At the beginning of the year, I had decided to make a conscious decision to get honest with myself. I decided to put my bootstraps on and stop fucking around. What I wanted more than anything was to live an authentic life. I wanted stability and everywhere I looked in my life I felt like everything was falling apart. I was avoiding the necessary and needed changes in my life. It was so much easier to suppress myself but slowly at the forefront of my mind, I realized that I needed to eliminate my suppressants.
The thing about alcohol is that it is a depressant and if you are prone to depression and anxiety the comedowns are hard. I kept leaping from highs and lows and the mental cost was getting to me. I was slowly unraveling at the seams and felt like I was trapped in circumstances and people. I felt like I was being constantly finding myself caught between things. Like I was playing tug of war but I'm in the middle.
I can’t lie, the past few years have been difficult I have had more bad moments than good. I finally see now the light at the end of this dark and long tunnel. As I have struggled with suicidal thoughts from the age of 16 I have contemplated taking my life several times. I have felt little to no empathy from the people in my life. I was searching for a savior when the truth was no one was coming to save me. Instead, I found the nearest escape in the past few years with alcohol and drugs. I found the substance to be my greatest escape. I felt a relief that would wash over me for a few minutes or a few hours. I've chased highs from not only substances but people.
As I have struggled to cope with the SA I experienced, to the grooming I went through throughout my childhood. I have struggled to keep my head above water but nonetheless, I have held my head above water and now I finally feel like I can catch my breath. My mom used to tell me if you can’t swim through the waves then float. Over the past few years, I haven’t fought as nearly as hard for my healing as much as I have now. Now I want peace and a quiet life. I spend enormous amounts of time devoted to healing my wounds. It gets harder to balance once you become an adult with responsibilities.
Sometimes life hits you hard to wake you up.
After the death of my friend, I thought I understood grief but you have to truly experience grief the way it paralyzes you and rocks your world. Experiencing grief has been the most sobering experience of my life. The thing about grief is, it forces you to look at your life and makes you reevaluate what really matters to you. The death of my dear friend rocked my world upside down and inside out. I felt like a chunk of me was bitten out of me. I cried every day for months. I cried on the way to work every morning and I felt this all-consuming sadness that I could not outrun no matter how fast I tried to escape it and shove it down by suppressing my feelings with high highs.
I got sick of cheap thrills. I got sick of pushing down how unhappy the people in my life made me. I got tired of pulling in addicts and users. I blamed myself for a lot of the mistreatment that others inflicted. I blamed myself for the abuse I endured.
At some point, my drinking, my smoking, and the prescription pills were making me sick to death. I was having incredible terrible abdominal pain to make me scream. Head in the toilet kind of mornings and sore in the face evenings. Eventually, whenever I would get high or get drunk I would have pain-staking instructive thoughts that made me want to practically unalive myself. I also had circumstances in which I was in environments that were harmful to my well-being and when I finally spoke up about it in the workplace they retaliated against me. I felt the world on my shoulders. I felt the world was against me and no one was standing with me, or so I thought. I was numbing myself to suppress the pain I was enduring, the abuse I was witnessing. I could not believe that when I finally spoke up and out about it I was the villain. I was the bad guy. I was thrown into limbo and I knew the world was an unjust place. If you have read my previous work I have been through abuse since an early age and I understand the signs but the first time in my life I spoke out against it I was affirmed that the world aka corrupt America does not give a fuck about your truth. I thought that I should probably not have spoken out. Instead, I should have swallowed my pain.
Looking back today as I look back now I should have screamed from the rooftops I should have raised hell. I don’t care about being the villain anymore, people will paint you however they want. I have realized it simply is not my responsibility to make anyone believe me I am responsible to speak out against untruths. To speak out when something is clearly wrong and unethical.
I don’t want to blame alcohol or substance for why I suffered. I think the root cause was my circumstance. I know the root cause was the relationships in my life that were abusive and controlling. I know that the root cause was that I was working for sick individuals who cared about profit more than the humans that were working through a pandemic. People who witnessed harmful and unsafe environments and were complicit in the abuse. Working through a pandemic is rough but having to endure sexual harassment and management that looked at you as if you are nothing but disposable is misery and no job, no amount of money is worth abuse.
My therapist often reminds me of the importance of why me leaving the circumstances I was once in. She says you cannot heal in the same environment that is hurting you.
I am happy I stood in for myself and have chosen to live.
It took me a while to fully be clean. I dwindled myself slowly in pieces so I was going from one extreme to another. It took a couple of months but I did it. I made it to the other side. Today I am cleaned 93 days from weed and 40 something days from alcohol and I can finally see the sun and it is beautiful. I regret the pain I put myself through was clearly a form of self-harm. Today I have curated a life that is quite beautiful and I didn't do it on my own it took love, it took patience from the people I love but now I can swim and I’m not sinking anymore.
For those that have come across this story thank you for taking the time to read my story.
With Love Blue💙
