At my lowest point, I believed I was making conscious choices. In reality, I was reacting. If it wasn't crack or heroin, it was fair game. I was hanging out with people I didn't know, didn't respect, who didn't know me. I was running on a super-fast version of autopilot, convincing myself I was in control while everything around me told a different story.
I think the most dangerous thing about addiction isn't the substances. It's the lying. Not lying to other people, though you do plenty of that. The real damage comes from lying to yourself. I convinced myself I could stop anytime. I just didn't have a plan for stopping, because I was having fun. Or I thought I was having fun. Looking back, I'm not sure "fun" is the right word for whatever I was doing at 3 a.m. with people whose last names I didn't know.
Somewhere in the fog of it all, I realized I was trying to fill a hole. Not a metaphorical hole. It felt physical. Like something had been scooped out of me and I was pouring substances into the gap, trying to make it level. The substances, the habits, the people, I let all of it define my days and weeks completely. And the whole time, addiction kept whispering the same lie: you're still in control. You're just choosing to have a good time. You could stop whenever you want.
I stepped into the Shawnee Mission Medical Center's Addiction Recovery Unit in my late twenties. My twenties had been a blur of excess and self-indulgence, and I finally had to deal with the mess I'd made. I remember being in there with a young man who was recovering from heroin. He didn't make it to week two. I still wonder if he's alive. I think about him more than you'd expect, because when I walked into that unit, the odds weren't in my favor either. The difference between his story and mine could easily have been nothing more than luck.
I walked into AA meetings feeling like a fraud. I'd look around at people with years of sobriety, sharing their stories with confidence, and I felt like I didn't belong. Like I wasn't "bad enough" to be there, or "good enough" to get better. I still feel that way about AA sometimes, to be honest. I think a lot of people in recovery carry that feeling around and never say it out loud.
There was a moment when I had to face myself. Not the version I showed the outside world, but the real one. The one who was scared, tired, and desperate for something different. That moment wasn't dramatic. It wasn't a movie scene. It was quiet. Just me, standing in front of the mirror in my apartment in Mission, Kansas, knowing I had a choice: keep running, or face myself. The only way to fill the hole in my soul was to crawl out of my actual hole. Get a clear mind. Get perspective.
Breaking the pattern meant rewiring my brain, at least to a certain degree. I didn't just quit the substances. I quit the places, the people, the habits that led me back to them. This is something I don't think gets said enough: you cannot heal in the same environment that made you sick. You just can't. The context is too strong. Your body remembers the places before your mind does.
The biggest surprise was what happened after I got sober. I expected clarity. What I got instead, at least at first, was chaos. Addiction had been numbing everything, and suddenly I had to process the full signal. My brain felt scattered. I had to lean into structure. Setting routines, writing things down, forcing myself to focus when my brain wanted to run in twelve directions at once.
After many years of not using alcohol or drugs, I finally understand who I am as a person. For a long time, I thought substances helped me escape, that they relieved stress and made life more bearable. But now I can see how much they blurred everything. They didn't make life easier. They made me worse at living it.
I won't pretend it's easy. But I will say this: when you break free from addiction, you don't just get your life back. You get yourself back. Everything awesome I've done in life has been because I've been accountable to another human. Recovery taught me that first.
If you're in the middle of it right now, feeling like there's no way out, I want you to know there is. You are not your addiction. You are not your mistakes. Start small. Admit the truth to yourself. Find one habit to replace the destructive ones. Reach out to someone, even if it's just a message to a friend saying, "I need help." The moment you decide to take back control is the moment everything starts to change.
I know this because I stood in front of a mirror in a cheap apartment in Mission, Kansas, and made that decision. And I'm still here.
If you or someone you know is struggling, these resources can help: the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988), SAMHSA's National Helpline (1-800-662-4357), Alcoholics Anonymous, and Narcotics Anonymous.