Never forgotten

Addiction is a strange disease.

It’s something that belongs to other people. To the men and women who have dirty hair and unwashed clothes, asking for money when you walk out of the shopping centre. The ones talking to themselves. The ones you glare at in disgust, or step away from in fear.

“Normal” people don’t have time for addicts. It’s their own fault. They choose to live this way.

Nobody chooses the life of an addict. People make stupid decisions for any number of reasons. Some follow the crowd, others are trying to find themselves. Some are born into it, just following mum and dad’s footsteps, continuing a life as adults that was all they knew as children.

Addiction isn’t solely the disease of the poor, but it certainly spends more time in their homes than in more affluent households.

The responsibility of the addiction begins with the addict, however, the drug of choice, whichever drug that may be, is more powerful than the human willpower and the chemical reaction within the body betrays the user, taking the drug from a want, to a need.

Addiction takes away an addict’s choice. When your body and your mind cannot rest without it, you will do all you can to survive, and unfortunately, for an addict, surviving means using. What is life with the pain of withdrawal? With the drug in their life, they sacrifice everything, but.. by now, everything else is gone, and the only friend left in the world who understands is the drug, so you might as well stay with it.

By the time the addiction takes hold to a point where an addict needs to stop, quite often they don’t have the financial means or a support network to help them climb out of that hole. Their selfish actions have forced loved ones away, they’ve lost them jobs, houses, children. Very few addicts crawl out of their addiction to rebuild their life. I don’t condemn those who don’t make it out alive.

I don’t even condemn those who do make it out, and then go back. Addiction never leaves you, and when you can't regain the precious things you lost due to your addiction, who can blame you for giving into it for good?

My addiction has been ugly. It has been everything you see in movies, or read in books. I have been covered in my own body’s rejection of alcohol, lying on my bathroom floor alone, hoping to never wake up, actually thinking that I’ll never wake up. I’ve been that girl at the bar who you just want to kill. I’ve been the angry, violent girl who smashes glasses on the floor because the bar is closed. I’ve slept with people whose names I didn’t ask for and I’ve put myself in more dangerous situations than I can count, simply to have just one more drink. I became a stranger to myself, all in the name of my next mouthful, cos sometimes, that’s all I could afford. And those are just the nights I remember. For every binge I can recall, there are 5 more that are just a blur of faces and emotions, mostly shame.

I know what it is to chase oblivion to the point where consequences no longer hold any meaning.

I’m luckier than I can express to have somehow retained that final drop of fear that simply wouldn’t allow me to give all of myself to my addiction. My love for, and from, my family and friends kept me tied to reality and that’s what allowed the fear to remain with me, despite the escalation of my addiction.

I knew my toes were brushing rock bottom and if I stood there, even for just a moment, I wouldn’t be able to climb back up. If I even let my heels drop, I’d drag all my loved ones down there with me, scratching their bodies up as I used them to claw my way out.

No matter what I do in my life, I will never lose my family. I suppose, if I was threatening the safety (mental, emotional or physical) of my siblings they’d give me an ultimatum, but it certainly wasn’t any fear of losing them that kept me somewhat on the straight and narrow. It was the fear of disappointing and hurting them that forced me to have my moments of sobriety and it was those moments of sobriety, where I would lay in my bed for 12 straight hours, staring at walls or ceilings, wetting my pillow with constant, silent tears, that kept me in the real world, forcing me to assess just what the fcking fck I was doing with my life.


Do you know how strange it feels to walk to work one Friday morning and avoid eye contact with a disgusting junkie, trying to ask for money, only to BE that disgusting junkie the following day, after a binge? The first time someone grabbed their child’s hand, as I was weaving my way home on a Saturday morning was one of the most horrifying moments of my life.

I wasn’t asking for money, but I was everything else that all those junkies I’ve glared at and treated like sh.it are. To the world, I looked just like them: drunk at midday, unable to speak coherently, shaking from the 17 cans of red bull I’d had with my vodka. Me. The girl who always made my mother laugh with the stupid faces and dances I’d do in the kitchen. The girl who writes all her thoughts and fears and feelings for the world to see because they are too big to understand when they are invisible inside me. The girl who had a good job with a respectable company. The girl who lived in an apartment overlooking Darling Harbour – none of that meant anything because I was, at that point in time, just another junkie on the streets of Sydney.

Each one of us is capable of making mistakes, even many mistakes, repeated over and over. Each one of us wants to be forgiven for our mistakes. Sometimes, these people coming towards us will never be forgiven by the people they love. Their lives are hard enough without strangers constantly reminding them of where they have gone wrong.

I’m honestly not asking for some kind of Save the Junkies revolution and I'm aware that they need to save themselves, there's very little anyone else can do if an addict doesn't want to face life without their drug.

I just want people to understand that addicts don’t choose the life they live. The addiction chooses it for them and none of us have any idea where life is going to lead us. Until humans stop making mistakes altogether, each one of us is a potential addict of some kind, and the next time you spit on someone or mutter horrible things as you walk past, just remember that there is every chance in the world that one day you might find yourself in the agonising position of watching someone you love get stolen from you by their mistakes and you’ll be wishing the people who walk past and call them names would understand that they were not always like this. They just took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost.

News has come to me twice in the last six months of two people who were once bright stars in my life, both of whom got lost in the needle.

Whatever else they were, they were people who loved, laughed, cried and shared themselves with people who are now mourning their loss. Their addiction wasn’t all they were, but it took all they had.

I will love and miss all they were, and all they will never be.