days have dragged on and sped up and mashed into one lump of sober time.
one year heroin-free. here we go again. i once again add up the clean time and slip it in my back pocket as i move through life, always wondering if the grass really was greener and if the brown would taste even sweeter now that i haven’t had it in so long, nevermind the avalanche of fentanyl and nitrazene and overdose warnings plastered all over my treatment centre.
i still get on the crims more than i do with the rat-racers. i still prefer the ASBOs, the ‘twos me on that mate’ as soon as i roll. i’m still unsure what a year of sobriety means for me. it hadn’t meant much in the past. because i still miss it, and i still envy the addict i see gouching out in front of the offie. i still wish i had gone deeper in the darkness, found new rock bottoms to nestle in and made one my permanent home.
but in the midst of all of this and all the litany atrocities that succeed one another in this bleak world, i guess i found reason to live. i worked out that i could not be useful to the revolution if i could not help myself. when i crawled back into recovery, precariously stilted by my friends who never had to deal with a distressed smackhead but really didn’t want me to die, i just knew that i couldn’t keep doing the same shit over and over and expecting different results. i wasn’t sure what kind of different results i wanted, however – i had never wanted a normal life, the whole picket fence, career and kids bullshit, that was never in the cards for me. i think i just wanted to hate myself a little bit less. i just wanted to not be sick in the morning, to not base my entire day around shitty dealers who’d make us wait and wait and wait, to then tell us we looked bait waiting like that. i wanted to not feel powerless anymore. i wanted to not feel like shit every single day. i wanted to not be mad at myself constantly.
it did get easier – that wasn’t a lie peddled by NA and my keyworkers, it’s true. the demons are still here, the impulses and the pain are still here, but i can mute them enough now that they become background noise. it’s like a bad breakup, really. you still think about your ex-lover, how much they meant to you, how they were your everything and how your world fell apart when you lost them. how you can never see them again, because their magnetic pull will suck you right in and you will lose everything again. after a while, once time has healed some of the wounds, you can start looking back on it somewhat fondly. it still hurts, but it’s manageable.
i don’t believe those miraculous recovery stories, about how an addict saw the light and they just became this completely different person, purer and holier than the rest of us (i have a massive bone to pick with the NA program and propaganda, but that’s for another time). i never wanted to be someone else, i just wanted to respect and love who i was; those things are part of me and they will always be. i’m still this angry, hurt, traumatised kid. i’m still the scheming arsehole i was on the streets. i’m still broken, but i’m mended. mending.
here’s to a whole year of learning, of trying. i hope it lasts, this time.
