My Addiction (From my journal that I wrote in treatment)

By anonymous, from US

My addiction became my knight in shining armor, and it came to fill the empty pages of my life’s story. I had reached out, only to find no one, and it came to be the only one who ever reached back. It became the arms to cradle my brokenness, to tell me I was beautiful, to catch my teardrops in its hands. It was the only one who ever noticed my tears at all. It was the one thing in my chaotic world upon which I could rely, my promise of escape, and I lost myself inside it. I’d found heaven.

My addiction became the sanctuary where I sought comfort, refuge from heartache, from cruelty, and my own sorrow. It was my security, my best friend, and the one thing that could make me forget it all. I needed it, I craved it, I dreamed it, I breathed it, until I couldn’t let it go. I clung to it like a child to a mother’s knees as she tried walking out the door.

It fulfilled my greatest dream – to lose myself, to become someone else.

I’d lived my life in shadows on someone else’s wall; all I wanted was to disappear – and I did.

I’d grown tired of dancing the dance to someone else’s song – like a puppet on a string, just dangling, searching the crowd to find out what I should do next. It was the one thing in the entire world that could be mine – all mine, and no one could take it away from me.

I saw my eternity there in its eyes, like the counterpart of my soul that they say you find in a lover. I found freedom there, in its blissful haze, in its high, and I left the world behind.

I swore that, if other people experienced life as I did – the depths of the same darkness, the insufferable lows that kept growing; if they had known the chronic emptiness that enveloped me, the whirlwind of betrayal and deceit from those who had sworn that they loved me; if they had felt the utter loneliness, the bitter sting of pain in my heart, and the seeming inability to change it – the endless wrestling within my own skin to change myself into someone who maybe someone else could love – then maybe they would understand why I wanted to end life as I had known it, and why I had to run so far and so fast. I convinced myself that they, too, would have drank it all away.

So, I slipped inside another skin, another world, a blissful blur of unreality. This life was just like a dream, where I ran through a field and a flood of red roses and wine – unaware that I was drowning.