junkie jambalaya

1) Withdrawals. Those weren’t fun, were they?

2) The mental torture and anxiety of realizing the dope is almost out…

3) …and having to experience that feeling every single day.

4) Your freedom will be lost once again. The dope will be making all the decisions now, and it doesn’t care how its choices will destroy you.

5) Do you really want to lose your clean time? Even if it’s a day, so many people will never be able to achieve a day of sobriety.

6) Oh, but you might not get an opportunity to ever get clean again, because there’s a good chance you’ll O.D.

7) You’ll go back to the same lifestyle that brought you to get clean to begin with.

8) Think you feel shitty now? You’ll feel even shitter when you relapse.

9) Think of your worst drug run and double it: that’s what you’ll have to look forward to.

10) I may not know you personally, but I know you don’t deserve to relive the horror that is active addiction. You may question your worth, but let me be the one to tell you that you deserve SO MUCH BETTER than having a needle in your arm, powder in your nose, or toxin in your lungs.

Now, don’t be ashamed or feel hopeless if you relapsed, because relapse is a part of lot of people’s stories, including mine. Relapse doesn’t mean you can’t get clean again; in fact it’s a big incentive to say “fuck you addiction!” And try again!

1. We are not stupid, we’re well aware of the damage. We know that what we are doing is killing us. We know that we are hurting people. We are aware of how society sees us. We know.

2. ADDICTION IS NOT ENJOYABLE. We are not “partying” or having a good time. The party ended a long time ago. We’re fucking miserable. Many of these drugs were never party drugs to begin with. It might seem fun and exciting the first week or month, but it quickly becomes a chore.

3. We don’t keep using just because we want to get high all the time. We use to not get sick and just to function normally in our daily lives. After awhile, we’re not thinking “how am I going to get high today?” We’re thinking “how will I be able to get to work today?” And then the reason we relapse is because we can’t remember surviving without it.

4. We have massive amounts of guilt, shame, and low self-esteem. We don’t need to be called “pieces of shit” and “scum junkies” because we already feel that way about ourselves every day!! The disease tells us not to care when we lie to and steal from friends and family. The disease makes us selfish. But we are human and we feel terrible about it. We aren’t psychopaths and are more than capable of feeling remorse. The more selfish acts we engage in, the worse we feel about ourselves. But we compulsively keep dragging ourselves through dirt.

5. It has absolutely nothing to do with you or anyone else. You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it. It is no one’s fault and you did not fail as a sister/brother/mother/father/aunt/grandpa/best friend. When we lie to or steal from you or choose drugs over you, it is nothing personal. It does not mean we don’t still love you. When the disease takes over, it doesn’t necessarily want to hurt you. It just assigns everyone the same value so they are neutral/irrelevant. Someone in active addiction is stuck in a completely internal thought process that completely blocks out the existence of other people.

6. The drug is stronger than love and values like family and friendship and that’s why we’ve chosen it over you. That is the unfortunate truth. That’s why we find a higher power in recovery, because no human power or emotion can fight off the drug on its own.