1. Fight to Recovery

2. .

4. Addiction is a strong, uncontrollable need to take drugs,
drink alcohol or carry out a particular activity such as
gambling.It becomes the most important thing in your life
and leads to problems at home, work and school.
There’s no single reason why addictions develop.
Regularly drinking alcohol or using other substances, or
spendingtime gambling or on the internet (including porn
sites), may be pleasurable or relaxing. Some people
experience these feelings particularly intensely and have
a strong desire to repeat them more often.

8. This is part of our True Life interview series, in which
we hear about different people's interesting/amazing/
un-nerving experiences. This is the story of ------ an
incredibly funny, smart, driven girl who fell into meth
at the end of high school.
a d d i c t i o n

11. My parents were very open about alcohol and drugs and because
there wasn’t a huge air of mystery about the whole deal, I was A
Good Kid growing up. I wasn’t afraid to fly my freak flag even if
it meant not fitting in with the other kids; I was too academically
motivated to jeopardize my glorious future; plus, all my friends
were too nerdy to even drink. The final year of high school, I fell,
hard, for a sort of unsavory guy and ended up following him to
lots of parties where binge-drinking and drug use were the order
of the day. I actually barely participated: got drunk a few times,
maybe smoked pot once, but the environment played arpeggios
up and down my repressed inner bad-girl chords.
Tell us about your relationship with
drugs and alcohol growing up.

13. By the beginning of of my final year of
college, I started a methamphetamine
addiction that would last for about two
years and didn’t take long to completely
control my life. Final year was the peak of
high-stress testing for my academically
rigorous diploma programme. Between
six hours a night of chemisty homework,
applying to a staggering 32 high-caliber
universities and spending every weekend
sweating blood in debate, I wanted two
things: to occasionally feel like a kid
again, and to somehow fit thirty hours'
worth of work into a 24 hour day. Oh,
and losing forty pounds wouldn't hurt
either. What do you know,
methamphetamines seemed to
perfectly fit the bill.
Whichdrugsdidyou
getinto?Andhowdid
thathappen?
One day in maths, one of my good
friends, another repressed bad girl
slipped a tiny bag of white powder into
my textbook. We cut English class to
snort it in the girls’ room. By the end of
the day, I’d finished two weeks’ worth
of assignments, drank a gallon of water,
not eaten a morsel and lost six pounds.
No exaggeration. Plus, it filled me with
confidence and a sense of love for
everyone around me. It was love at first
snort. She hooked me up with her
dealer and I was never without a
magic little bag of my own.

18. Babysitting. Is that a
small-town cliche or what? But when
you're a college student with no interest
in fashion, all of your cash is disposable.
I made a few hundred pounds a week
on babysitting and snorted at least half
of it usually more. Lord knows I wasn't
spending the money on food. By the
time I got to university and was snorting
(and by then smoking) even more,
I had the good luck to be funded with a
very generous quarterly student loan.
I can't even begin to tell you how much
I regret funding my habit with money that
had been given to me because
I was a promising young student. The
only thing I can say about my defense is
that at least I was never spun when
I was babysitting children. Can't say the
same about being sober while taking
my classes, though.
Howdidyoufinanceyourhabit?

23. That's one thing about methampetamines:
they could definitely be worse for your
grades. Often when I got spun, I was
insanely productive, practically sneezing
out term papers and memorizing text
books. That is, when I didn't get spun and
stay up all night obsessively trying on all
of my (ever smaller) clothes or tweezing all
the hairs out of my legs.
How did it affect your grades/
relationships/etc?
But by the time I neared the end of my
addiction, I forgot to ever come down
and get sane again. I'd write a eight-page
paper in an hour, convinced it was brilliant,
then look at it a few weeks later to realize
it was absolute raving lunacy. But maybe
because I've always been obsessively
academic, my grades didn't really suffer:
the worst that happened is that I had to
drop a class the term that my addiction
hit its all-time high.

25. I tried to keep my addiction a secret from
everyone I cared about because
I knew they would try to make my
stop and in my junkie's lizard-brain,
the most important thing was to keep
that from happening. By the time I was
in University, I was afraid to speak to
my parents and refused to answer their
phone calls, for fear that they'd realize
something was up. By function of living
together, though, my roommates who
were my best friends realized I had a
problem. I'd lock myself up in the room
for hours to smoke, then come out as
a manic parody of myself. I'd sit in the
kitchen with them, picking at a slice of
bread, and incessantly smack my mouth
which was always cotton-dry despite the
gallons of water I would drink.
Did the people in your life know you were
struggling with this?
Other people have drug problems,
I'd tell them. I just have a drug
hobby. And although they sometimes
asked me to seek help, they didn't
push it too hard. I think this is
partially because they were afraid of
completely alienating me, and partially
because they like me were sheltered
academics and had never had any
exposure to drug addiction. They
wanted to believe that I was right.

26. I accidentally OD-ed, thank god. My rock-bottom had been
flying upward to meet me for a while: after about a year of
being almost permanently spun, I'd started suffering from
tactile, auditory and visual hallucinations. I'd stay up all night
writing pages of whacked-out work, then become convinced
there was a man standing outside my window staring at me,
and be too paralyzed with fear to do anything but sit there,
my pulse a 220-bpm machine gun.
For the three-week bender that led to my OD, every night
when I lay in bed, a rat would chew its way through my brain.
I'd smell that vermin sewage scent, feel its feet scrabbling on
my cheeks, hear its little jaws closing around my ear drum,
then ripping away the walls of my ear canal and getting
into my skull. Sometimes I could "catch" the rat and throw
it against the wall. Other times, its whole body would get
wedged inside my brain, nibbling, nibbling, nibbling, and
I would lay there crying until it went away. When it did,
I would always stand in front of the mirror for ages, touching
my ears and face and amazed not to see any blood.
Was there a low point that
made you decide that you
wanted to quit?

27. The day of my OD, I'd been spun for three weeks and
had to write an essay, but my mind was already at the
brink of insanity and for the first time ever, I couldn't
make words come out. Desperate, I smoked bowl
after bowl, trying to regain the feelings of confidence
and brilliance that usually accompanied a high. After
my last bowl, I had the sensation that my teeth were
falling out, so I ran to the mirror. My tongue started
talking to me and telling me it would knock out my
teeth to punish me weirdly, my first reaction was
horror at the thought of being toothless who
would date me then?!
I realized I was OD-ing and tried to get dressed to go
find help, but my hands were melting. If I tried to pick
up my jeans, I thought my fingernails would ooze off;
when I reached for the door to run outside naked,
I thought my hand would liquefy to a puddle of goo
and be unable to turn the knob. So I just lay there on
the floor, naked, screaming for help until the
guy across the hall came in and helped
me call the Ambulance.

28. After I OD-ed, the hospital kept me overnight and made me
eat something substantial for the first time in weeks. After they
released me, I was still deluded enough to think I could seek
help without telling my parents what had been going on.
I asked the Residence Head of my University to help check me
into a one-week recovery programme in the psych ward of my
university's hospital. But after about an hour there, I realized
it wasn't going to be a hilarious, cinematic Girl, Interrupted
experience. I wanted my mum. So I called my parents, arranged
to get a week off of classes, and went home to confess what
I'd been doing to the people I'd let down the most. To their
everlasting credit, my parents didn't scream at me once. They
force-fed me and watched me every moment of the day, true,
but they didn't tell me how disappointed and angry they were.
They just helped me start my life without methamphetamines.
Howdidyougo
about getting help?

31. Recovery was, in many ways, easier that I imagined it would be,
after I got through the wrenching experience of admitting to my
friends and parents that I had a problem. I immediately cut off ties
with my former dealer; cutting off contact with other user friends
wasn't a problem, as I didn't have any in college. For the first
several months, I would seize up with the urgent desire to get spun
I can't even tell you how many nights I cleared everything out of the
drawer where I used to keep my stash and snorted up every stray
little dust mite and paint chip, hoping to find a spare crystal. But
because I cut off my contacts, I had no way to get drugs, even in
my weakest moments, and after being completely clean for a while,
the cliche is true: it got easier every day.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't watch the baby. In no small part because
I knew there would be drugs in the house. So I told her no and
helped her find somebody else to watch the baby, jesus, that
poor baby so it wasn't left alone. And the whole time, there was
that little voice in my head: this could have been you in five years.
Don't let that happen.
How has your recovery been going?
One horrifying experience that helped: I stayed at my parents' house that
summer after freshman year, when I was busy getting clean. One night, after
I'd been clean a few months, I got a call from my former dealer, who had
stopped using because she'd gotten pregnant. She'd had her baby three nights
before and called to ask if I could come over and babysit. She and her
boyfriend had missed getting spun, and now that they had the baby, they
wanted to go out and smoke meth again.

32. And most days, when I think about my history as a junkie, it just feels like
a movie I've watched rather than a life I've lived. But every time I smell a
pound note or watch someone snort a line in a movie, I know that all the
obsessive junkie tendencies haven't just gone away. Even thinking about
smoking meth or snorting a line makes my muscles seize up and that old
lizard-brain start kicking in again. I still drink moderately, I've smoked pot
a dozen times or so, I've even snorted one or two social lines of coke after
being clean on meth, and these things haven't been triggers for me. But
I know I can never do methamphetamines again, not even once, or the
junkie beast will come roaring back to life. And I can't let it happen again.
“In a few months,
I'll have been five
years clean”

33. Tell someone. Right now. You know all those people you're shutting out of your
life because you don't want them to find out? The reason you don't want them
to find out is that they love you and they will make you stop. But it will be better
that way. And if you're anything like I was, you might be thinking, "I'll tell them
soon. I'm just in too deep now give me a few months to sort out my life and start
recovery one my own!" No. That's the addiction talking. I don't care if you're
superman: you cannot quit an addiction on your own. Your friends and family, the
people who love you no matter how stupid you've been or how much what you're
doing is hurting them, they are what's going to get you through this. And they're
not going to hate you for it. They only want you to get better.
If telling your friends and family is too big a step, then just tell anyone. Tell a doctor,
tell the cashier at the supermarket. The secrecy eats away at you just as fast as
the drugs do. You don't have to walk alone.
Any advice for others
struggling with addictions?
Article Credit http://www.yesandyes.org/2010/03/true-story-im-recovered-junkie.html