Skullduggery to Recovery: Chapter Two

Pain pills are the devil.

Every time I’ve taken them I’ve gotten less empathetic, more irritable, and disgusted with my erratic thoughts. Years ago, I’d use them to get high. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been using them to legitimately manage surgery pain.

The effects are the same though: brief euphoria followed by the best sleep you’ve ever had. Waking up, feeling a bit down and knowing those little powdery pills are there to console you. Not hungry, and not fully engaged with anything.

The day after I took my last pain pill, I slept all day. A swollen leg propped up on three pillows, with an ice machine consoling me. I had feared this would trigger a relapse of some sort, but I knew where that road led to, and I refused to travel it again.

Opening Up…
This is the first time I’ve ever written or spoken about my addiction to pain pills. Years ago, way before this story takes place I went through a divorce, custody battle, moved three times, and changed jobs. As much as people will tell you addiction is a “disease”, for me, it just wasn’t.

I saw addiction as a conscious decision I was making. Of course, when I had pills, there was no way I was keeping the cap on the bottle. But I knew I was addicted, and I knew it was my fault. We do a massive disservice by telling addicts that its not their fault, that they can’t help it. They can help it, they just won’t.

Addicts are deeply accustomed to lying to themselves, and believe every excuse that inches them further down the road of despair. They know addiction will give them everything they don’t want, yet still pop pills in the face of that knowledge.

I was no different. Addiction magnified my unsavory qualities and kept me locked in torrential swirl of negative thoughts. My marriage was ending, although I was on the way out long before I began chewing on Lortabs and mixing them with brightly colored Hydrocodone & Sprite.

I recall once, while the cops were arresting my friend for simple possession, being so high on pain pills that I was actually encouraging the cops to search my car. They found my cooler in the trunk and popped it open, a purple Sprite bottle fully loaded with pain pills lying right beside the Duke’s mayonnaise. The cop laughed and said “At least you got the right mayo!”, before shutting the cooler and sending me on my way.

Apparently drug dogs can’t smell codeine.

The crazy thing is, divorce actually saved me from going deeper in the pit of addiction. I had finally taken back control of my life from a toxic relationship and was ready to fully live again. So I doubled down on jiujitsu, and started learning everything I could about how to influence myself to live at the highest level.

Flashback to the Seeds of Entrepreneurship

I’ve always held the desire for entrepreneurship. As a kid, my friend and I would knock on doors, telling the homeowners I’d draw their homes for a few bucks. We’d split the money and spend the rest of the day riding our bikes or rollerblading.
As a teenager, I took it a step further; customizing sneakers, selling watches, and CDs. Although I was one of the captains of the track team, I sold weed to support my smoking habit. This was the beginning of a love-hate relationship with entrepreneurship.

I loved customizing shoes, reselling things, and making money on eBay.

I hated selling weed, and the type of clientele a 16 year old drug dealer attracted.

Over the next few years, I’d find myself taking my first foray into selling digital products online. Using the knowledge I’d gained, I began creating 3-D models. If you played a video game or watched a CGI movie from 2003 to 2005, you may have seen some of my work.

While I didn’t make enough to live off of, it lit a fire under me, and proved all the people wrong who were telling me it was impossible to make money on the internet.

Sadly, after a couple years of this, something hit me hard, and I fell into a rough patch. My relationships were horrible, I could barely do one pushup, the walls in my single-wide trailer were literally melting, and I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I was a mess.

At that time, I had never really done pills, and my main addiction was cigarettes. Each year that passed, I’d feel my potential slipping, and with it, my hopes of pulling myself out of it. Until one day, I listened to a tape by Dr. Wayne Dyer.

He began talking about how our thoughts control our reality, and the only way to change our reality is to change our thoughts. Sitting alone in my driveway, my mind was blown. How had I missed this truth throughout my whole life? Why had no one taught me this?

So I began changing how I perceived the world, and became a student of my own reckless behavior. There would be struggles along the way, but it set me on a path of experiencing the world in a radical new way.

What I Learned Through Addiction
The first thing I learned on the other side of these cravings, is that we are all addicts. We all have a vice, a compulsive need to consume something.

For some, it’s Netflix or Facebook. Some, cheeseburgers. Still others are addicted to negative thoughts and would rather discuss problems than solutions. We are all addicted.

Of course, having the drug monkey on your back can be worse than a seemingly innocent addiction to social media. But they hold parallels. They both have the power to destroy families and leave you feeling insecure and empty.

So I set out on a journey to become addicted to things that aided my conquest for personal revolution: Jiujitsu, running, reading, just to name a few. Instead of leaving work and watching television, I’d go to jiujitsu class, then spend the rest of the evening planning out what I wanted to achieve next.

They say relapse is part of recovery, and for a while I thought this was a way to absolve the addict of responsibility. While relapse isn’t ideal, its certainly something that we shouldn’t feel ashamed about. Even in the midst of reclaiming my power, especially in the midst of it, I found myself doing more pills than ever before.

It was never to the point of daily usage, but I had a cycle of partying on a Friday night, spending the whole weekend with a massive hangover, and clearing up in time to be efficient on Monday for my job. I can’t say that it harmed my performance at work, but it definitely made me dislike myself and where I worked.

I always knew I was destined for something greater than a cubicle, but when you’re in the haze of pills, it’s incredibly difficult to get a hold of your thoughts. You just don’t feel like it, and it becomes incredibly easy to lie to yourself about the direction your life is heading.

Drugs have their place. Recreational usage can actually hold benefits, especially psychedelics and marijuana. Prescriptions can bandage emotional wounds for people to move beyond them. The problem comes when addiction takes root, and the loss of self-control that comes with it.

Thankfully, I had enough self-awareness and inner fire to peel back the layers of self-deception. It wouldn’t be easy, but something had me, and it wasn’t the addiction anymore…

To be continued…