#functionaladdiction

 @legoule                    (excerpt from) Functional Addiction

@legoule                (excerpt from) -Functional Addiction

@legoule                    (excerpt from) -Functional Addiction

My mother was a functional drug addict, she was high every day of my life. I denied this for a long time, “But…she just knows how to have fun” I would tell myself. --A drug addict destroys lives and steals shit. --A drug addict Has trouble finding or keeping a job. “but…she was continuously employed, never missed a day” --Drug addicts are filthy homeless people. WE weren’t homeless really…at the worst of times, we slept on couches, but that was always temporary. She wasn’t an addict that I could see, her ability to function hid the truth rather well. Sure she hoarded medication and dosed herself every 6-8hrs, but that’s how she got through her day. It took years for me to recognize a pattern. What a person grows up with is their own personal brand of normal. As children, our first taste of “the world really IS different outside this door and behind another” is the first sleep over at “their” house. It’s our first unsolicited lesson in perspective. The differences just glare at you. Then you get to decide who’s right, and who’s wrong…and which you think is better. By the time I knew she was a serious hed, I mean got high every day, or most days, I saw it as she was someone who could keep her shit together. Being functional and dependable were things I didn’t think a junkie could do. So I labeled her something else. Mud was into pills, opiates to be specific. She had a soft spot for speed in her teens-twenties, but by her 30’s she only did speed/coke to hasten a downward spiral. At those times it was never much of a fun up thing for her. It amplified the pain to a point where she couldn’t feel anything at all. She only spun out twice in my 17years with her. The last one is when the Sydney plan was hatched…but we’ll get to that. She liked her opes and I was a pot head. I did pills here and there, she would dose me every once in a while. I saw it as our drug bonding. It was special. It somehow meant I was cool. “Is she cool?” yes I was. But she didn’t like to smoke pot, so it’s not like we hung out and did drugs all the time. Drug time was an event. It was playtime. On many a payday we rented a stack of VHS, bought 10dollars worth of burgers and fries. Gorging in front of the tube, we would sit with a deck of cards and a righteous buzz. Amid the cigarettes and laughter, we would come up with stories and lines that we never wrote down. When I smoked pot it was mainly with Liz. She was the first one to get me high. Not to say that she smoked me out first…no that was Jody, the 10yrold son of a drug dealer back in Florida. Because drugs played such a part in my family’s life, in many of the stories I tell, you could play “where’s the high one”.  Hint: there is always a high one, and sometimes several.  . . @legoule