This is the Beginning of the Rest of your Life

 Isn’t it funny that I’m 21 and I’m just now realizing how young I truly am?

I have felt old all my life. Even when I dealt with teenage angst, I still looked up to those older than me and couldn’t relate to the world of people my age. I always felt like there was a river separating us and I was on the other side. I never could understand people my own age.

I recently received my sponsor who is 40 years older than me and has been sober for longer than I’ve been alive. I’m assuming you might wonder what we could possibly talk about, what we could possibly have in common. But every time we talk, time flies. She told me she feels like she’s known me all her life, yet I am so young. It shouldn’t make so much sense, yet it does.

I lost my last grandparent freshman year of college, and it hurts a special way to have your bloodline wiped like that. I feel like I could finally appreciate my grandmother now, and she’s gone. She died while I was in active addiction and I never grieved her properly. If anything, I never prayed but I prayed for her to die and my prayer came true.

I never really understood why my grandma made me so mad at the time, but I do now. Her disappointment hit deeper than anything anyone else said to me. I felt like when I made her proud she didn’t say much, but when I disappointed her she had a lot to say. I knew I was doing horribly mentally and subconsciously knew I would only get worse, and I wanted her to die to spare her from seeing me turn into what I would become. It was horrible and selfish.

I hated her because she was me, and I hated myself. 

When I was born, my mom had her uterus removed and it sent her into a deep postpartum depression. And as I stood there at her funeral emotionless, I noticed something in the PowerPoints. I noticed I was in most of the pictures, mostly from my infancy where she took care of me with my dad. And it all clicked.

She was the one who raised me when my mom couldn’t. And she didn’t tell me this, nobody did, and I had to be overwhelmed with that information all on the same day as her funeral. And finally, at that funeral, I cried at her death for the first time and I couldn’t stop. People tried to console me but they couldn’t. I couldn’t even put into words how much it hurt to lose her, and that I didn’t even appreciate the time I had with her. I felt like she was dead because I prayed for it to teach me a lesson. I felt so evil.

Now, I try to not focus on when she was disappointed in me, because she would get disappointed in me the way a mother gets disappointed in her child. I was the firstborn grandchild, she left a very special thing to me in the will, and I ignored all of that. I ignored how much I must’ve meant to her. That’s how much drugs skew your way of thinking. Drugs were more important to me than a relationship with my last grandparent.

I try to focus instead on how she taught me women could be funny. She was absolutely hilarious and I took it all for granted. 

Now that I’m sober, I can’t numb my feelings anymore, and with this grief, I understand now why people write books and draw things to cope with it. It’s so hard. On my last phone call with her, she told me not to do drugs and that she would be watching me.

And she must’ve kept her promise. Because I believe when I got into a car accident that turned into a DUI, she was the one who turned my wheel so I couldn’t drive to my dealer’s house to relapse on cocaine. She knew, and I felt so alleviated by all the disappointment she felt for me. 

I realize now that disappointment can only come from love. When my ex-partner called me in jail, he was so disappointed and angry with me, but that was to cover the worry he had felt for me all day. Worry manifests into disappointment. They’re worried about you and your future if they are disappointed in you.

It means they have higher standards than you have for yourself. It doesn’t come from a place of disrespect or dislike like I originally thought. It means they love you more than you love yourself.

When I was in active addiction, never once was I disappointed in myself for selling my body for drugs, for tanking all of my courses, for lying to my parents, and that wasn’t because I was carefree. It was because I was in a cage of self-hatred, that kept any emotions from coming out. 

I recently did bad on a Physics test, and I was so disappointed in myself. And as I kept focusing on that emotion, I felt something shift. I had changed. My low standards for myself had changed. I finally had standards for myself again, and that’s what my grandma had for me. She knew I could always do better than I was doing, and that manifested into disappointment, but behind that veil is love. And maybe loving yourself is as simple as knowing your worth.

I read in a book by Thich Nhat Hanh that every moment can be a rebirth, that you can be reborn multiple times in a day. And I felt a rebirth that day. I loved myself so much I was disappointed in myself again. I wasn’t numb, I wasn’t proud that I got more than a zero like I was before, I wasn’t emotionless. I was so riddled with emotion that I felt nothing short of human.

And as someone who has abused pain-relieving medication, I can say that the coping and healing that comes with feeling difficult emotions is more pain-relieving than numbing it out. You can’t heal what you can’t feel. 

My sponsor is my surrogate grandmother. She treats me like the grandchild she never had. She has given me a second chance, to make things right with my grandmother. I am clean now, and my grandma would love to meet me for who I am now. 

I can’t live with this regret anymore. It is so heavy. And it hurts even worse that I don’t have another grandparent I can make it right with. It’s very lonely.

I truly believe my grandma was the one who turned my steering wheel and made me crash when I was on my way to relapse. Because I know I would’ve crashed again and had a felony possession of cocaine. My life could’ve really been ruined, but she saved me. Even after I prayed for her to die, she still did that for me. That is true love.

I live each day clean, not only for myself but for others too. For the addicts who still suffer. For all the people I hurt in active addiction. For all the addicts who stopped going to meetings and passed away. For all the addicts who sought help and have nearly recovered from obsessive and compulsive tendencies. For all my loved ones, who were disappointed in me that day just because they know I can do better.

And I can do better. And most importantly, I live today clean for myself, because I think I finally see what my true potential can be. Your true potential is like an asymptote, you get closer and closer every day in recovery. Every day clean is a day won.

I’m tired of feeling so old and archaic. I want to be young. I still have so much of my youth left, and everyone comes up to me after the NA meetings saying how brave it is to get sober so young, in Austin of all places. They wish they had as much time as me, but God, I’ve felt so old and I don’t know why.

I will use my wisdom to help me bond with my surrogate grandmother, but I will use my youth in my actions in recovery. My youth is my superpower. 

It’s very corny, but every time RuPaul’s song goes “This is the beginning of the rest of your life,” I cry when I never used to cry before. I can’t help it. I can’t help feeling like this is the beginning of the rest of my life. I see my college years so far as a blur of running away from my problems. I took a pause on life. I fell into a coma. But nobody faults people for going into a coma; they just try to update them on what they missed and what they can do now.

I will try not to hate myself for being asleep mentally and spiritually for so long. I wrote an article a while ago that I was like a cat, who had nine rebirths and would die at the end of my ninth one. But I’ve had ten. If you count the mini rebirths I have daily, I have infinite. I survived longer than I thought I would.

I was given another chance when I didn’t die in that car accident. Every morning, I pray to my Higher Power, thanking them for giving me another chance, and I pray for all my loved ones to live long and healthy lives, for everything they’ve done for me. And most of all, I pray for my Higher Power to remove all my regret and turn it into action.

I have made a complete 180. I stopped praying for people to die and started praying for others to live. I understand what it means when they say that you can’t love someone until you’ve loved yourself. I couldn’t pray for my grandmother to live until I loved myself. I am so sorry to her, but I can only say sorry in my actions.

My life is not over yet. In fact, it’s only just started, or at least that’s what all the oldtimers in NA tell me. I have so much time left. And I am not weak for getting sober at 21. It just means I woke up that early, and I am so grateful. I could’ve been homeless, or out of college, or had worse things happen to me than what has happened to me. I could’ve had more stories, but would that mean anything if I wasn’t around to tell them?

I think I can say for sure that I am proud of myself now. They say in recovery everyone else sees the changes and you are the one who always sees it last. But I finally see it. I thought I saw the light one sees when they die, but it was just the sun. 

This is the beginning of the rest of my life. You can always start over. You don’t have to wait for anytime. You can do it right now. The only time you have is right now. You can be reborn right now. It’s okay if you haven’t been reborn before. Now is better than never. 

Creativity is my New Favorite Drug

We wonder, how can we emulate the ecstasy that certain drugs make us feel? Are we restrained by the time limit of certain drugs? Can we only experience true creativity and mental integration when tripping on magic mushrooms or are we restricted to the bliss cocaine makes us feel during the 30 minute long high period? We, as humans, are attracted to these measures because they recreate something we have always wanted all our lives — austerity.

For one time period, life is simple. Life is so complicated when sober. It becomes a grueling, horrid task to wake up each morning and escape from your dream state, full of simplicity, conclusions and control. Drugs are simple, especially cocaine; it jumpstarts your dopamine reward system, and provides you with something you’ve wanted all your life — answers to why you’ve been feeling so unfulfilled the entire time you’ve been on this planet.

Drugs are a forced state of the abandonment of the mind. It’s like a cheat code for the brain, or at least that’s what it feels like. It feels like we can bypass all the hard work it takes to reach the enlightenment that comes alongside creativity. 

I remember I used to think I was only a good writer when I was on cocaine. What Sigmund Freud had to say about cocaine was “You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work. In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe you are under the influence of any drug. Long intensive physical work is performed without any fatigue.” He’s not wrong; cocaine is magical in the sense that it makes you feel superior than human. It makes you feel stronger, makes thoughts flow easier and makes words easier to construe together. I was really onto something when I thought cocaine enhanced the experience of writing.

But I would like to tie it back to this specific Bojack Horseman episode, where him, Todd and Sarah Lynn get high on cocaine and write his autobiography, which turned out to all be gibberish. And that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make: cocaine makes you feel like you’re stronger and you’re more articulate than before. That’s it.

But it’s simply by hacking the dopamine reward system, as I mentioned before. It provides you with endless reward, telling you that every word you are writing is the best one you’ve written. It gives you no self-awareness, which is the benefit of the sober mind. It only provides action, and in a world that is so dependent on it, that doesn’t seem so bad.

There used to be this song that I loved and the lyrics write: “I do coke so I can work longer, so I can earn more, so I can do more coke.” This sounded genius to me at the time. In our hustle-bustle society, this seems perfect. I remember I used to think if I had an IV of cocaine endlessly in my system, then, and only then, could I accomplish all my goals.

But I am sober now. How have I been able to go on? How have I been able to write without cocaine? I used to think that that was impossible. I used to think my sober writings were boring, because there was no story attached to them.

It’s funny, because the very thing that made me think I needed coke was also the thing that made me realize I didn’t need coke at all, and in fact, it was holding me back.

When I was in active addiction, I could only remember the good parts of my drug use, and I ignorantly forgot all the bad parts. I remembered that I could only write when I was on coke (only because I had fried my brain chemistry so much), but forgot I could only write a mere few words. Because doing coke alone is boring. For someone who hated being alone with her own thoughts, cocaine made them run free. That should’ve scared me away from needing it as much as I did, but I couldn’t connect the dots. I only saw the perspective of how I couldn’t write when I was sober, and could only find the will when I was on cocaine.

And just like Bojack, my writings were pure gibberish, uninteresting and lacked creativity. It was because I suppressed everything I felt, so I had nothing truly to write about. I would only write about how I wanted to forget everything I kept remembering on cocaine. I never could see the cycle that cocaine was putting me through; no, instead I loved tiring myself out on the hamster wheel.

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s a way to want to live in the world without the excitement that comes from drugs? Would you believe me if I told you I found a way to write more happily than I was when I was high? 

My writings plainly sucked because I lacked what Krishnamurti puts it as “abandonment.” He defines this as “the sense of not being held, of no restraint, no defense, no resistance.” And I couldn’t write well because I was allowing my creativity to be restrained, to be reliant on something. 

Creativity is not induced in a state of drugs and it never can be. The only reason why people come to conclusions on such drugs is because it is the only time they can ever spend by themselves. Every other moment of the day not on drugs is an attempt to escape themselves.

Krishnamurti says that inward beauty is the key to creativity, and can only be attained “when you feel real love for people and for all the things of this earth.” And, funny enough, you yourself are a part of this earth. As long as you hate yourself, you can never unlock your full potential, your full capacity of creativity and you can never love another being. You can read and know everything there is to know about writing, but “without this creative beauty inside, your talent will have little significance.”

We tend to overcomplicate things. We tend to create more problems for ourselves than is necessary. Sometimes, we create pain so that we have an excuse to take a pain-relieving substance. Krishnamurti says “we can thus abandon ourselves only when there is austerity, a sense of great inward simplicity.”

Creativeness is the beauty in life that you are so desperately seeking.

I bet you might ask about the Grateful Dead, and how they created such beautiful music by tripping on acid, or peyote, or mushrooms. You must think I am so stupid, that drugs can elevate creativity. 

But if you ask any member of the Grateful Dead, they will say the same thing. They will say their fans are all misled, that their band was never dependent on the drugs while everyone else seems to believe so. Drugs are a shortcut, but most of the hard work was generated sober. If you need a drug to enjoy a band, think, maybe they aren’t that good.

The thing I do when I want to use again is write, when that was the thing I would lean towards whenever I was on a substance. And that is because creativity is a drug. Drugs, at least for me, were the first time that time flew and I wasn’t impatiently waiting for the day to end, watching the hands on the clock tick. Actually that’s not true; it was the third time. The first time was when I found out how much I loved writing. And the second time was when I found out how much I enjoyed researching neuroscience.

Creativity is simple, yet drugs overcomplicate it. It makes it feels like creativity is a threshold one has to achieve, when it’s as simple as putting a pen to paper and letting something flow out of you. 

Hemingway stated that “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Creativity is like catching the beauty of the world in a butterfly net and making it your own. We were born into a world that is not our own, we were born into a body that is not our own, but our actions are what are our own. And we can choose if we want to spend our precious acts being wasted and reliant on something to carry us through the next day, or developing a habit that will be there for you when nothing else is.

Krishnamurti says “You can be creative only when there is abandonment — which means, really, when there is no sense of compulsion, no fear of not being, of not gaining, of not arriving. Then there is great austerity, simplicity, and with it is love.”

Once I realized I loved myself, I realized how much I loved writing. And with loving something, comes hating it as well. Hatred can only sprout from the seed that was previously love, but they can interchange at will. When I am in a writing stump, I hate writing more than anything in the whole world, but I only have hated it because I love it so much.

I was in the depths of my creativity when I was using drugs, when they are said to create creativity. Even the neuroscience of psychedelics suggest that they cause the neural pathways of the brain to be more interconnected than before and thus, provide more conclusions and ideas! 

But, creativity does all that and more. It leads to hyper connectivity, cognitive disinhibition and an increase in cognitive flexibility, and it does all of that sober.

I used to be so interested in the impacts of drugs on the brain, but I find I am more interested now in what the human brain is capable of without the injection of other substances, what it is able to do all by itself. 

I urge you to meditate 5 minutes every day, and see how creative you truly are. You are just being stuffed with stimuli — either on social media, or with drugs, or with other things. Creativity is creating something nobody has ever seen before. 

Creativity is making the world’s beauty your own. We shouldn’t be afraid of the sober brain — we should be in awe of it. I find it’s more interesting how specific breath work exercises or specific contemplative or concentration meditation practices lead to similar psychedelic sensations as those seen in psychedelic drugs. 

The human brain is my favorite drug, and I am going to get high on it.

What is Freedom?

What is Freedom? And where can I buy it?

 I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you wanted, when you wanted to. I used to think freedom meant that that’s what people striving for a lot of money ultimately reached for — financial freedom. I thought freedom was the thing that stems from love, not the other way around. I used to think freedom was the destination everyone so clearly wanted. I thought freedom was the purpose of life.

I lived most of my life, contrary to these beliefs, not free. I wasn’t free from my trauma, I wasn’t free from financial distress and I never experienced or understood love. What did give me a false sense of injected freedom was drugs.

When someone is not free, they take drugs to feel free. There is this lyric from a song I used to love called: “Take this and be free.” I thought the only times I could be free were when I was incapacitated, with drool spilling out of my mouth and in awe at everyday objects, like trees, or grass. Since I never understood freedom, the closest I could come to pseudo-freedom was believing it was full of lies. I thought freedom was only attainable on something like DMT. I was deluded into thinking drugs were a portal into something else; I ignored how everyone who had an “ego death” became more egotistical afterwards. 

I lied to everyone during my period of drug use, but I still had the guts to say that I was free. Sure, maybe I was free when I took the drugs, but what happened after the drugs wore off? Simultaneously, what else wore off was my wonder and curiosity towards life. I started seeing my periods of sobriety as something evil. I stopped seeing sobriety as the default state of the brain; I started seeing it as something to avoid at all costs.

That is not being free, and nobody who relies on drugs is free. And, contrarily, it doesn’t mean that people who are off of drugs are free either. Sobriety doesn’t guarantee enlightenment just as a drug-induced state doesn’t either. There is no default state of enlightenment; the gap can only be lessened by trying. These external things only make the gap farther apart.

Everyday, when I popped Percocet like it was my scheduled prescription pill, I used it to falsify the documents that say whether someone is free or not. I lived as a fraud. I would be knocked out for several hours, then the remaining hours of the day were spent being ignorant and waiting for the next pill. How did I ever think that I could take those pills and subsequently be free?

And, the last thing I want you to do is look down on me for doing such a funny thing. Yes, you can laugh at me for thinking that taking drugs made me free, when in fact they made me shackled, but you are no better than me. I know this because after being an addict, I see addiction in everything, like a sixth sense. I see that everyone is addicted one way or another.

People love to look down on addicts and call them stupid for not realizing such an obvious thing. Should I laugh at you for the amount of hours you spend on your phone? Should I laugh at you for craving validation from others and not from yourself? Should I laugh at you for binging on food every time you are the tiniest bit upset? No, we don’t do these things, yet addicts are still villainized.

During every NA meeting, I am forced to repeat that “I am Amanda, I am an addict.” I’m not allowed to forget it in NA and I’m sure as hell not able to forget it in the real world because none of you guys let me. I am labeled a drug addict for the rest of my life, but why do I get a bullet wound and everyone walks around with scrapes and bruises? Why are some addictions deemed as worse than others?

I see jokes everywhere online about people obsessing waiting for a boy to reply to their text, and instead of the comment section calling them an addict, it’s flooded with corresponding remarks, such as “Me too!”. Do we tell these people to go to Codependency Anonymous? Do we tell these people they are trying to fill a void in themselves like we do with drug addicts? 

We are all not free, yet there are some that are more than others, but it’s more of a spectrum than a black-and-white diagram like we see it today. If someone took away your phone for a week, you would crumble, but I am demonized because if I’m without a drug for a week, I would crumble as well.

What they teach us in addiction recovery is the function of the dopamine chemical. But outside of these treatment centers, we make light of it! We suggest doing a dopamine detox for a week to “cleanse” us of our addictive tendencies. Why am I expected to be sober the rest of my life, while you get to do whatever you want, do a week break of it and continually suffer, go right back to it not having learned your lesson, and still have the nerve to tell me you are more free than me? 

The dopamine detox trend is hilarious. It shows how much we don’t know about addiction and how much we are controlled by it. We are afraid of being addicted. We all live in denial. Drug addicts are just the ones who are not supposed to. It’s hypocritical.

Freedom does not mean independence. It does not mean getting to do what you want when you want it. It is to be free of fear, and all of us are so burdened by this daily. We are afraid of dying alone, so we marry the first person we find that likes us. We are afraid of dying, so we spend our whole lives trying to maintain a legacy, or circumvent our aging process, or find the root to immortality. 

Is our fear not an addictive quality itself? We think we can live without it, but we cannot. Not if we keep walking the road we are on right now. We treat our fear like it’s normal. We treat our fear like this because we were never taught about it. Instead, we celebrate people who take dopamine detoxes. We celebrate weddings of people who are incompatible and fight all the time. We celebrate bodies at all sizes. We celebrate the age that one is able to start drinking. 

We celebrate addiction except when it comes to drugs. And that’s why none of us are getting better.

It’s an invisible barrier that is made against drug addicts — it separates the general population from them. We talk on the news all the time about murderous fentanyl and face-picking meth and the zombie drug flakka. We make it scary. We make it another thing to be feared, when we should be focusing on the increase in junk food being produced everyday, the amount of alcohol commercials everywhere, the shared acceptance of porn websites, the widespread amount of locations of casinos. But, no, drugs have to be illegal because they make you look ugly.

I doubt as many people who have claimed to have felt love have really felt it, because love only stems from freedom. I did not receive and accept love when I adhered to everything I knew; I received it when I let it all go. Love is not dependence. 

Why is it we fear-monger drugs but everything else remains okay? Why is that I’m the one who has to recover and everyone else gets to remain addicted? How in any way is that fair?

I urge you, for one time, to look within yourself and see what you are addicted to. And don’t say nothing. Don’t try and say you are better than drug addicts, that you would never let yourself get so weak to the point where you rely on an external source for happiness, because you do. If you didn’t, you would be spiritually awakened, and nobody has done that yet to my knowledge.

You are in denial. Let that sink inside you, let it fester and let it turn into an angry tumor that you want to remove at any cost. That is the only way you can help yourself, if you stop lying to yourself. 

I’m tired of seeing everyone grow fat with ignorance, while I have to sit here sober watching it all. It’s painful to see. You people deserve better; I just wish you would see that.

On (Not) Being in Denial

 I hadn’t been alive for years, until I had to fight for my life.

In a jail cell, they want you to suffer. They make everything suicide-proof, but it’s all ironic. I found a way to kill myself in there if I wanted, one that would be painless, quick and seamless. But I didn’t.

I had hurt everyone I loved at that point. All my lies had crumbled, like badly written lyrics on pieces of paper in a trash can. I felt like Judas, having betrayed all of my friends. I understood why Christians made up Hell. They made it for people like me.

My ex-best friend said my drug use in freshman year would amount to me being dead in a ditch. I realized me being dead in a jail cell in junior year wouldn’t be that far off. I hated everything I became, but most importantly, I hated that she was right.

In order to get all the drugs that slowly killed me, I had to lie to everyone. By the end of my reign over my life, I had conjured so many lies to my friends and family that I had grown tired. I knew that day when I drove something would go wrong, but I didn’t care enough about myself to stop anything. All I could think about what my next fix. I couldn’t stand being sober for one minute.

The girl who could do nothing else but be alone with her thoughts was gone yet again. She came back in waves. She oscillated, in flux with the moon phases. 

I looked around at my friends who could regulate their drug use. I didn’t suppose my daily use was anything abnormal. I saw it as something I necessitated that others didn’t. I would grow angry at drugs being illegal when so many other addictive things are legal, like gambling, drinking, sugary foods, or smoking. None of it seemed fair; I couldn’t see myself as an addict in the sense I didn’t see myself as different from anyone else. I saw everyone else as addicted too, in some way, just they were in denial of it. I felt stronger by being addicted and yet knowing it too. I was never in denial. I always knew what I was.

I was in so deep that I needed to swim up now or I was going to never be found again in the water. My body would only rise again with the gases that are released from a decomposing body. I needed to swim up that day or I would only be found again dead.

And I did swim up, but not of my own volition. I needed to be pushed against a police car, handcuffed and incarcerated to swim up. 

Because there was something I realized in that jail cell. It was different from the police that came to save my life when I attempted suicide. Those police wanted me alive; these new ones wanted me dead. 

And I just couldn’t stand the fact someone wanted me dead for being addicted. I couldn’t stand seeing someone wanting me dead more than I wanted myself dead. That gave me strength to not kill myself in that cell.

There are still things I wrestle with everyday: why I got in that car, why I crashed, why I failed the field test. None of it goes away, and it won’t forever. I changed my life forever that day, but had addiction not done the same thing but slower? I would’ve never been there if it hadn’t been for my addiction. 

And, for the first time in my whole life, I hated being addicted. I hated who I became. Before, I was proud. I remember I told the love of my life that I was proud of how well I could keep things from people and he was disgusted. And I just couldn’t fathom why. 

It felt like life was a game and I was playing it right. I was maintaining about four lives while living one steady one in my subjective reality. I felt superhuman. I felt like I had cracked some code. I remember thinking that if anyone else had had to deal with these many stories and keeping them in track, they wouldn’t be able to. All my life I felt so boring, but this was how I coped. This was my way of feeling special.

I bit down on my cloth until my gag reflex enacted. That is innocence. Innocence is shattered when you keep biting down, until you have no more gag reflex. Until nothing phases you.

I’m embarrassed now that I needed several rock bottoms to wake up. But I realize now I was just in a very, very deep slumber. And I realize now that when I awoke from my metaphorical coma, I did have others around me, in fact, they were holding my hand and crying at my feet. And I just looked at them with confusion at why they were still there, not elation in the fact that I had woken up or that they were with me. I was so ungrateful.

I’d rather have been in denial, but I always knew everything that was wrong with me. I just never wanted to fix it, and I guess that hurts worse.