others take note of the obvious and attempt to use it as a weapon. I mean really, you think I don't know that, guys? I know it as sure as I know where every dead vein in my body is, as sure as Narcan makes for a bad fucking night. 

Plus, there's the cold hard fact that for whatever reason, a junkie is proud of being a junkie. No, not proud of our addiction. Not proud of the sickness inside. Not proud of the damage we cause. But we accept that we are addicts and wear the badge of the status of official junkie with a sick pride and defensiveness; we went through a living fucking hell to get there and gave away chunks of our hearts in the process, so it's only natural we would be proud to have survived as junkies. We are proud to have survived what would destroy 90% of the population. We are strong and we are fucking warriors. We wear it with pride around other addicts and when called a junkie, say "Yeah? Your point is?" Or "Goddamn right!" So that stuff doesn't get me. 

What hurts is the more complex and time consuming haters. Those who take the time out to post long, drawn-out comments explaining to us what a piece of shit we are, how we only want attention, have daddy issues, on and on. The ones with such closed minds they assume that we made a choice to become what and who we are, and therefore it's as simple as making a choice to not be addicted to smack anymore. I mean c'mon, it's just a fucking powder, right? You've only been chained to it for fifteen years- MAN UP and walk away already! It is not their words that hurt- it is the knowledge that should one of their loved ones ever find themselves suffering from the disease of addiction, that hatred and judgement is what they can expect. Not help. Not support. Not the ability to be open with their best friend about their pain and their struggles. The knowledge that if they are, they can chalk them up as lost forever. And that?

That fucking HURTS. 

A junkie judges themselves so harshly, we truly in our hearts- don't feel but rather KNOW- we are trash. Know we are worthless. A drain on everything and everyone. We live every day with not only the burdens of our root pain, which I've talked about before and will go into again at some point I'm sure, but the pain added on by our escape and what we are now powerless to stop and must submit to- the need, not want, NEED to get more. Our lives owned by that fire, reduced to ashes and smack. The acts of degradation so staggering most would just eat a fucking pistol afterwards. The fires we start and fires that consume what we once were and forever change our worldview, our self image, our reality and our future. Junkies live such hell every waking moment and many dreaming moments as well that when I see a closed minded asshole who refuses to self educate or ask questions or seek to UNDERSTAND, who chooses instead to attempt to further the pain we already live, I get hurt, angry, enraged- and then I get writing. I try to explain to them with kindness rather than their same weak and juvenile nastiness how the same way they think we are pathetic, well, I feel the same about them. Their ignorance. Their desire to belittle and attack and wound those souls already so close to broken, it's less than a thread we hang by. That is truly pathetic. A junkie isn't stupid. In fact, I believe the longer you've survived this mode of living, the more brilliant you must be because it is endless work, endless scheming, endless thinking and planning and split second decision making to be a junkie and stay high and keep away the withdrawal. And it takes the strongest kind of souls to survive the worst forms of pain. 

Addiction is a disease. It is recognized and categorized as such by the AMA, can be found listed in the DSMV and there is not a country in the world without addicts as a part of the population. Addiction is not a choice, not a lifestyle, not a goal nor a decision. An addict's brain, viewed on MRI, is literally PHYSICALLY different from a normal person's brain. We are not like you. We were born this way just like a person is born black or white, gay or straight. You may be an addict too and it may be as simple a difference between us as you not having that deep pain that kick starts your addiction, that drives you to seek out a way to escape that becomes the very thing which you fight with staggering violence to escape from. 

If you don't get it, that's fine. If you don't want to learn, that's not fine because ignorance is not bliss but whatever, I cannot force open a firmly closed mind. I can and will and do however ask that you show a little respect. Some common decency would be nice. See a photo of someone in so much pain, so tormented by whatever their root pain is, that they have a needle full of smack in their arm to try desperately to escape? Think about what your words will do. You cannot shame me out of my addiction. You cannot bully me out of it. You cannot do anything but add to my root pain- an my root pain? It comes from the very bullying that you are so cruelly, so thoughtlessly, so immaturely doling out. What purpose can your cruelty serve other than to take me instantly back over fifteen years ago to the first time I felt that same punch you're dealing out so coldly. 

Wake up each day, junkie or normie, fiend or not, and think, "What can I do today to seek to reduce the harm I do to those around me? What can I do to promote understanding and peace rather than judgement and hate? What can I learn today and how can I stay open enough to allow myself to see that which I am supposed to learn and they whom I am to learn it from?" Do that and maybe you'll find the world isn't half as black and white as you think. Maybe you'll see I'm not a bad person, I'm just sick. I'm not evil, I'm suffering from a disease for which there is no known cure. Yes, I made a choice to pick up the first shot but how could I have known that fifteen years later, I would be fighting still to escape that decision? And after you educate yourself I hope you can sit down and think, "Thank whatever god there is I am not in that kind of pain," rather than wanting to spew rage and hate and evil on the Internet. 

Seek to understand us as we seek to be understood. The stigma and judgement is what keeps us sick, prevents us from seeking help, from being able to take care of our disease with the same matter of factness with which a person would seek care for cancer. Hate addicts? Then the way to help wipe us out is to stop judging and start learning and become part of the solution rather than adding another closed mind to the problem. 

Because without understanding, I truly have no hope left at all.