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I don’t know where to start and I don’t know where to finish because I can’t remember when it all began and if it ever ended. I don’t know if it’s possible for it to end. So why do I want to make a story out of it? Stories end. Be it ambiguously or definitely they end somewhere. Maybe my story can end but without a conclusion. I don’t know if that makes for a very good read though. People like endings tied up and problems resolved but I don’t know if my problem is resolved. Time is the only judge of that.
I stopped myself from writing for years because I couldn’t admit to a problem that was destroying me from the inside out. I couldn’t write a story that showed no signs of maturing and no clear indication of ever resolving itself. I know I said I wasn’t sure if my story had an ending but I’m positive that it will someday. Two years ago I wouldn’t have been too confident about ever saying that. I was trapped in a vicious cycle and there was no sign of it ceasing. I locked myself away and I became my own prisoner. I had the keys to my cell but I couldn’t free myself. I didn’t deserve to be a part of the world I was living in. All that I detested about myself I knew everyone else would too and I saw myself as a criminal in my own mind. To let myself out would be putting others at risk and no matter how badly I wanted to escape I knew my mind wouldn’t allow it . I would always be a fugitive, running away from myself, hiding from the world. It took me years to realise that I didn’t want to escape, I wanted to be freed.
I have only come to acknowledge my own struggle in the past six months. Before that I was quite happy living in a land of addiction and isolation. I didn’t want to be part of the world. I was proud that I had become so comfortable with being on my own. Loneliness didn’t take long to get used to and after a while it became my companion. We were inseparable. I miss it. Not the actual feeling of being lonely but the craving for loneliness. I feel like I’v lost a friend, a best friend. And the days that I’m yearning for that feeling of complete alienation I can’t help but think that it’s right there beside me , cursing me for betraying it. It’s hard to believe that I deserted loneliness. What kind of friend am I? I wasn’t any kind of friend because I didn’t have any. The one friend I did have didn’t exist anymore. I had expelled it from my life with no reason and no excuse. I was , for the first time in years living in reality. I felt raw, like my soul had been snatched from me. I had imagined myself as a certain type of person that now I could no longer be. I had woken up . It was as if I had been in a trance for eight years. I was suddenly part of the world again, exposed to everyone. I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive it. I couldn’t be anything else but honest. Secrecy was and still is a constant reminder of my addiction and it’s of no use to me anymore. I was so skilled at fooling myself and tricking myself into believing that I didn’t have a problem and if I could fool myself I could fool anybody , but once I faced my problem openly and honestly I surrendered every trait and every emotion that went with it .Secrecy was a huge part of it. And like loneliness I miss it. I feel like I’v lost competence and without it I’v disabled myself in some way.
The longer I go without feeding my addiction the more of a blur it becomes. I can hardly complain about that. I’v started to forget how to have an addiction . It’s an unusual feeling, like a dream, you can only remember bits of it before it gets lost in your mind and I hope I’v lost it forever. I don’t want it to be found. The worst part about coming out of an addiction like mine is the the exposure. The nakedness that I can’t help but display is so overwhelming I sometimes wish I never admitted to having a problem in the first place. Nobody ever wants to feel vulnerable, but feeling vulnerable is normal and I thought if all I got out of my confession was the feeling of normality, that’s good enough. I hadn’t felt real feelings in a long time and this feeling of being normal was new and I couldn’t do anything else but cope with it. I had no rock to hide under and my haven of addiction was destroyed thanks to a year of therapy . I do often get mad at therapy for taking away something that eased my pain. I haven’t been very forgiving of it. Therapy is like a squatter , setting up a life somewhere it doesn’t belong. It’s like a leach that clings to addiction and feeds of the anesthetic that should be feeding me. I ended up starved of what was rightly mine. It’s my addiction. My nurturer. I didn’t realise what I was giving up when I agreed to go to therapy. While it consumed my addiction , reality consumed me. Therapy was the bad guy for a very long time and only in recent months have I been able to accept that it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It won’t let me indulge in my addiction anymore and for almost a year I refused to accept that something could have this much power over me. I felt like I had no control but it was the opposite way round, my addiction was controlling me and therapy helped me control it. While I’m praising therapy I’m also praising myself. Therapy is a tool that I used to get better. It is a torch in the dark, something that helped me see more clearly but I used it and there is something in me , in my mind that welcomed the idea of recovery even though I might not have thought so in the beginning.
I was told that I am “one of the lucky ones” . I didn’t understand it at first but I do now. There is a huge population of addicts and out of that group a minority surrender themselves to therapy and rehabilitation and again a minority of those actually succeed in overcoming their addiction. I am of that minority and I do feel lucky. I’m being given a second chance to start over and to evolve into the person that I want to be. I can’t believe that I was given that chance. I value it greatly and I know that there is alway the possibility of relapse but I know I would be undoing too much to allow that to happen. Therapy is only the beginning of this new life I’v been awarded.
Anybody will tell you that people slip into addiction most of the time due to a trauma they experienced in their past. I understood this but I didn’t understand it when it came to my own dilemma. What trauma had I suffered? I didn’t know. It took me a very long time to accept that my addiction wasn’t completely self-inflicted and that it was brought upon me by something or in my case somebody.
As I already mentioned I don’t remember when it started, so I don’t really know where to start in this case. I don’t remember how it felt before my addiction. It’s that long ago. I don’t remember the person I was when it all began. I was quite young. Fourteen I think. I was always god in school and I was liked by my teachers and I always had plenty of friends. That’s hugely significant in this story, I always had lots of friends. But secondary school was different. It didn’t have the safety factor that primary school had provided. The teachers weren’t parental figures like they had been and your classmates weren’t automatically your best friends. I found the idea of secondary school a bit uncomfortable. I didn’t think that there was anybody there to take care of me. However this idea became dormant for the best part of two years. I made friends quite easily as did most people. I think we all had the same experience in primary and that was this idea of safety and we didn’t let go of that straight away. It was comforting to hang on to that for a while but I relied on it. I was friends with most people and I didn’t have any enemies yet. I was still safe. And although I thought I had let go of the child inside me I realised much later on that I was clinging to it for dear life. Secondary school was the beginning of what I can only describe as hell.
I had a close group of friends who I absolutely adored. We had become close since the beginning of school and there was no separating us. That’s what I thought anyway. I honestly don’t know what happened. One day they were my best friends and then all of a sudden they weren’t. It hit me like a tone of bricks. I wasn’t allowed be their friend anymore. I wasn’t invited anywhere, I wasn’t included in conversations. Anytime I tried to join in they shut me up, put me down, made me feel stupid. They made sure I knew I wasn’t wanted. I didn’t count as anything to them and they never told me why. I had been so oblivious to the fact that they didn’t like me anymore. I couldn’t even figure it out for myself, someone had to tell me. I loved them and they didn’t love me. I didn’t understand it. Why didn’t they love me anymore? What could I have done that made them hate me so much? I never found out. I never found out because there never was anything. It was down to pure jealousy and nobody will ever admit to that no matter how honest a person they might think they are. I couldn’t face this fact for years. I was afraid that I was wrong that maybe I had actually done something to upset them and that I would never know. I would never be able to fix that part of me that was so imperfect that my best friends would hate me over it. I know now that it was my confidence. I didn’t have a whole lot of it but I definitely had buckets more than they did and they successfully stripped me of it. I became a mute on some level, always afraid to speak up afraid to talk afraid to be myself. How could I be myself when everybody hated that person. How could I confidently talk to people when that was a trait that they despised. I became a nothing. I couldn’t be me so I had to be someone else and I didn’t know who that person was and thats where my addiction started. I became a shadow trying to attach myself to a group that would accept me. It didn’t work. I was lost and my addiction became my friend, my healer, it became everything I wanted in a friend. It was there for me without fail. The idea of having friends became less and less important as my addiction comforted me from all the pain and suffering I had to deal with in school. I relied on it like one would rely on a best friend. I was pathetic. Losing those girls as friends left me scarred. I didn’t want to ever have to experience anything like that again so I cut myself off from everybody. I couldn’t go through the process of loving and really trusting anyone again for a long time. I didn’t want friends. I was willing to be a recluse then try involve myself with people.
I got used to not knowing who I was and it became comforting. Hiding is very comfortable especially when you know no-one will ever find you. The rest of my school years were a blur and as I failed to maintain any sort of relationship with the girls in school I was also failing in school. My results were never brilliant. I had gone from confident bright student to miserable lonely failure but I wanted to be this more than the person I used to be. People left me alone. No-one really asked about me or noticed me missing. I wasn’t allowed sit with the girls anymore so I spent most lunchtimes by myself in the bathroom. I was surprisingly happy there. It was quite peaceful and nobody interrupted me. I thought I was being brave.
I finally got closer to my cousins who were in the same year as me. I couldn’t tell them too much about what had happened but I told them enough that I was automatically included in their group. By this time too much damage had been done and I wasn’t comfortable socialising. Again nobody really took too much notice.
I don’t remember much more about school except that I was delighted to get out of there. It was a step towards freedom and it was shortly after leaving school that I went to my first therapy session.
I don’t regret developing an addiction. I did but not anymore. I have forgiven those girls and there is still a part of me that loves them very much. I’m being given another chance and I want to make it count. I have a lust for life that I didn’t have before and it’s only been the past six months that have shown me the person I really am and what I am capable of. I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe I was given this obstacle to overcome . I don’t quite know what that reason is yet but I’m sure I’l find out someday. My addiction stemmed from my wanting to be perfect. I’m not perfect, nobody is and I believe that it’s our imperfections that makes us who we are. My addictive behavior controlled me for so long and took up so much brain space I thought I’d never over-come it but I can safely say that my addiction has become nothing more than a distant memory.