My Monster Called “Addiction”

Addiction. It is not just a word, or an illness, or a simple flaw in one’s character; it is something that resides in the bones, compresses the heart, and pulsates within the mind with no regard for the life that it has manifested itself in.

Addiction is not a choice, it is not an easy-fix, and it is not something that can often be controlled. It is an entire entity of its’ own and once it has latched on, life will become nothing but a constant loop of recovery and relapse.

No matter how many times you feel the cold tile of the bathroom floor on your face, no matter how many times you tell yourself, “This is the last time,” it will never really be the last time. You may never swallow another pill, or taste another drop of alcohol, but these things mean nothing to the monster that you are now hosting. Every waking moment will be filled with the remembrance of how good you used to feel when you were on them, how safe and comforted you felt when addiction wrapped its’ arms around you in the warmest embrace you ever felt. Maybe it was just the numbing side effects of your poison of choice, but in the moment, you could swear that it was because, at last, you weren’t alone anymore.

In a world where nobody understands, where everybody looks at you as if you are just a vile addict and nothing more, this intimate moment with the monster feels as if you are finally where you belong. It is beautiful, it is enlightening, it is comfortable… and it completely obscures the truth. This monster is not hugging you, but rather, smothering you, and without some sort of wake-up call, eventually the pressure will grow so great that you cannot bear to take another breath.
         Your family, your friends, your significant other, they’ll all beg you to stop. They all tell you that once you stop, you’ll be right back to your old self again, like that’s the only way that they could ever love you. What they don’t understand is that the jar is broken; there is glass all over the floor, in the carpet, even blown up, and into the ceiling, and there is no going back because no matter how well you reassemble it, the cracks will always show. You can’t tell them that, though. You can only respond, “I know. I’ll stop. I want the old me back too”; it’s not technically a lie because you do, more than anything, but the fact of the matter is that you killed her. With every pill, every drink, every slice taken out of your wrists… you spent so long trying to kill yourself, trying to poison your internal organs until they simply cease to serve their purpose of keeping you alive. Of course, that’s not what happens. You force yourself to believe that the stomach pain, heart palpitations, and the uncontrollable tremble of your hands are signs that it is almost over. You aren’t killing yourself medically, though; you aren’t truly dying. Instead, all that pain is just the little girl inside of you pounding on the insides of your body, frantically searching for a way out before the poison swallows her whole like a vat of hydrochloric acid. She knows that once it touches her, she will be disintegrated on impact, but you know this too; so, you keep going to that stash in your bedroom closet, count the pills, and knock them back in one swift motion, and as they are going down your esophagus, and processed through your organs, you register the fact that you have now officially incinerated the person you used to be.

At first, it’s a relief; no more guilt, no more shame, no more condemnation, but eventually you take into account that you are now empty- sans the toxin that is currently churning in your stomach- and that what you have done is, in no way, reversible.

​It will start with hushed tones and suspicious glances, text messages hidden from your sight, and intentional isolation induced by your own family. You will wake up to find that your purse is missing from your room, and the contents have now been strewn across the kitchen counter. The realization that you no longer have any control over your life or your belongings weighs you down from the moment you get out of bed each morning, so you begin to up your dosage with the ideology that maybe if you take enough, you will be able to feel free again. That is when the screaming starts. Eventually, you’ll take too many to be able to hide the effects, and the people you love the most will begin to yell so loudly that their words will remain chiseled into your skull for the rest of your life.

“Look at you! You’re disgusting, you can’t even walk straight right now”, “You’re never going to amount to anything, you might as well give up”, “No wonder everybody leaves you” are just a few of the many things that the voices in your head echo persistently.

It isn’t long before you look back at the last eight years of your life, and realize that you can’t even remember most of them. You look at your friends, and your family, and all of a sudden it is like a brick has been thrown straight into your sternum; while you have been in this haze, they have all been aging, and soon, maybe even a few of them will be dead, and you will have no recent memory of them to hold on to. You had always told yourself that the damage wouldn’t be permanent; that whenever you had the strength to get better, and quit for good, everything would go back to the way it was before you started, but what you’re beginning to realize now, is that time is irreversible, and now, you have wasted too much of it.

​You try to distance yourself from the people that care for you because all you’ve become is a burden; not a friend, not a girlfriend, not even a daughter. All you are is an inconvenience, and so you try and push the people who love you away. You don’t want them to see what you’ve become, and you are fully opposed to taking their hand and accepting their help. If you did, you would just become more troublesome and eventually, they will grow tired of supporting you. In order to save both you and them, you must extract them from your life-- for good. Before long, you’re alone, and now you’re convinced that the only one getting damaged by your actions is you. So, you grab the Xanax, and Vicodin, and Ambien, stare at the handful of multi-colored pills, and swallow five times the amount that you usually do. You let the fog swallow you- and this time, you don’t even try to put up a fight; the monster always wins, and deep down, you knew that from the start.