There was a line I crossed, though I didn’t know it then.
As early as I can remember, I had this anger in me. Soon after that, the anger got a voice. So I quieted that voice the only way I knew how.
From a sad child hiding from abuse deep in a book, to an unaware but budding psychonaut, to a full-blown addict, still trapped in a hell worse than anything I could imagine.
My siblings were my best friends. My very first best friends. Before I can remember having friends, they were there. My very first best friends.
Through all my parents fighting, me and my siblings were oftentimes spared. But that all changed when those horrid three and a half years started.
Part of my decade of destruction.
The shattering moment when life breaks open and nothing is the same.
Mom got the news. Somehow, I didn’t. I didn’t even know it was legally her fault, or that the other person died. All I knew was that me and my siblings were safe in that car, and not hurt.
There were times of pseudo-happiness after the accident. The best part was the break from life that seemed to be the happiest I can remember from those days. The summer of falseness for a young man, who knows none of what I know now.
Then the sentencing came, mom was gone, and I was lost.
Those three and a half years entailed suffering.
My mother and father both had their demons. They both had issues that were devastating to their children at the time. I only see my mother. My father... I haven’t spoken to him in years, by my choice.
Now, I have to be there for my brother, though I’m not upset about it, and can’t be there for my sister, even though I wish I could be.
The chaotic years of trying to survive — vices, protection, loneliness, and fractured identity.
The whole elementary school knew that my mom was a criminal. At least the bullies did. That would follow me until middle school, leaving me a quiet introvert with no friends.
I found friends in the med cabinet. Not knowing of drugs besides the scary ones they warned of in school, but knowing fantasy couldn’t quiet the noise.
New vices entered. The old fell. I still can’t read with any joy or wonder. Luckily I have retained my love of nature and life beyond mine.
Before I smoked my first cig, I had popped my first pill and drank my first drink. I knew the pain I felt wasn’t normal. So I numbed.
So before I knew it, I was drinking cough syrup, popping antihistamines, intermittently at first.
I was drinking cough syrup and rum, smoking cigarettes but not weed, and popping anything I could.
Then came middle school. I didn’t have many friends, but everyone was an acquaintance. I did a season of a sport, trying to be what I wasn’t. But I didn’t think I was good enough. So I stopped. I gave up. I became an outsider again.
By then, I knew my siblings needed protection though, and I tried my best to give it to them. Picking fights with my father when I knew he was coming for them. Defending to my last breath.
By this time, I’d slowed with anything substance-wise.
This is probably where the depression got the worst. I tried several times by this point, but knowing your responsibilities and trying is where suicide is real.
And then, three and a half years passed, and mom was home. And I finally got my escape — from hell, truly, every weekend, when I went to see her with my siblings.
I didn’t realize the domestic violence continued. The violence that led my mother to drink the night before that accident, which led to her three and a half years in prison, which led to three and a half years of torturous abuse.
I didn’t realize that my mom needed protection just as much as I did, and neither of us got it. I was too young to protect her, and she didn’t know what her abuser did to their kids.
I spiraled worse and worse through this time. Though only 13 or 14, I already knew of death. I had friends that had passed. And by the time I was an older teen, I’d lost a grandma, a grandpa, and a cousin, as well as who might have been the love of my life.
I got my chance for escape at 15. I moved in with my mother to work at McDonald’s and stayed for school after the summer.
Here, I found another vice.
By 16, which I turned before 10th grade started, I was smoking more weed than I’d ever known was possible. Literally. I was getting an eighth a day and smoking it all.
I was a stoner before anyone I knew was a stoner. The only people I knew who were stoners were my coworkers. And we smoked. Did some drinking with them. But I got reckless when I was alone.
When school started, I became a clown. A clown with friends, though. I was my own laughingstock. People appreciated my deprecative humor. And for some reason, though I get it was my accent and my clothes, people thought I was a Brit.
After that, the weed use just increased, so the alcohol slowed. It was as simple as not asking anyone to buy it for me, and not going to parties. I stayed inside by myself and smoked my weed.
Soon, though, my mind became hell. School became hell. Work became hell. The only time that wasn’t hell was when I was inebriated.
So I became inebriated at all times. High on marijuana at school. High on pot at work. High off that kush at home.
I sunk into weed.
After I sunk into weed, this is where my mind started to break. When I was high, I was fine. When I was sober, I was falling apart.
My parents knew about my smoking habits, even though I was 16. They knew it helped my second worst problem — insomnia. Maybe the first worst of that time.
Though my first worst soon became suicidal ideation and actions. I ended up in the hospital right before Christmas, the end of 11th grade.
I had just turned seventeen that August.
It was an adolescent psych ward, but I felt like an adult in a kid’s system. Everyone around me seemed younger, even if they were my age. I wasn’t like them. I was quieter. Heavier. I wasn’t just struggling — I was drowning.
Out in early January. Back again in May. And from there, I didn’t even get to go home. I was sent straight to rehab. Residential. Stayed ‘til the beginning of August.
Then mid August hit, and I turned another year older.
By October, when I lost it and ended up in jail, I was 18.
I had to fight that in court over the next couple months with my mom and public defender's help.
I was off Benadryl and propylhexadrine inhalers — ate the cottons of them — and I was in full-blown psychosis. Tweaking out of my mind. Talking to people who weren’t there. Crawling with bugs only I could see. I was gone.
Though I was bonded out, I was still fucking up.
After another three-day bend — just the next week — my parents sent me back to the mental hospital.
And by parents, I mean my mom and her husband. My stepfather. Not my bio-dad. That part matters — I don’t want it getting twisted.
I was off a far higher dose of Benadryl. Enough for a crazy, full-on, insane psychosis — not just massively hallucinating this time. I lost my mind completely.
After jail, and the mental hospital, and court, and all the troubles October brought, I was in IOP. I was clean.
I was out of work and school, doing school online, and taking a leave of absence from work.
I got better. I started to heal.
I was prescribed meds and I took them — high-dose lithium, aripiprazole, naltrexone for alcohol cravings, and gabapentin for anxiety.
As prescribed. I didn’t even smoke weed or drink.
Stuff was good. I had people that loved me, and I started to love them too.
I got better — and I got worse again.
That’s the devil in it.
I started to relapse. Hard.
4000mg, 5000mg, up to 10,000mg of gabapentin with whatever DXM I could find in cold medicine.
Mucinex DM was my best friend. But my liver hated the guaifenesin.
I took three stimulant laxatives on New Year’s Eve—because I heard “stimulant” and got excited—alongside my 40-count box of Mucinex DM, a couple 12-hour Energies, and a full bottle of NyQuil Severe.
I think I shat my pants three times: once at my home, twice at my grandparents’.
This is where the mask fell, but I was already moving, so there was no other choice but to move and hope that would keep me clean.
Oh, were we all wrong.