On a Careful Subject

​Drugs and alcohol take away years of your life. You'll be made a fool of yourself so long as you engorge yourself with substances. You'll miss out on the best years of your life and spend so much money and time pursuing something that is slowly killing you and robbing you of your potential to live life on your own terms. Your risk of dying explodes. Your brain will be fucked, and you'll need it for the years of work you'll have to do, hopefully at a job that isn't so soul crushing enough that you question the meaning of it all. You'll be a slave to your neurochemistry, chasing a high and mental state of mind that can only be instated by consuming substances and then abruptly crashing down into your reality, which, by the way, doesn't change positively through drug use or drinking in any good way. Your reputation? Ruined. Your trust in others and most importantly yourself? Shattered. You'll be left alone and won't even have yourself as company. Only a bottle, or only a pill. A bottle or a pill that drains your coffers into negative, making you scrounge for money any way you can, selling your mementos and prized possessions just to get any semblance of your new normalcy: high and numbed. And the pain? The reason you probably still engage in drug seeking behavior? It multiplies. And not only that, it does so covertly, under your radar. Everything you did, everything you try to avoid thinking about, all the shame you have garnered, it grows through remorse and regret. All the grief you've been trying to run away from? It follows you. You start using not just to get high anymore, but just to feel normal. So now your everyday baseline emotional state is way lower when you're off that substance, and you're going to feel like shit, and the best way to not feel like shit is to do more drugs. Even in spite of your strongest beliefs, knowledge of reality, and of truths, you still can't quit the habit. But then you realize: you can't keep doing this to yourself. Your life depends on it.

So I understand that recovery is hard. Because you're going to face everything. Oftentimes alone, in your mind. But it's even harder when you make it more harder for yourself by using. You're not the only person who hurts from this kind of behavior. You need to get better. Or maybe even just ok. Ok is good enough for me.