Chasing Death I Found Life

Knowing that no other attempts to contact me after this hurts. I can imagine they believe that I continue to get high, but how are my mother and sister to know if I am or if I am not. I have been shunned from my family, I am the black sheep that is an embarrassment to them. I am okay with that.

The choices that I made during one season of my lifetime do not define me. I am more than the poor choices I made during this time, more than the sleepless nights and dope sick mornings. Being a recovering addict is something that I am proud of. We addicts do not always make it out of the madness, death is getting to common and jail can be a savior. Everyday is a struggle to stay clean, with temptation and triggers at my every turn. I am winning the battle as I watch so many of my fellow addicts continue to lose.

2017 was a very trying year for me. Giving up seemed like the best option, sometimes the only option. Over the past year I have been broken and beaten down. I have lost friends and lost structure. I have seen death and desperation. I've meet sober snakes and dope sick angels. I lost fear, knowing no one on these streets could do anything to me that hasn't already been done.  For a while, I lost myself. I will never be the same person I once was. I hate that I will never be the same person again. My qualities of being trusting and somewhat naive will never be there again. Instead I feel like I walk around in a trance waiting to wake up from this nightmare. From here though, I can only go up.

The hardest things I learned over the last year was how to grieve the loss of someone that is still alive. Someone that I sometimes can not avoid being around for now. I have had to grieve the loss of a mother figure that I have always sought and understand that I will never have. The anger and resentment that I have carried over the years is only hurting me, she doesn't, and never will, see the trauma and effects of her actions. I recently learned that, as the child of a narcissist, the volatile and unpredictable emotions of my parents made me a textbook empath. As a defense mechanism, I learned to read people's emotions without ever hearing them talk. Body language, movements, and other indicators tell me what a person is feeling, I can better protect myself from any possible out lashes.

I have learned so much about myself this year, I have no regrets. Understanding why I react certain ways or why I do certain things has really helped me work on my character defects. Growing as a person is important to me, but also being a person who is kind with strong morals and ethics is even more important. Without destroying myself over the last year, I would have never found myself. I truly have been humbled.