The Humanist

CHAPTER FOUR

"the fire can't touch me
for i have burned one too many times
and the sea can't harm me,
for i have been drowning all my life.
oh but you could rip my heart open, darling,
for i have never known love before."
-R./ asthreria

Addiction consumes. First, it'll takes over your senses. You can't feel anything but the drug, how euphoric it feels, how it takes over everything, you can't think about anything other than when you'll get high next. You're walking around with a bag of pills in your pocket, the only thing you can think about is where the next bag is going to come from, that repetition, that obsession goes down to your very cellular memory. Then it takes over your body; after only a short amount of time you'll feel a need for the drug like you've never felt you've needed anything before, like the first sip of water after days of dehydration or the first bite of a meal after a month of starving, with everything in your body you can feel a need for this drug that is already everything you want. You'd do anything just to not suffer through withdrawals that painful. And then it'll take over your job, your school, your relationships, everything. It'll slowly consume every single thing you have and it will never stop taking. When you are utterly and completely alone, with no aspirations, no wants, no future, at least you'll have another hit.

Kelsey was a seventeen year old heroine addict that used to work at the local theatre. She was one of the kindest people I'd ever met. She was smart, sweet, clever in a way that's rare to come by and just a couple of months before she overdosed she had a conversation with me. Her mother had been a nurse who'd become a meth addict and not long afterwards got fired, then got a felony and couldn't get hired at Best Buy because she had to tick a box saying she's a criminal, because she looked like an addict, and everyone knows an addict can never be trusted. She started stripping and then came Kelsey, the daughter of two junkies, that barely even knew either of them. She never felt connection at home, went through so much abuse and neglect she never stood much of a chance at life. "The very first time that I did heroine," she told me, "it felt like my mother hugging me again. Like a soft warm hug."

Drugs will complete a broken person. Drugs themselves aren't addictive really, the same way that food isn't addictive but to some people it is, or caffeine isn't addictive but to some people it is. Why on earth would any sane person inject themselves with something that could potentially kill them unless somehow it makes sense to them, in their situation. Obviously most people that try drugs don't form an addiction, it's the trauma in you, the mental need for intoxication. To want nothing more than to escape your mind or body, to be distracted for a while. In no way have drugs ever been worth it to me, never logical and yet I relapse every time. Drug addicts are looking for oblivion in a high that'll never take them there, they look for forgetting, for the unfamiliar. The guitarist of the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards who was a heavy duty heroine addict said: "The contortions that we through just not to be ourselves for a few hours." And it makes sense.

I had been struggling with clinical depression on many degrees since I was twelve. The first time I touched anything was liquor at thirteen. I used to drink till I blacked out every other day. My body was starved, dehydrated, tired. I would throw up all the time, so used to getting hungover everyday it just bled into the background. No more showers, ripped up dirty clothes, half the time I'd fall asleep on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, laying on my side and waking up in a puddle of my own vomit. I can't tell you many people I hurt, how many times I hurt myself, how many times I ended up at the hospital due to alcohol poisoning or something I did while drunk. The things I did, the things I regret, the people I lost. I started smoking weed at fourteen, would eventually just be high constantly. Within a month of first smoking, I was getting high two to three times a day. After six months it was a few grams a day, I was high no matter what i was doing or where I was. I couldn't eat, sleep, function without the weed. I wouldn't get hungry until I had the munchies, I was constantly so tired that I slept more time than I was awake, I got so forgetful, so drained that I felt useless. I couldn't do anything, couldn't hold up a conversation and I wanted more. I'd smoke about an ounce a week by the time a year of daily cannabis use surpassed. I used to sit for hour and hours behind my piano and I hadn't touched it until my mother's cousin who used to come sometimes to teach me, she asked me to play and the disconnection I felt between my mind and my body; it broke me. But that didn't make me stop, My first time trying morphine was when I was fifteen. My friend at the time Jackie was in the hospital with a kidney infection, she was prescribed morphine after the surgery for her pain. It was her idea to crush the little pills and snort them. The high it gave me was unlike anything I'd ever felt before, I felt invincible.