The beast within me restored my inner peace

Chapter Ten: Drugs Are Temporary

Using substances to make yourself feel better only works as long as you are using them and that is one of the things that causes addiction. Struggling with depression and anxiety can make you feel like you are trying to save yourself from destroying yourself without knowing where to start. Using medication to calm my anxiety made me depend on them constantly and that led to an addiction. Moral of the story? Substances aren't the solution as drugs are only temporary fixes for long-term problems. One of the years that were the worst times of my life was 2017. It was the first time that I ever failed a subject before, my friends were being treated awfully by the staff of my school because they were targeted as the "worst students" because of past mistakes, my parents were extremely disappointed in me for struggling with a subject because my younger step-brother had always done very well at the private schools he went to whilst I went to public schools, and I turned to substances to get my mind off of it to make it through the year. That entire year was a joke, relying on things such as weed and codeine to make you feel better about all of the horrible things happening every day. Then something worse happened on the 14th October that year. Only a month later, I was not only high again but that's how I met my ex boyfriend. The year went from bad to worse extremely quickly. Being exposed to terrible people with bad intentions and using substances to pretend that things were perfectly fine all led to utterly catastrophic events. Knowing what I know now from those experiences, it gives me the tools needed to help someone if they had been going through the same circumstances. That's the good thing that I have chosen to take away from it. All of the horrible things that have happened in my life have prepared me for helping others. It taught me that it was all there for me to learn how to give others advice about preventing those things from happening. Protecting those around you from experiencing the same havoc as you did becomes vastly important once you have faced them on your own. The biggest thing about all of the horrors I had experienced in my life was the fact that I faced them all on my own. That was wrong of me because I could have confided in someone and that might have helped me. However, I went to a therapist and that didn't help at all. She only repeated the things that I had said in a previous session and then repeated it again in the following session. It built up anger within me that made me want to throw her across the room if I had to be forced to deal with another session with her. That's when I went back to trying substances to make me feel better and as I mentioned before, it is only a temporary fix. There were people that I tried to confide in and they only made me realize how much confiding in people can seriously turn out for the worst. Imagine confiding in someone about one of the worst things that happened to you and then them turning around to say to everybody else that you're a slut. Cause the girl is the one in the wrong when she didn't want to engage in something with a guy, right? For years, even today, I'm still labeled as a slut because I'm not a virgin. Even though the thing they don't care about is that the choice to lose it years ago wasn't actually mine. Ask them. Go ahead and ask them if they knew that. I can promise you that they do and they would still call me a whore today. Because the male is the one that gets away with murder but because the girl could end up pregnant, she gets labelled. All of that led me to using substances to burn the anger inside of me that was caused by everything everyone said. No amount of weed, alcohol and tablets could take away that pain. It makes you feel good in the moment. Then you feel worse as you become more sober as time progresses, it makes you want to use more. Welcome to the addiction of trying to shove your feelings way down with the wrong things. When you learn that substances can't fix you, and that you need to take the time to make yourself better... You will have a huge change in your life. It took a lot of time for me to learn how to laugh in the faces of everyone who had lovely crap to say about me. As I said in previous chapters, miserable people only live to make others miserable and when they are not able to do so, that only makes them more miserable and leaves you feeling at peace. That burning, strong, powerful and brave feeling inside of you that makes you want to tell everybody who says the worst about you to simply "Fuck off"... THAT is the beast within you. The reason I say it's a beast is because to me, a beast is powerful and doesn't tolerate anyone's crap. It is a part of you that takes the awfulness that everyone throws at you and builds a strength out of it. That part of you knows that drinking, smoking and drugging will never bring you peace. You have to take responsibility for the things in your life that you have tortured yourself about when you had no control over them. It'll take a lot of time and a lot of hard work but substances will never help you get there. Finding your path in life is not going to be supported by searching at the bottom of a liquor bottle or a drug concoction. Knowing that you can take full power of your progress without any of those things will make you feel empowered in everything you do moving forward.