There is a particular cruelty to addiction. Not just the physical toll, not just the destruction it leaves in its wake, but the way it makes catastrophe feel ordinary. Looking back now, I can see a trail of moments that should have stopped me cold. Moments that, in another life, might have prompted me to ask for help.

Instead, I rationalised every single one.

This post is not an easy one to write. But I think it’s an important one, because if you’re in the thick of it right now, you might recognise yourself here. If you do, I want you to know; the signs were always there. You just couldn’t see them yet, I couldn’t either.

Content note: This post contains references to substance use, overdose, violence, gang involvement, and housing instability.

The Tactical Chunder

We called it “tactical”. Making ourselves sick throughout the night to create more capacity for drink and drugs. It felt like a funny quirk, a practical solution, a thing we laughed about.

It was not funny.

It was not practical.

It was a bodymind screaming for relief and a group of people so deep in their using that this had simply become procedure.

I didn’t hear the scream, I just thought we were clever.

“How Are You Not Dead Yet?”

People said this to me regularly. Not as a joke, or at least, not entirely as a joke. They had witnessed what I was consuming; the quantities, the combinations, the frequency.
I heard it as a compliment, a testament to my constitution, I believed it was a badge of honour.

What it actually was; people who cared about me, terrified and not knowing how else to say so. They were watching me die by increments and reaching for humour because nothing else was working.

I was too busy feeling proud to notice.

The Quantities That Would Have Ended My Freedom

At various points I was buying hard drugs in quantities that, had the police caught me, could have resulted in a sentence that took the rest of my life.

I was proud when I got away with it. I felt invincible, I experienced getting away from the police as an achievement rather than as the desperately close call it was. The bravado was the point, the danger was invisible.

The Kidnapping

I was once kidnapped by a cocaine dealer. I had to set off a makeshift firework to escape.
I don’t say this for shock value, I say it because at the time, I filed it away as a story, something to tell.

Something that had happened to me and that I had survived, therefore it was proof of my resilience rather than evidence of how far things had gone.

When your life is endangered and your first thought is “this will make a good anecdote”, that is not resilience. That is dissociation from the reality of what you are living.

The Weapons

I was deeply enough embedded in drug gang life that I thought nothing of carrying deadly weapons on my person for protection. There was a logic to it, a logic that felt entirely coherent from inside.

I also knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that there was a real chance I might use them one day.
I told myself this was just survival, what it was, was a life lived so far outside of safety that violence had become a calculated risk I was willing to accept.

Dealing To Fund Using

At various points I was dealing substances to fund my own use. The circular logic of it felt almost elegant at the time, it solved a problem.
What it actually meant was that my using had escalated beyond what I could sustain financially, and rather than recognise that as the crisis it was, I found a workaround. Addiction is extraordinarily creative when it comes to workarounds.

Never Having Enough For Rent

I never had enough money to cover my rent, not because I wasn’t working. Because every available resource was being routed toward substances.

There is something particularly telling about this one, because rent is a baseline. It is the minimum of keeping yourself housed and alive. I consistently could not meet it, I treated this as a logistical inconvenience rather than what it was; my life being consumed.

Trap Houses And Abandoned Buildings

I moved in and out of trap houses and abandoned buildings. I told myself it was practical, saving money, being resourceful.

The reality was I was sacrificing the safety and stability of housing, one of the most fundamental of human needs, to ensure I had enough for drugs. I had reorganised the entire hierarchy of my needs around the addiction.

Extracting Codeine

I was extracting codeine from paracetamol using imperfect equipment. I knew what I was doing to my body, I knew the risk, I did it anyway, because I needed the fix.

The knowledge of the harm was not a deterrent. It barely registered, that is the nature of dependency, the knowing and the doing exist in different compartments, and the doing always wins.

I was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver this year. This was said to be one of the likely culprits.

Moving 300 Miles To Escape

I had to uproot my entire life and move 300 miles away to escape gang members I had wronged.

Think about that for a moment, my using had embedded me so deeply in a world of organised crime that the only viable exit from a threat to my life was geographic displacement. I left a place, a life, relationships, everything; because staying was too dangerous.

I treated it as a fresh start, I didn’t treat it as evidence of the depth of the crisis I was in.

67 Overdoses In One Year

I overdosed on morphine 67 times in one year.

I don’t know how to add much to that.

It is a number that I still find difficult to sit with. Each one was survived, each one was normalised, each one became just another event in a year full of events. In fact i used to get angry if they tried to administer naloxone, the life saving drug that reverses opioid overdoses.

Sixty-seven times my body came close enough to death that it constituted a clinical overdose, and I kept going.

What Addiction Does To Perspective

The thread running through all of this is not stupidity, it is not weakness, it is not even denial in the way the word is usually deployed; as a kind of wilful blindness.

It is the way that addiction systematically reorganises your perception of what is normal, each escalation becomes the new baseline.

Each crisis that is survived becomes evidence that you are fine, the more extreme things get, the more ordinary they feel.

The absurd becomes quirky, the life-threatening becomes an anecdote. The catastrophic becomes an inconvenience.

I could not see the signs because I was living inside a reality that addiction had constructed for me. A reality where “tactical chunder” was funny, where 67 overdoses was just a bad year, where carrying weapons and moving to escape gangs were simply things that happened.

Recovery did not begin when the signs became visible, the signs were always there i could always see them. Recovery began when I could finally let them mean something.

I celebrated 10 years of recovery this year.