I was very fortunate as a drug user. I didn’t like the way I had to use sex to get drugs, so when I had money to buy my own drugs, I tried to make them last. Cigarettes too. I didn’t share when I bought my own drugs. I used alone. It was more important that I’d have more to use the next day then it was to get high out of mind in a single go. I knew the consequences of running out.
When I was using, my mind felt like silly putty - an old child’s toy from the 90’s. When you pull silly putty apart slowly it stretches into nothing, but when you pull it apart really fast it snaps. That was my mind… My sanity was pulling away from reality and I wasn’t sure if it would dissolve into nothing, a place where I no longer existed, or whether one day it would just snap.
In retrospect, the outcome is the same. A lost mind is a lost mind whether it snapped quickly or stretched slowly into insanity.
One afternoon, when I was 17, I’d been on a coke binge for over a week straight, and I was really strung out. I walked to my parents house but they weren’t home. I had a key so I let myself in. Once I was there I finally fell asleep for the first time in several days on their couch. I guess I left some writing out that spoke of my suicidal thoughts. When they tried to wake me, I wouldn’t wake up. Assuming I had overdosed again, they called 911. I awoke with a tube up my nose, two paramedics and a couple police officers hovering over me. My parents didn’t know I was using. That was the day they found out.
The biggest question people ask me is “How did you clean up?” I’d love to say it was willpower, but it really wasn’t. I’ve discovered in my life that some changes are forced on me. Life becomes so uncomfortable that I simply can’t keep living that way. Cocaine was the same, when I used too much, my heart would stop.
I had some pretty decent friends in my using days, not most of them, but a few. The first time my heart stopped from cocaine I was at a party and my friends actually called 911. This might seem like the obvious thing to do but alongside paramedics come police. At a lot of big druggy parties, they will literally drag someone down the block (or far away) then call 911 so as to not bring heat to the party.
My friends that night called 911 and the police did show up. I discovered from that hospitalization that I have a heart murmur.
After that, I was terrified so I started cutting my lines smaller and smaller and snorting the rails further apart. I needed the drugs but I didn’t want to die that way. This will sound strange, but it was not the ending I had envisioned for my life. I always thought my life would end by suicide, and cocaine was not the way I wanted to go out.
I call death Home. When I die I am going home - Home to wherever I came from. To this day (November 29, 2018), I still struggle with the concept of living. It’s not that I want to die, I just wish I had never been born in the first place. I have a belief I tell myself that keeps me alive. I tell myself that if I kill myself I must come back to this planet and live again until I learn what I came here for.
I am so tired, I feel I’ve been a part of this world for a very long time. I like to tell myself that the only way I truly go home is to let the Universe (aka God) take me the way it wants to.
I am tired of simply trying to survive on this planet, so I have started a journey towards Mental Wellness. This is why I loved cocaine and still do. It may have nearly killed me, but it taught me that if I must be alive, then I want to truly live life and live it well.